We don’t like to think about death too much at Christmas these days, especially when it comes to children’s stories. This is a shame, because dwelling on the proximity of darkness has been a significant part of our collective storytelling tradition at this time of year, since long before the Green Knight crashed King Arthur’s Christmas feast.

The Christmas ghost story used to be a family occasion; Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black both begin with the telling of fearful tales around the fire on Christmas Eve, a reminder that as we gather with loved ones around the warmth and lights of the hearth, the dark and the wild are still outside the windows, remnants of our pagan past – frightening and far from cosy.

Which makes it all the more infuriating that one of the highlights of the BBC’s Christmas programming is a toned-down, fluffier remake of Richard Adams’s distinctly un-fluffy 1972 classic Watership Down. Despite its stellar cast (Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy, Gemma Arterton, John Boyega and Peter Capaldi, among others will voice the animated rabbits), the new version has drawn fire for pulling its punches when it comes to the level of brutality – among the animals themselves, but especially at the hands of humans, who callously rip up their habitat and pump them full of myxomatosis. Most of this criticism has come from the generation who grew up mildly traumatised by Martin Rosen’s graphic 1978 animated adaptation and swear it didn’t do them any harm.

I loved that film as a child, even though it terrified me. It managed, like the book, to be both sentimental and clear-eyed about the natural world. If anything, it gave us a healthy awareness not only that nature, even in anthropomorphised form, could be unsparingly bloody and cruel, but that humans’ disregard for life had horrific and painful consequences.

There’s a trippy quality to Rosen’s animation that made the scenes of death and poisoning all the more nightmarish, and the censors were later criticised for giving it a U certificate, meaning it could be viewed by four-year-olds – exactly the age I was when the film came out. I was not much older when I discovered the tie-in picture book at home, and I still remember the frisson of sneaking a look at the worst images – the frothing and bloodied General Woundwort, or Fiver’s apocalyptic visions – until I couldn’t sleep for fear of seeing them when I closed my eyes.

Have we become more sentimental about both children and animals in the intervening years? When Channel 5 ran the Rosen film on the afternoon of Easter Sunday in 2016, there was an outcry on social media from parents appalled that their children had sat down to watch a cute cartoon about bunnies and seen one ripping another’s throat out. Bafflingly, many of those parents must have been of an age to have seen it themselves as children, and must surely have realised it’s not Brambly Hedge.

No child who grows up in the country, or anywhere near a farm, has the luxury of imagining a sanitised version of the animal kingdom, and it was always Adams’s intention not to gloss over the gore, according to his daughters Juliet and Rosamond, for whom the story was originally written (when they were six and eight). “Daddy didn’t like the way people babied and pandered to and ‘icky-ised’ children, lying to them about death and so on,” Juliet said in a recent interview. “We’re destroying the environment and endangering all the animals – I think it would be strange to ignore that.”

And yet not so strange; there were some who criticised the BBC’s Blue Planet for being too overtly political in the way it emphasised the cost of human pollution. Some people will always prefer to be entertained by projecting human narratives on to animals without the uncomfortable reminder that our habitats are inseparable.

Perhaps, in the end, the only worthwhile measure of the new BBC/Netflix version’s success is whether it brings the story to life for a new generation that has different expectations of TV drama. But I can’t help feeling that drafting in a legion of CGI “fur artists” to make the rabbits more realistic won’t make up for shying away from the realism of death and devastation that are so much part of the original story. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of the wild darkness outside, even if it keeps you awake at night. What could be more festive?

• Stephanie Merritt is an author; her most recent novel is While You Sleep