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.
