Make her dance 'til her legs fall off – The Red Shoes

Horror Moments, Kate Bush Edition

‘Horror Moments’ is a weekly series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursdays, and I share articles on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Monday afternoons – don’t forget to subscribe! Catch up with the Kate Bush series here and the full back catalogue of horror moments (from Wallace & Gromit to Shakespeare) here.

[Spoilers: The Red Shoes (1948)]

We’re more than halfway through our Kate Bush-inspired series of horror moments and this week we once again find ourselves exploring a song inspired by a film. This is ‘The Red Shoes’ from Bush’s 1993 album of the same name, inspired by the film (also of the same name) from 1948. The film in turn is inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (you guessed it, of the same name.)

The story is simple: there are a pair of magical shoes that give you the power to dance beautifully when you put them on but won’t come off again. Like the unfortunate protagonist of many a fairy tale, you’ll have to resort to gruesome measures if you ever want to be free.

With its rising sense of dread and wild galloping chorus, Bush’s song is a brilliant retelling that captures the dancer’s desperation as she realises her terrible mistake. The cruelty of the original plot is found here in the sneering voices that gloat sadistically as the music drives her on and on into excruciating pain.

She gotta dance, she gotta dance
And she can't stop 'til them shoes come off
These shoes do, a kind of voodoo
They're gonna make her dance 'til her legs fall off

Hans Christian Andersen’s stories often get cheered up in adaptation, just look at what Disney did to The Little Mermaid. ‘The Red Shoes’ has generally escaped this treatment, and both the 1948 film and Bush’s musical version give the story its full tragic rein, although neither retains the heroine’s original name ‘Karen’, which is probably for the best. (Apparently Andersen had a half-sister called Karen whom he hated, which is hilariously petty).

Unlike some of the horror inspirations we’ve discussed in this series, this tale seems to want to teach us a clear moral lesson, but what exactly that moral is depends on the version you tell. In the original, Andersen punishes Karen for her un-Christian vanity; it is an angel who curses her to keep dancing even after her death. In a grisly twist, her amputated legs block her way back into church and the feet are supposedly still dancing out there somewhere.

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film, it is unclear whether the dancer kills herself on purpose or whether it is the shoes that force her to leap to her death. The film is in fact a tale-within-a-tale, following a ballet dancer who is playing the ‘Karen’ role in a production of ‘The Red Shoes’ and whose life begins to mimic her art (something that Black Swan (2010) draws on heavily.) It becomes a story about the ways in which those who devote themselves to an artistic discipline make sacrifices which prevent them from living a healthy life and separating reality from fiction.

Bush herself had trained as a dancer and had integrated movement into many of her music videos and live performances, but her true gifts lay elsewhere and you can sense her own identification with the tragic protagonist of her version of the story who is not naturally gifted but would do anything to be as brilliant as the mysterious ballerina who first offers her the shoes:

Oh, she move like the diva do
I said, "I'd love to dance like you"
She said, "Just take off my red shoes
Put them on and your dream'll come true"

So important was this story to Bush that she directed a 40-minute film called The Line, the Cross and the Curve which functions as the music video for the songs from ‘The Red Shoes’ album and loosely follows the plot of the fairy tale with elements from the 1948 film. Miranda Richardson here plays the seductive villain who tricks Bush into taking the cursed shoes. Lindsay Kemp, himself one of the most important British dancers of the twentieth century, plays a spiritual guide by way of cirque-de-soleil.

…but the reception of the film was mixed. Bush called it ‘a load of bollocks’ which is far too harsh, though I think it’s true that sections of the film work better as standalone music videos rather than a connected narrative. The songs don’t necessarily feel as if they belong together and it’s often unclear exactly what one scene is ‘saying’ about the frame narrative. Then again, the unnervingly trippy dreamlike world it shapes feels tonally appropriate for the story, we more or less get that blend of beauty and nastiness that both the 1948 film and the original fairy tale possess.

In ‘The Red Shoes’ section, there’s something quite moving about watching Bush dance with Kemp, the man to whom she dedicated her song ‘Moving’ all the way back on her first album, ‘The Kick Inside’. To watch Kemp dance is to hear him tell a story, and here he’s paired with a girl who longs for this same power. I admire Bush for the ease with which she uses music to conjure scene and character, I’d love to be able to write songs like she can — yet here she is longing for the power of dance! Kemp himself was tactfully polite about how her dance abilities compared to her musical skill. (For what it’s worth, I love her dancing.)

So even as we flutter through wiggling devils and Halloween-party skulls (there are plenty both in The Line, the Cross and the Curve), there’s a deeply melancholy cautionary tale in the song that rings touchingly true in Bush’s own career. The moral of ‘The Red Shoes’ has shifted once again: we always want what we can’t have, and that desire never does us any good. What unwise deal would you make for a skill you long for, and could you ever be happy with the gifts you already have?

Next week, grab your Geiger counter and prepare to return to the world of dystopia but for now, happy nightmares everyone!

Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Monday afternoons.