Disney chose family-friendly storylines for its fairy tale films, although many of the stories have an older and more cruel version in the Brothers Grimm collection. But not only the Brothers Grimm collected and told fairy tales. The stories are often older than their most famous written versions, and usually had several versions – some with a happy ending and some with a sad one – before either Grimm or Disney came to them. They weren’t exactly intended for children either.
There are many versions in which [Little Red Riding Hood] dies and many of them where she lives; it kind of depends on where the stories come from and what point the society they came from wants to convey to people. The purpose and meaning of a particular story will vary depending on the writer / narrator / collector, what they are trying to achieve with the story, and who their audience is. Perrault wrote for the French aristocracy; the Brothers Grimm tried (allegedly) to collect the folk culture of the peasants for school purposes.
… no, children were not originally the target group for fairy tales. Children were often included in the audience, but they weren’t the main audience. As such, the stories contained a lot of violence, lots of sex, lots of crude jokes and references, and lots of frank discussions about topics that influenced the worlds of storytellers. For a context of when these stories could have been told, women often told such stories to each other during housework, housework and other activities, or with men around the fire after the children had gone to bed.
