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Seven Years Ago, Tommy Wirkola’s ‘Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’ Gave Us Anti-Arthouse Horror

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This past weekend saw the theatrical release of Osgood Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel, a visual feast that reimagines the classic Brothers Grimm fairytale as a coming-of-age horror story. The film comes along almost exactly seven years after Hollywood’s previous attempt to reintroduce the iconic story to the movie-going public, which took the form of Paramount/MGM’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters back in 2013. Like Gretel & Hansel, Witch Hunters saw the studio system scooping up a fan-favorite indie horror filmmaker and letting him run wild with his own vision for the fairytale; and quite a different vision it was.

Released on January 25th, 2013, the Will Ferrell-produced Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters was written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola, who a few years prior had impressed with his zombie-comedy Dead Snow. Wirkola’s take on the Brothers Grimm tale begins where the classic story always comes to an end, picking up several years after the events at the house made of candy and centered on Hansel & Gretel as adult characters. Tracking and killing witches around the world, the siblings have become hardened monster hunters since that fateful day, and the film documents their battle with a Grand High Witch.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, to say the least, was the antithesis of Osgood Perkins’ slow-paced, moody Gretel & Hansel, with Wirkola going “Full Wirkola” and delivering a high-energy, incredibly gory action-horror film that most definitely was not made with a young audience in mind. Witch Hunters was released into theaters with an “R” rating, and even still there was enough excised gore that an Unrated cut was released on home video; and that’s no gimmick, as the film’s Unrated cut is a full 10-minutes longer than the theatrical cut!

Starring Jeremy Renner as Hansel and Gemma Arterton as Gretel, Wirkola’s Witch Hunters is a whole hell of a lot of fun, the sort of go-for-broke horror insanity that you don’t often find on the big screen today. It’s anti-arthouse horror, essentially, existing only to entertain and made by a filmmaker who has no delusions about precisely what he’s making and who he’s making it for. Not surprisingly, general audiences took to Witch Hunters while critics very much did not, propelling the $50 million horror-comedy to a worldwide box office total of $226 million. The lion’s share was scooped up internationally, with the film opening to just under $20 million at the domestic box office and pulling in $55 million in the US in total.

It was enough for Paramount to order up a sequel, with Wirkola on board to script and direct the continuing adventures. Alas, Wirkola eventually exited the director’s chair and the sequel was seemingly scrapped altogether; at one point, however, murmurs of a television series continuation were floating around the net. It’s now been seven years and this particular iteration of the Grimm fairytale universe would seem to have about as much of a chance of spawning a follow-up as Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel – which is to say, not much at all – and that’s a bummer because Wirkola laid the groundwork for an action-horror franchise with so much sequel potential. And Renner & Arterton proved to be a fun duo to lead the saga.

It’s not often that films tailor made for gore-hounds scare up over $200 million at the box office – even the hugely popular and successful Saw franchise never reached those heights – and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is most definitely a film made for that audience. Particularly in the aforementioned Unrated cut, hardly any character in Witch Hunters dies off screen, and let’s just say that nobody’s final moments are pleasant. One man’s brain is ripped right out of his head by the Grand High Witch (played by a deliciously evil Famke Janssen), while several others have their heads blown clean off and smashed to gelatinous little bits. It’s no secret to anyone who’s seen his two Dead Snow movies that Wirkola was inspired by the early horror output of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and Witch Hunters allowed him to proudly celebrate those inspirations with a big budget at his disposal. And honestly, given just how gruesome and gory the film is, it’s pretty cool that the studios even allowed it.

What’s particularly cool about Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is that much of the gore is brought to the screen with old-school, practical effects, something that Wirkola is clearly a huge fan of. Mind you, the film is also home to some digital gore effects that stick out like a sore thumb at a few points, but there’s enough practical carnage on display that those computer-generated bits are ultimately the exception. The most impressive practical effect in the film is a character named Edward, a massive troll who starts out as the Grand High Witch’s slave and ultimately morphs into a hero with a heart of gold. Edward is incredibly well-realized thanks to a large practical monster suit (worn by Derek Mears!) and an animatronic head, and he’s the sort of character who would no doubt have been entirely computer-generated in the hands of most other filmmakers. After all, how many post-2010 studio movies have in them a full-on monster character who’s almost entirely practical?

