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adarkrainbow · 7 months

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Spooky season fairytales (1)

I have been covering it these past weeks, and it is a perfect fit for Halloween: Hansel and Gretel.

This is one of the creepiest "popular" fairytales, that has terrified many children. The witch in the gingerbread house not only exemplifies so many bogeymen that caused children's nightmares, but is also one of the two most famous examples of witches in fairytales - and we know Halloween is one of the witchy holidays. And the whole story revolves around a house made of sweets - in modern day interpretations, Hansel and Gretel is THE candy-fairytale. And Halloween is THE holiday for treats and sweets.

Despite being an obvious choice to make fairytale horror movies, and the fairytale having inspired several great horror classics (the scene I posted before in Stephen King's IT involving the witch of Hansel and Gretel), the tale doesn't actually have a lot of treatment in the world of horror... Yeah, it is surprising, but the first true "horror movie" about Hansel and Gretel would be the Korean 2007 movie of the same name, that was recognized as a great Korean horror piece and a very touching tragic story, but is not an actual retelling of "Hansel and Gretel" - or rather it is a twisted, reversed-retelling that mostly uses Hansel and Gretel as a motif and reference rather than actual plot material.

To have "Hansel and Gretel" REALLY enter the horror movie world, we would have to wait for the year 2013, and a dual release. The first one is a famous movie by fairytale enjoyers, that is still quite popular online: "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters". This movie is what the 2005's "Van Helsing" movie was to Dracula.

What to say about this movie? It is a dark fantasy, action-movie acting as a sequel to the original fairytale and depicting the two protagonists as gun-and-arbalet-wielding witch hunters. It is everything you except from a a big studio classic action gritty-fantasy movie. In fact, that's the main flaw of the movie: it is extremely generic, formulaic and "by-the-book". There's no real inventivity or uniqueness in terms of plot, setting or characters. If you played dark fantasy action video games, you watched this movie already. It didn't even invent the concept of Hansel and Gretel as witch hunters - Fables for example had done it already by making Hansel a fanatical Puritan witch hunter in the style of the Salem witch trials. As a result, what could have been a really good, inventive, interestng movie is just... a neutral, generic movie. The kind you can watch and enjoy but that won't transcend anything and isn't groundbreaking in any way.

Not that the movie is bad, it has some highlights and qualities to it that avoid making it bad. For example, several of the actors in this movie are really good and give their best despite playing bland or generic characters (and in fact it sames some flat characters, who are given depth by their actors' work) ; and there is a true visual work, with some fascinating designs. This all makes the movie enjoyable in several aspects - but just having good actors and good visuals won't make the movie good given how generic it is in plot and style, and how incoherent the worldbuilding and the tone feels, tiptoing around anachronisms for the sake of "let's make it cool and steampunk", and failing to find a balance between dark comedy and serious movie. (Oh yes and it also dreadfully suffer from the awful "3D movies" trend of the time)

And to this movie answered another movie: 2013's "Hansel and Gretel", aka The Asylum's Hansel and Gretel. A movie which is the perfect twin to "Witch Hunters" - in fact you could say they are the yin and yang to each other.

This movie is a full horror movie, not a dark fantasy/action piece. This movie is a retelling of the original story, not a sequel to it. This movie takes place in modern day, the 21st century, instead of a fantasized Germany of unclear era. And whereas "Witch Hunters" kind of fails at meeting the hype it built up, and is a neutral, average, not-good not-bad big budget movie, this movie is... surprisingly good for what it is, and ends up much better than what it should be.

If you do not know The Asylum, the group behind this movie, they are well-known producers of mockbusters, unofficial sequels and B-movies, and very proud of it. In fact it is their goal: make mockbusters to propose a cheaper alternative to big-studio movies, and turn the making of "second-rate" movies into a true art. They make their movies very fast, they release them against big studios movie they openly took inspiration from, they use cheap special effects, they select for actors either "no-names" or "has-beens"... I think I can sum it up enough by the fact they are the makers of the "Sharknado" movies. As a result, this movie was probably going to be an utter mess and ridiculous schlock...

