While there are plenty of amazing fantasy movies that play by the genre’s usual rules, these five titles were incredible precisely because they subverted all the usual expectations that viewers bring to the genre. Although elements of the fantasy genre have been around since the first recorded instances of written and oral storytelling culture, the genre itself didn’t take shape until as late as the 1800s. There were plenty of stories of dragons, magic, and sorcery before this, but what readers now recognise as a classic fantasy story was first shaped by novels from the late 19th century.
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Since then, writers as varied as JRR Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and George RR Martin have left their stamp on the ever-evolving genre. However, while stories like The Lord of the Rings trilogy helped shape the concept of the fantasy genre, plenty of other entries into the genre did everything they could to subvert, distort, and play with the reader’s perceptions. Similarly, movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, Shrek, and The Green Knight took everything that viewers thought they understood about the fantasy formula and radically rewrote it.
Pan’s Labyrinth
On its face, Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark fairy tale wherein the teenage Ofelia travels from WWII-era Spain into the mythical eponymous labyrinth, where she meets the enigmatic titular faun, a diverse array of fantasy creatures, and not a few terrifying supernatural villains. This sounds like a straightforward fantasy, but the director’s story is actually something much darker and more thoughtful.
A parable about fascism, coming of age, and the loss of innocence, Pan’s Labyrinth subverts the familiar tropes of the fantasy genre to wrong-foot viewers. The story is filled with shocking twists that would feel out of place in a normal epic fantasy story, but make perfect sense in a disquieting, subversive take about the power of resistance and the importance of storytelling as a political act.
The Company of Wolves
If Pan’s Labyrinth subtly takes elements from various folk tales and subverts them to create a new, darker, more complex story, 1984’s The Company of Wolves straight up rewrites one of the most famous fairy tales ever in its twisted fantasy story. Directed by Interview with a Vampire director Neil Jordan, the screenplay for The Company of Wolves was penned by Angela Carter and is based on her short story of the same name.
Told as a story within a dream, this trippy tale follows a young girl as she comes of age in an unsettling fairy tale village. Through a series of stories within stories, the movie’s heroine comes to terms with her emerging sexuality via a strange, subversive, and revolutionary version of Red Riding Hood’s familiar storyline. Bloody, bizarre, and hauntingly beautiful, The Company of Wolves twists its source story until it is unrecognisable.
Shrek
Most of the movies listed here are firmly for adults, since part of their project involves taking stories that are typically told to children and rewriting them for a more mature audience. However, the Shrek franchise also deserves a spot here, as the DreamWorks fantasy comedy series is a superb example of creators taking the familiar building blocks of an epic fantasy story and using them to tell an entirely fresh, original, genre-bending tale.
Shrek‘s princess is no helpless damsel in distress, its prince charming who comes to save her is a bitter, self-interested ogre, and the characters of countless famous fairy tales and folk stories reveal that they are sick of being stereotyped in this ingenious fantasy comedy. Although Shrek is a lot tonally lighter than the rest of the titles listed here, the blockbuster hit’s subversive reconfiguration of fantasy tropes still deserves to be acknowledged.
Snow White: A Tale of Terror
1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror is more than merely a violent, R-rated retelling of the iconic fairy tale. Unlike 2025’s Disney flop Snow White, this revision makes its evil stepmother genuinely sympathetic as she is motivated by past trauma and not merely an irrational jealousy of Snow White. Similarly, Snow White’s helpers aren’t the merry miners of earlier retellings, but rather a group of understandably aggrieved bandits who resent the king and initially hate his daughter before eventually warming to her.
The Green Knight
While Snow White: A Tale of Terror does subvert the audience’s expectations with its retelling of the famous tale, the dark fantasy still ensures that its titular heroine is as virtuous as ever. Not so in 2021’s The Green Knight, directed by A Ghost Story’s David Lowery. Here, Dev Patel’s Gawain is motivated by fear and insecurity rather than the virtues of chivalry, and his hero’s journey ends without any meaningful conclusion.
Bleak but absorbing, The Green Knight breaks all the rules of the genre as the movie offers viewers a hero who isn’t heroic, a villain who isn’t traditionally evil, and a journey where nothing is achieved in the end. Like Pan’s Labyrinth and Shrek before it, this unpredictable fantasy story rewrites what the audience expects from a film in the fantasy genre.