The film’s various creatures were designed by Mike Elizalde’s Spectral Motion, and the team was (naturally) mostly tasked with creating different witches to fill out the world. Wirkola and the makeup artists clearly had a whole lot of fun bringing their own unique witches to the screen, with many of them looking more like Cenobites from the Hellraiser franchise than any witches we’ve ever seen in pop culture before. The film’s standout set-piece sees witches from all around the world gathering under the Blood Moon for the batshit crazy final act, wherein Hansel, Gretel and friends massacre a wide array of witches. The crowd is filled out with everything from a witch with a massive tumor on her neck to Siamese twins fused together at the back, and though they don’t all get a whole lot of screen-time to shine, the diversity of the designs is something to behold. And yes, of course the Siamese twins are gruesomely separated by shotgun blasts to their joining flesh. It’s that kinda movie.

The high-energy, fast-paced nature of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is particularly driven home by the various fight scenes, with David Leitch (John Wick) serving as the stunt coordinator. The hard-hitting fights, of which there are many throughout the movie, are incredibly fun to watch, and the film is book-ended with battles that take place in the iconic candy house from the classic fairytale versions of the story – the opening sequence features the house in all its delicious glory, while the final battle brings us back into the house in a withered, less-than-tasty state of decay. When fists are flying, bullets are being fired and blood is being spilled, Witch Hunters is a blast – thankfully, that’s most of the time.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is the kind of movie where everyone was having fun and that’s conveyed on screen, and in the end, the downsides ultimately take a back-seat to the fact that you’re just having a great time watching all the high-energy madness play out. Ending with a tease of the witch hunters traveling outside the woods to hunt other witches in other parts of the world, Witch Hunters is also the kind of movie that probably should’ve spawned a couple sequels and provided Tommy Wirkola with a whole lot more work in Hollywood. Alas, Wirkola’s work hasn’t been seen on the big screen here in America since. And as we’ve already touched upon, a sequel to Witch Hunters was never able to materialize – with or without him.

MGM/Paramount’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and MGM/Orion’s Gretel & Hansel are two vastly different takes on the same source material, reflecting how malleable the horror genre truly is. In less than 10 years, the classic fairytale has been turned into a silly action-horror movie and a serious arthouse horror film, and I’m just happy that we’re living in a world where we can have our cake and eat it too. Watching the two movies back-to-back, they also paint a pretty clear picture of how much the horror genre has changed in the past seven years alone. It’s hard to imagine Hansel & Gretel getting the arthouse treatment back in 2013, and it’s equally hard to imagine a movie like Witch Hunters being released into theaters in 2020.

But the beauty of the horror genre is that we get to have it all.

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

Editorials

‘The Fog’ 19 Years Later: There’s a Reason You Don’t Remember This John Carpenter Remake

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The Fog remake
Pictured: 'The Fog' (2005)

John Carpenter’s illustrious catalog of horror and non-horror classics has already seen three remakes (Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, and this column’s focus), with at least one more kinda-sorta confirmed on the way (Escape from New York). If you consider 2011’s The Thing enough of a remake, notch another on the bedpost. It makes sense; Carpenter turned his no-bullshit attitude into a masterful filmmaking style, and those listed titles harbor nostalgic admiration. We’re probably closer than we think to seeing Bryan Fuller’s Christine remake for Blumhouse or a contemporary They Live, while Dwayne Johnson’s Big Trouble in Little China sequel project fades away. Imagine Julia Ducournau’s Christine should Fuller exit, or what about if James Gunn booked a brief horror vacation away from the DCEU for his take on They Live?

Carpenter’s brand of down-and-dirty storytelling mixed with societal commentaries make his works perfect for generational updates, but they can’t all be winners.

Take 2005’s woefully tragic The Fog, for example.

Rupert Wainwright’s disastrously shallow remake lacks the finesse of even a crusty barnacle attached to the underbelly of Carpenter’s original. During a period of horror cinema inundated by remakes, The Fog asserts itself as one of the worst. The 2000s had a very “show, don’t tell” approach to horror filmmaking and leaned on grisly violence popularized by Saw, all exploited in their lowest forms throughout The Fog. Bless both Carpenter and the late Debra Hill for serving as producers, but Wainwright and writer Cooper Layne do their salty source shanty zero justice.


