A dark fable, perhaps.

On the lighter side there are the humorously dark fables of Lemony Snicket (a k a Daniel Handler).

Well, maybe because it sets in motion the strange events of "Measure for Measure," Shakespeare's dark fable of lust and punishment.

"The Black Rider" uses the skeleton of the 1821 Weber opera to relate a darker modernist fable that can be read in any number of ways.

At first sighting on a sunlit day in the Dry Tortugas, Fort Jefferson rises from the sea like a specter from a dark fable.

Those films that do address the subject are usually Faustian horror stories of identity exchange or dark Jekyll-and-Hyde fables of personality transformation.

This dark fable won critical acclaim for its magic realist depiction of the seedy beggars' underworld of India.

A dark fable, "Into the West" chronicles the adventures of two boys and a white horse.

Mr. Burton's film is a dark fable about the misadventures of a suburban teen-ager created by an eccentric inventor.

They are extremely thin compared to the genuinely dramatic impact of the dark fable of a love that truly cannot be.