I think I speak for adults everywhere when I say that I don’t get enough sleep. Aside from being a busy person, I’ve had recurrent insomnia since I was eight years old, and I’m a proud night owl. This means that my best writing happens between 9:00 pm and 3:00 am, which does absolutely nothing for my already terrible sleeping genes.

Coming from that context, I really don’t think a 100-year sleeping curse sounds that bad. Especially if all your loved ones are snoozing alongside you and everybody stays young, why not embrace a little beauty sleep? Still though, the concept of a ravishing princess frozen in time in her castle is such a captivating portrait that I understand why her story is so timeless IRL.

I’m a HUGE fan of Sleeping Beauty, both the fairy tale and the movie adaptation that’s oh so familiar. This story makes my top ten list of fairy tales, but you might not know . . . the original Sleeping Beauty is dark. And extremely icky in every sense of the word.

For Once, the Grimms’ Version Ain’t So Bad

“Little Brier-Rose” may be darker than Disney, but it’s among the tamest of the Grimms’ collection and heavily inspired the movie. We all know how it starts: a king and queen throw a grand birthday party for their long-awaited princess. And one slighted fairy gets left off the guest list.

Here there are twelve good fairies and one unlucky number thirteen. She realizes the royals’ insult because there are only twelve golden place settings for the fairies, and she proceeds to curse the little princess to prick her finger on a spindle and die at age fifteen. Harsh, ma’am. Harsh.

But one good fairy softens the blow by changing the death sentence to one hundred years of sleep. The king and queen still burn all the spinning wheels to escape the prophecy, but somehow a random spinster woman in a remote tower doesn’t hear the royal decree and continues to use a spindle. For the record, this woman has no ill intentions toward the princess, but Brier-Rose does find her. When the princess touches the spindle out of curiosity, she immediately collapses into her century-long sleep.

The Rest is Basically the Disney Movie

The original good fairy puts the entire court and Brier-Rose’s family to sleep and grows a wall of vicious thorns to protect the princess in her slumber. Of course the Grimms include the gnarly detail that several princes try to rescue her and are graphically impaled to death on the thorns. What’s a Grimm fairy tale without some bloodshed?

But eventually Prince Charming arrives after one hundred years, and the thorny barrier parts for him to find Brier-Rose. He’s enraptured with her beauty and kisses her just moments before she awakes. Take note that the prince’s kiss doesn’t actually break the curse in the original Sleeping Beauty. He just happens to show up right on time and kiss her when the century-long time-ticker runs out. Super convenient, but it is a fairy tale. Give it a break.

The Grimm Brothers very nearly cut Little Brier-Rose from their fairy tale collection because it was just too French for them. Truthfully, they borrowed most of their material from the unabridged version by Charles Perrault.

The French Sleeping Beauty Had a Longer Road to Travel

Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” was published years before the Grimms’ tale and has some pretty distinct differences. Here we have seven good fairies at the baby’s celebration, and the king and queen didn’t invite the eighth only because they thought the old sprite was dead! Plausible explanation. But not a good enough one for the wicked fairy. There aren’t enough golden dishes for her place setting, so she curses that baby.

Perrault leaves out any gruesome details about princ