LITTLE ROCK — Once upon a time, it so happened that boy wizards grew up. They quit having new adventures. Zombies stumbled, vampires lost their bite, and The Next Big Thing came along like a giant in the forest: fairy tales.

Fairy tale movies, TV shows, books, comic books and weddings fit for a princess make this the year of living happily ever after. Book publisher Barron’s Educational Series predicts the trend “will certainly continue through 2013 and beyond.”

How big a trend? - big as the grudge that the fairy tale siblings, Hansel and Gretel, have against witches. The old story ends with the children escaped from the witch’s oven, happy to stay home ever after. But Hollywood has other ideas.

Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton play the siblings on screen, grown up and still taking potshots at evil crones in the newly released Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.

Also, real-life brother and sister Booboo and Fivel Stewart play Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft. Rather than find their way home, these two find their way to home video. Follow the trail and it leads to still more fairy tales for a new audience:

Jack the Giant Slayer (coming March 1): X-man Nicholas Hoult clambers up the big-screen beanstalk.

Maleficent (sometime later): Angelina Jolie casts about in the title role of the fairy tale mistress of evil, caster of the curse that conked Sleeping Beauty.

The TV series Grimm, about a fairy tale monster hunter and his werewolf sidekick; and Once Upon a Time, about fairy tale characters trying to make do with real life.

Trend-watchers saw as much coming long, long - well, not so long ago, but a while back. Irish author Maura McHugh did when she set to work on the latest from Barron’s, Twisted Fairy Tales: 20 Classic Stories With a Dark and Dangerous Heart.

“The current fascination with fairy tales has been forming for some time,” she says from the leprechaun land of Ireland. “If you look at programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Supernatural and True Blood, they have been tapping into myth and fairy tales for inspiration. It wasn’t going to be too long before someone selected fairy tales as the primary background material.”

Meantime, fairy tale references creep into everyday language like the enchanted frog into the castle. A politician who makes hard-to-believe promises can expect to be accused of telling fairy tales. Rich weddings are fairy tale affairs in the news, especially the marriage of England’s Prince William to Kate Middleton. And if the match turns out to be a royal mess, People magazine can describe it the same as when Heidi Klum and Seal broke up: “End of the fairy tale.”

But right now, there’s no end in sight.

SPINNING GOLD

Fairy tales might seem to be nothing but make-believe - entertaining nonsense about gingerbread cottages, Jack’s magic beans and Prince Charming’s dependable arrival. But these are old, old stories, full of warnings in their original versions, dipped in serious meaning for those who choose to take a bigger bite.

“In many of the old stories, survival is possible even for the weakest and most unlikely heroes,” according to fairy tale collector Kate Bernheimer of the University of Arizona at Tucson. “In this time of mass extinction - human-caused - and with all of the senseless violence on earth - human to human - we respond to these stories with a kind of longing, I think.”

Bernheimer edits the annual Fairy Tale Review (at fairytalereview.com), a literary journal devoted to fairy tales from around the world, in addition to her own novels, children’s books and fairy tale anthologies.

“I can’t imagine any more relevant form,” she says. “Fairy tales offer radical solutions to very real problems” - poverty, famine - and “certainly we all know at least one humble human who could use a radical solution.”

ONCE UPON A SUBLIME

In fairy tales, “you find a very spare and poetic style,” Bernheimer points out. “The magical things in the stories aren’t amplified. The language is flat, unadorned. The characters are not astonished by magic - it is part of their everyday lives.”

Editor Brian M. Thomsen’s anthology, The American Fantasy Tradition, explains a big difference between European fairy tale magic and distinctly American fantasy. Fairy tale characters think nothing of the strange things that happen to them. Cinderella never questions why she has a fairy godmother.

The American equivalent of the goblin market is the Twilight Zone. “You’ve just crossed over,” as the TV series’ host Rod Serling said, and things are different. In the episode called “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” an airplane passenger sees a gremlin on the wing. He stares, he sweats, he screams, he thinks he must be crazy.

One way or another, these characters raise a very personal question: How would you feel?

“There is a lot of room for the reader inside their bones,” Bernheimer says, “and this has inspired many centuries of artistic response. It never has waned, but there is more overt attention on these stories right now.”

