Moodboard Monday: Dark Fairytales and Femininity

Where beauty bruises, desire deceives and myth becomes memory

This week’s moodboard drifts into the shadowed corners of femininity, where elegance is weaponised, and fantasy is laced with grief. The Virgin Suicides, Dangerous Liaisons and Pan’s Labyrinth each explore womanhood as myth, mystery and emotional terrain. These aren’t fairytales with happy endings. They’re cinematic spells, beautiful, brutal and unforgettable.

Mood & Theme

Femininity as performance, rebellion and ritual.
Innocence corrupted, elegance sharpened, fantasy fractured.
Visual storytelling through lace, blood, mirrors and silence.

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Mood: Ethereal melancholy, suburban myth.
Visual language: Hazy lighting, pastel palettes, soft focus.
Styling cues: Nightgowns, floral wallpaper, sunlit sorrow.
Why it works: Sofia Coppola frames girlhood as ghost story. The Lisbon sisters are less characters than collective memory – beautiful, unknowable, already gone.

She was framed like a fairytale – and faded like one too

Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

Mood: Aristocratic cruelty, seductive manipulation.
Visual language: Candlelit corridors, powdered faces, velvet shadows.
Styling cues: Corsets, fans, handwritten letters, emotional armour.
Why it works: Femininity is weaponised – used too seduce, destroy and survive. Every costume is a chess move. Every glance, a dagger

Elegance isn’t innocence, it’s strategy

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Mood: Gothic fantasy, wartime grief, mythic innocence.
Visual language: Mossy greens, candlelight, creature design.
Styling cues: Military uniforms vs fairytale textures, blood on lace.
Why it works: Ofelia’s journey is a dark rite of passage. Femininity here is sacrifice, resistance and belief in beauty and brutality.

Fantasy doesn’t protect you, it prepares you

Visual Moodboard

Textures: Lace, velvet, moss, porcelain, parchment.
Colour Palette: Sepia haze, bruised plum, candle gold, blood red.
Frame Composition: Mirror shots, slow pans, symbolic blocking.
Styling techniques: Costume as emotional code, lighting as mood, silence as tension.

Femininity in cinema, is often a spell – and sometimes a curse

This week’s moodboard is an ode to the feminine as mythic terrain – where beauty bruises, desire deceives and fantasy fractures.

These films remind us that fairytales aren’t always gentle. Sometimes they’re warnings. Sometimes they’re mirrors, and sometimes, they’re the only way to survive.