The Approach

‘The Fog’ (1980)

Carpenter’s The Fog is successful because of the auteur’s influence. Between his stronger emphasis on churchly greed, eerie musical score, and abilities as a simplistic yet impactful visionary, viewers get plenty of “bang for their buck” in 90 minutes. Wainwright doesn’t possess those qualities and relies on archaic horror templates without any investment. In an era where computer graphics were still advancing, and some producers only valued horror as gory inserts within a lax narrative, Wainwright’s direction equates to background noise. There’s nothing spectacular or signature about the filmmaker’s approach, as recyclable as the plethora of 2000s horror films plagued by the same churned-out doldrums.

Smallville heartthrob Tom Welling follows in the footsteps of fellow WB/CW stars like Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki to shepherd his own horror remake, playing Tom Atkins’ role of fisherman Nick Castle. He’s a descendant of Norman Castle, one of the founding fathers of Antonio Island, which is located off the Oregon coast. It’s been over 100 years since the island’s bustling Antonio Bay community was established, and to celebrate an upcoming anniversary, a statue is commissioned that displays its founders as a dedication to their contributions. Mayor Tom Malone (Kenneth Welsh) wants everything to be perfect, but little does he know Antonio Bay is about to have an undead problem to confront when a mysterious fog rolls in thick as sauna steam.

The bones of The Fog are all there, but both needlessly overcomplicated and disparagingly unkempt. Carpenter introduces his film with an eerie ghost story told around a campfire that becomes a grave truth for Antonio Bay — Layne’s remake screenplay does backflips to try and explain the unexplainable. Nick’s charter fishing vessel unleashes the curse when second-mate Spooner (DeRay Davis) rips open a burlap bag concealing curse items with the boat’s anchor because the film doesn’t trust audience comprehension past any viewer’s eyesight. One of the biggest scourges upon 2000s horror cinema was creators believing their audiences were as dumb as algae-covered rocks, causing them to spell the obvious out in even more blatant and less captivating methods.


Does It Work?

The Fog remake carpenter

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The adjustments Wainwright oversees in 2005’s remix are a bungle of what out-of-touch producers presumed horror fans wanted to see at the time. Carpenter’s quaint coastal atmosphere is eradicated by Spooner’s Girls Gone Wild behavior or the need to belabor flashbacks that lay out every grim detail about Captain Blake (Rade Šerbedžija) and his lepers. Antonio Island’s tainted history is still prevalent as a driving force behind the weather-based haunting, but where Carpenter leaves us to imagine the atrocities founding fathers committed, Wainwright and Layne lean on time jumps that detract from overall moods for cheap betrayal thrills. The remake retains less reflection, whereas Carpenter’s original better depicts a town reckoning with its horrifying heritage — an example of hollow vengeance versus frightening introspection.

Maggie Grace co-stars in Jamie Lee Curtis’ hitchhiker role, except she’s no longer affable nomad Elizabeth Solley; she’s Kathy Williams’ (Sara Botsford) daughter, Elizabeth Williams. Her ties to Antonio Bay are supposed to represent how we can’t escape our fates, fair enough. What’s unfortunate is Layne’s need to shoehorn relationship drama because she’s (apparently) the love of Nick’s life despite his handful of hookups with KAB radio DJ Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair) while Elizabeth fled her hometown for six months — a love triangle situation that adds no special sauce and is practically forgotten. Carpenter is fantastic when letting his characters exist without bogging their arcs with fifty reasons why they’re exactly where they are in any given scene. Wainwright is no mimic, nor does his film’s desire to tangle characters together as friends, lovers, or family members add further intrigue. If anything, it adversely tanks character development because there’s no resident we intimately care about.

Which brings us to the “fog” of it all. Carpenter’s maggot-ridden swashbucklers from the deep are memorable and creepy, while Wainwright pulls his haunted visuals from a grab-bag. Sometimes, they’re atrocious see-through animations made of mist — other times, indiscriminately human entities. One victim contracts leprosy as his punishment, another fried to ash upon touch, and yet another is dragged underwater by invisible hands — there’s zero continuity to Wainwright’s justifiably antagonistic forces. They become a Mad Libs gaggle of props fitting whatever scare-of-the-hour The Fog decides is necessary at that moment, none of which ever collaborate in unison. That includes Captain Blake’s parting climax, in which he abandons his group’s attack on Antonio Bay because he claims Elizabeth as his ghost wife after it’s clear she’s the spitting image of Blake’s 1870s lover [insert seventy thousand question marks].