GRIMMS AND GRIMMER

Marketing presumes today’s audience is older, coming to fairy tales via the realm of monstrous orcs and dragons in movie director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. The vampire romance Twilight is rated PG-13; Hansel and Gretel: Witchhunters, R-rated for sex, messy witch slaying and the f-word that doesn’t mean fairy.

Back with a vengeance, many of today’s new versions rediscover the gruesome tales of yore - fairy tales the way German folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm spun their bloody yarns in the first part of the 19th century.

“As a writer I felt a responsibility to hew to the spirit of the stories, but I wasn’t afraid to change them in places to make them more interesting or to update them for a modern audience,” Twisted Fairy Tales’ McHugh says. “Fairy tales have never stayed the same. New people in different ages have rewritten them to suit their time period. That’s part of their enduring appeal: They’re malleable.”

The scholarly Brothers Grimm recorded more than 200 stories with the intent of preserving German heritage, a serious business. They were surprised - like the farmer and his wife whose son turned out to be a hedgehog - to find that people took their research as bedtime reading for children.

But the Grimms’ earliest versions are scarcely the stuff of sweet dreams. Maria Tatar’s book, Grimm’s Grimmest, tells some of originals, complete with the vilest of evil deeds, punished by the most grotesque of retributions and seasoned with scandal.

Here, the prince does not climb Rapunzel’s tower just to say hello, and before long she has another visitor: The stork. The witch discovers why Rapunzel’s clothes are too tight, and then - oh-no!

That snip-snip sound is not the little tailor’s scissors, but the censor at work. The brothers sugared some of the stories themselves, editing according to second thoughts as they went along. And like the cobbler in “The Elves and the Shoemaker,”they had lots of help.

BIBBIDI-BOBBIDI SKEW

Ever since Walt Disney’s animated cartoon version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), generations of children have grown up with Disney’s much-sweetened versions of the old tales, brightened with song, enlivened with mice that sew dresses, and made into Disneyland fun rides.

Disney’s Snow White, for example, runs to the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. They hide her from the wicked queen, and she keeps house, singing to herself that “someday, my prince will come.”

In Twisted Tales, McHugh’s princess grabs a sword to put a sharp end to the queen’s apple-poisoning ways.

The tale of Pinocchio the puppet boy is another turn-around. Pinocchio sure enough encounters a talking cricket in the Italian writer Carlo Collodi’s original novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). The wise cricket tells him “Woe to boys who refuse to obey their parents.” Pinocchio bangs the bug with a hammer, and it dies “with a last ‘cri-cri-cri.’”

Disney revived the squashed insect to become one of the studio’s most beloved cartoon figures, Jiminy Cricket, the singer of the Oscar-winning “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

But things take yet another a sharp turn in the four-volume graphic novel series Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer, written by Van Jensen in Atlanta, illustrated by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette artist Dusty Higgins. Pinocchio stakes bloodsuckers with his ever-growing nose.

After a generation of “coddled children,” Jensen suspects, “maybe we’re moving more toward an era of adults at least not trying to shelter their children from the world. But I think also there’s a renewed interest in authenticity, which is a vague concept. But in terms of fairy tales, it means telling the stories as they were originally told. And many of those old stories are pretty harsh.”

Philip Pullman’s collection, Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version, allows the Grimms their red-hot iron shoes and bad sisters rolled down the hill in barrels. He cites one of their bloodiest, “The Juniper Tree,” as a personal favorite.

“The only thing to do, it seems to me, is to try for clarity,” Pullman writes in the book’s introduction, “and stop worrying about it.”

For every nasty fairy tale, after all, there’s an equally sweet one.

For every tale told, there’s one told differently.

“To generalize, critics often dismiss fairy tales as a type of story - as just a children’s story or as an unrealistic story, let’s say,” according to Bernheimer. She counters, “There is no such thing as ‘fairy tales’ that one can dismiss as a class; there are, rather, millions of fairy tales, generated over thousands of years.

“There are fairy tales for children, fairy tales for former children, and fairy tales no one will read.”

Style, Pages 45 on 02/03/2013