... But it was surprisingly good. Better than what it should be. Of course The Asylum's marks are still there. The movie opens and closes on two very ridiculous scenes (the first victim's flight in the night ; the explosion of the house), there is some cheap "sexy-horror" audience-appeal (it is no mistake the only victims to be eaten are women that are forced in underwears before being pushed in the oven), and the plot is basically Hansel and Gretel X The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. BUT all that being said, this movie actually works! In its own, small-budget, no-real-ambition way. It doesn't try to be too snobby or arrogant - it knows it is a small, derivative, B-horror movie, and it stays in its lane. There are some interesting scenes and concepts (such as the drugged-colorfed nightmares). They do manage to create some disturbing elements - while also purposefully breaking several horror stereotypes and cliches. They try to keep a "maybe magic, maybe mundane" approach to the story in their own clumsy way but that is interesting. And more importantly - the character of the witch is SO GREAT!

I can't say enough how I enjoyed the witch (Lilith) on screen, and I do believe that this is due to the incredible work of her actress. Because she is played by none other than Dee Wallace (a horror movie regular who began her career with E.T.) - and she manages to make the character entertaining and disturbing. It really works, and I suspect that if a bad actress had been placed there, the role might have felt flat and generic. But she brings extremely well the disturbed state of mind, the humanity of the monster, and the true descent into horrible madness of the character. They are notably the first movie, to my knowledge, which actually acknowledges and reflects upon the special relationship between Gretel and the Witch, invoking elements that would later become common in "Hansel and Gretel" retellings, such as the witch wanting to make Gretel her "heir", or seeing her as a daughter substitute.

Beyond the year 2013, of course, now, you hit "Hansel and Gretel - horror" in any web research system, and you get the recent horror movie by Oz Perkins, the 2020's "Gretel and Hansel".

I do believe that this movie, and The Asylum's movie, truly reflect the two sides of horror movies and how one same story can be treated under these two lenses. The Asylum's is a gory, brutal, low-budget but decent and interesting horror movie, that still works in its limitations and intends to be just your random "fun little horror slasher movie" ; this movie is the artistic, big-budget, much more stylized and psychological disturbing horror movie that veers more into dark fantasy sometimes and tries more to be an actual nightmare, in the most abstract and eerie sense.

Personally, I did enjoy the movie as a whole and I think it is a good Hansel and Gretel movie. I do think they did a good job at mixing the fairytale with the entire Christian myth of the witch as built by the witch-hunts and other countryside superstitions (they weaved in the story for example the topics of the magical ointments and the idea of witches feasting on the dead) ; and I did love the dark twists and reveals at the end ; and I also liked very much the subtle references to other fairytales slid in the story (Little Red Riding Hood, and The Juniper Tree).

However it is not a movie without flaws - and I would never call it a perfect movie. It got the ideas, the visuals, the will, the inspirations, but... sometimes it does too much, there's unecessary things that could have been cut out and do ridiculize a bit the movie (the first third of the movie is filled with unecessary and random moments like the bizarre hostile man in the abandoned house, or the "mushroom" scenes, which clearly were not needed - there's also jumpscares that are just... there, for jumpscare sakes, when this movie clearly does NOT need jumpscares). There is also the fact that while often it manages to drive its themes, messages and topics in subtle or clever ways (the dialogues of Gretel and the witch, about things such as power, womanhood, the world, are all very well done), a few times it becomes suddenly very clumsy and awkward (one particular moment was the line of Gretel about "the system" in her very first scene, which felt definitively too political and modern to fit in the context).

I do remember the so-called "debate" there was when this movie was released, and the so-called "scandal" of putting Gretel's name first. But it makes full sense when you understand that Gretel here is the main character, that we are told the story through her, and that it doesn't try so much to be a Hansel and Gretel retelling, as rather a dark and morbid fantasy movie that uses the Hansel and Gretel tale as a driving plot to explore more things - the European witchcraft myth, the theme of "Faustian deals", etc, etc... And despite some clumsiness here and there that do flaw the movie (I haven't mentionned it, but the choice of the tattoos for the witch's "final" form seemed very random and ill-thought, which is one of the several little details that don't work ; balanced by details that do work, such as the idea of having a more modern architecture for the witch's house), it still works for most of its course.

To conclude this post, I need to talk about one last "Hansel and Gretel" movie. A movie which American audiences are not actually familiar with. Because it is a German movie, that got released around Europe (I saw it in French), but to my knowledge never crossed the Atlantic. Made by Anne Wild and written by Peter Schwindt, this movie is probably the eeriest Hansel and Gretel adaptation I have seen. It is not "disturbing", "shocking" or "horrifying" - it is just creepy and unsettling. It is not a rewrite or a "retelling" per se, because it stays faithful to the original tale and barely changes anything. Out of the five movies I present you, this is the most faithful movie when it comes to adapting the brothers Grimm fairytale.