The Result

The Fog remake tom welling

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The Fog remake is everything I despise about thoughtless horror outputs rolled into a briny clump of seaweed and misbegotten reinventions. It’s hardly scary, unable to let audiences invest in atmospheric spookiness, and so wildly incompetent. Each scene gets progressively worse, starting with the reveal of evil personal belongings stamped with identifiable “Hallmarks” that become pieces of a puzzle that never gets finished. Carpenter makes you feel the offshore breeze rolling in with his fog, sending chills up your spine as these scurvy-soaked scoundrels start stabbing and hooking Antonio Bay residents. Wainwright doesn’t ever grasp what his iteration of Blake’s demons should look like or how they should cause havoc, so he starts throwing basic horror visuals at the screen out of desperation.

Revolution Studios’ The Fog downgrade sinks thanks to primarily messy effects, hampered by the early millennium’s digital capabilities. That’s not exclusive to awful ghost illustrations that look like someone just decreased the “Transparency” slider in Photoshop. The fog, the TITULAR FOG, doesn’t even hold up to Demon Wind standards (in which the wind is essentially fog, roll with it). Wainwright and his team brainstorm ideas that sound rad on paper — an older woman gets barbecued, a ghost outline appears in fog like Imhotep’s sandstorm face, a younger woman is attacked by seaweed — but execution almost exclusively whiffs. The remake’s drunkard generalization of Father Malone (which is such a slap in the face to Hal Holbrook’s fantastic original performance) should meet an epic death when Captain Blake levitates glass shards as a containment circle, but three pieces fly through Malone’s body, and it’s over. That’s the level of SFX disappointment that festers throughout 2005’s The Fog, all buildup with no reward.

The film’s finale feels like a prank; the rest of the conflict’s resolution is lost at sea. Carpenter’s much heavier scolds against organized religion’s dirty dealings help give his film an identity down to the glimmering golden cross, while Wainwright goes as generic as they come and abandons ship when the well runs dry. Nothing justifies the kind of conceptual excitement that comes along with worthwhile remakes, whether that’s copycat role replications (I love Selma Blair, but her Stevie doesn’t match Adrienne Barbeau’s presence) or storytelling reductions that choose numbing violence over folkloric sensations of dread. We love a horror movie that’s critical of early America’s disgusting colonization tactics, but The Fog doesn’t know how to turn those frustrations into a compelling genre production. Whatever’s kept from the original holds no candle to Carpenter’s version, and whatever’s added — like Nick and Elizabeth’s awkward shower sex scene set to softcore porno music — brings nothing of value.


The Lesson

‘The Fog’ (2005)

Just because your remake starts with a banger like Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging” doesn’t mean the film itself is a banger. There’s no world where I’d recommend Wainwright’s The Fog over Carpenter’s titanically superior original, and I say that as a leading Aughts horror remake champion. It’s another Nu-Horror approach that strips away commentary crucial to the plot’s intrigue since all Layne musters is a non-creepy and waterlogged story that feels like an unwieldy CW episode — not meant as a compliment. Not even the chiseled beauty of an early 2000s Tom Welling in a wool turtleneck can save this travesty from becoming another forgotten wreck.

So what did we learn?

● Not all CW figureheads have a hit horror remake in their blood.

● Less is so often more when it comes to horror movies, as long as you’re selling scares and confidently telling a story within your means.

● Some movies from the 2000s horror era will always suffer thanks to dodgy digital effects because while it was the shiny new toy everyone wanted to play with, golly, the technology was rough to start.

● Horror fans can be easy to please, but they’re also first to call out your bullshit — get out of here with these ghosts and their inability to pick a lane.

Wainwright’s film never knows what kind of horror movie it wants to be, and that’s the kill shot. Is it a slasher flick? Zombie movie? A large-scale haunted house blueprint? There’s never any indication that Wainwright or his screenwriter conceptualize a path forward, so they barrel on, praying there’s enough horror familiarity to appease the masses. There isn’t, it’s a boneheaded slog, and that’s that. Horror fans deserve better than to be fed the equivalent of table scraps for 100 minutes. To each their own and all, but now that I’ve finally seen 2005’s The Fog, the only times I’ll think about this movie again will be if someone interacts with my Letterboxd post.

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