EDIT: I originally wrote this part thinking the movie was very hard to find... TURNS OUT IT WAS POSTED ON YOUTUBE! The full movie is on Youtube - in its original German though

This movie made the fairytale eerie with two things. 1) Little unsettling and creepy details in terms of style and movie editing. This movie actually has several things in common with the 2020's Gretel and Hansel - such as the heavy use of the forested landscape to make one feel both lost and trapped at the same time (helped by the fact the protagonists are here played by actual children), and bizarre camera angles and movements (including disturbing close-ups and brutal cuts). The score also includes eerie songs and creepy children whispers, that add to the general spookyness. 2) A work on the realism on the tale. There's still magic and supernatural in there, definitively. But overall it is all... "realistic" in style, making it all more unsettling. Hansel and Gretel behave like actual children - and are in fact often unaware of the danger they are getting themselves into. The color palette is drab and lightless.

Don't get me wrong: this is not an adult-aimed movie, it is not a horror movie. It is still a kid-oriented, fairytale movie, with some moments of humor (though it is mostly dark humor, such as Hansel, blissfully unaware of the witch's plan, coming to enjoy his life in a cage eating good food all day long), a happy ending, and many beautiful visuals (the witch's bedroom is especially interesting - slight spoiler but there is the beautiful visual of the witch keeping petrified birds and butterflies in her room, that come back to life once she is dead). It has poetry to it - but it is definitively not a Disney movie and not what we usually think of as "fairytale movie for kids". It is a quite dark one.

One good illustration of this would be the family dynamic at the start of the tale, and how this movie slightly changes the whole abandonment episode. In this movie, the character of the mother is actually sick - and having her suffering from what will be a deadly disease puts her entire character into a very different light. Another major change they did is that the second time the children are abandoned - the parents do not hide the fact they are abandoning them. Hansel and Gretel know it, and the parents don't bother lying or even pretending, but there is still this sort of untold shame as they don't openly admit it and flee from their crying children... It hits hard.

The creepiest part of the whole movie is however, without a doubt, the witch. By gosh, this is one of the creepiest incarnations of the character I saw. She is a perfect embodiment of the uncanny valley: she is not some cartoonish monster, she is just this pale middle-aged woman that never blinks. She does perform magic, but her magic keeps with the "realism" style of the movie - no flash, no music, no smoke. When she teleports, she is just here one moment, another the next. She prevents Gretel from leaving by casting a spell that makes it so that each time she walks away, she ends up finding herself in front of the house - despite it being impossible. Her rhyming "Who's nibbling on my house?" is actually a disembodied whisper in the ears of the children as they see nobody, making their answer "It's just the wind" an actual comforting sentence they say to themselves thinking they imagined it all. Her bedroom cannot actually exist because it is located in an impossible part of the house that does not appear from the outside. And there are those little details that do hint at her maybe not being actually human but just looking like a human - when she moves sometimes her bones crack, and other times her voice seems to double itself in a strange echo... And when she is pushed into the oven (light spoilers too) - she doesn't scream. She doesn't make a sound. Once she is pushed and the door is closed, it is dead silence, and that makes it even more disturbing than if she actually screamed in agony.

And there are other little morbid details in the movie - too many for me too count. But one thing that does stick with me was the way Gretel pieced up together the witch's real intentions for Hansel (because of course she didn't tell them she was going to eat them), by noticing little details straight out of Pan's Labyrinth - such as Gretel noticing the witch's wind-chimes is made of bones and hair ; and the witch keeping in her house a closet filled with an ungodly amount of toys in various states of aging. This latter detail was notably taken back by "Gretel and Hansel", where the first hint of the witch's previous victims are toys scattered in the wilderness around the house. In fact, I do wonder if Perkins didn't take some inspiration from this 2005 movie, because there is definitively something similar between the two.

And with this, you have to my knowledge the perfect Hansel and Gretel movies for the spooky season.

The supernatural tragedy inspired by, and a famed piece of Korean horror. The surprisingly good B-horror movie that turns the story into a new "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The dark fantasy action-packed blockbuster that is just halfway there. The recent, heavily stylized, witch-hunt inspired artsy/socio-political horror movie. And the eerie, unsettling, faithful retelling as a dark German children movie.

#spooky season fairytales #spooky season #fairytale movies #hansel and gretel #dark fairytales #fairytale horror #horror fairytales #gretel and hansel #witch hunters

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