Interviews
[Interview] Osgood Perkins on Making ‘Gretel & Hansel’ a Horror Movie for a Younger Audience
Osgood Perkins is no stranger to the horror genre. Over the past five years he has delivered the soul-crushing satanist film The Blackcoat’s Daughter (review) and the somber ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (review). He now returns to us with Gretel & Hansel (review), an adaptation of the classic fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm.
Perkins’ films have never relied much on gore to emphasize the horror of his stories, and Gretel & Hansel is no different. Still, the PG-13 rating (or “Pussy 13” rating, as some of our more vocal commenters have dubbed it) for a film about a cannibalistic witch who eats children has given some people pause. This is a story that could easily go the gory route, but Perkins opted to make Gretel & Hansel accessible for children. Snow White: A Tale of Terror this ain’t, but where some PG-13 horror films were originally meant to be R and then cut down to be PG-13 (looking at you, Black Christmas), this was never the case with Gretel & Hansel. When asked why that was, Perkins replied:
“From the very beginning that’s what I wanted to do. Where’s Gremlins today? Where’s the thing for kids that’s just slightly too freaky that just sort of trusts kids to be able to take care of themselves and to be able to emerge out from the other side and there’s just not a lot of those. So yes, the idea was always to honor the younger audience.”
Lest you think this means that Gretel & Hansel won’t also work for older audiences, rest assured that this is not the case. This is yet another instance where a film may not be meant for a certain target audience (hardcore horror fans of a certain age), but that doesn’t mean that they still can’t enjoy it. What Perkins has crafted is a film that works well for more mature viewers, but asks younger ones to rise to the challenge and view it on the same level:
“The trick here is to make sure that the younger audience can hang with it and the gamble is that younger audiences want to be treated with a little bit more intelligence and want to be asked for some patience as opposed to just being given the lowest common denominator thing which, to me, feels like we’re trying to soothe the kids for a minute. I would rather just lift them up with a challenge.”
If you’re familiar with Perkins’ two previous films, you’ll know that he is a fan of leisurely pacing. Unlike those films, he didn’t write Gretel & Hansel (that honor would go to Rob Hayes), but the film still feels like a Perkins film, both from a visual and a narrative perspective. This is a bit puzzling, as you don’t often find many children’s movies that are paced as deliberately as Gretel & Hansel. That is where the film’s brief 87-minute runtime comes into play, but Perkins said he wasn’t worried about boring the audience, telling us:
“Worried? No. Aware? Yeah. We always had an eye on [the pacing] and always had an eye on running time. There’s so many components to succeeding with a movie for kids. There’s a lot that needs to be constantly considered. I feel like we didn’t make the movie overly complicated. We didn’t make the movie overly long. We put some fun into it. I feel like kids are going to say ‘Thanks for giving us a chance to watch something that’s a little bit hard for us.'”
Gretel & Hansel was released in theaters nationwide today.
Interviews
‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Director Michael Sarnoski on Brutal Violence and Reinventing the Legend
Michael Sarnoski (A Quiet Place: Day One, Pig) gives a darker spin on a classic ballad in The Death of Robin Hood, which sees a legendary outlaw confront his own violent legacy.
A24 releases the dark reimagining of the classic folk tale in theaters this Friday, June 19.
Hugh Jackman stars as a grizzled Robin Hood, who begins Sarnoski’s latest in a grim place of death and violence before a grave injury presents a rare chance at salvation.
In 13th-century grit and squalor, the violence in The Death of Robin Hood is especially brutal, setting up a stark contrast for the outlaw’s thematic journey in his final days. Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s release, writer-director Michael Sarnoski explained that the visceral brutality at the film’s outset was both a reflection of period authenticity and in service of Robin’s story.
“It’s always a little bit of both,” Sarnoski explains. “The initial idea for the movie was I wanted to humanize these characters from this old legend and really understand them. So, part of that is understanding the authenticity of the period and studying the brutality of the old ballads. Both things evolved at the same time, because then it became this story about this person who was grappling with their own legacy of violence and their own folklore.”
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
He continues, “It was a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing where it was like, ‘Okay, the authenticity is where we’re going to access the humanity.’ But then, through that, we also have to access how these people felt about that violence. And because of that, we really have to make that violence feel human and real and brutal and not Hollywood-ized at all.“
But don’t expect The Death of Robin Hood to be too beholden to period accuracy; the filmmaker never wanted to lose sight of its characters or their humanity. “I was more trying to capture, in my mind and soul, what it might have felt like to live at that time. When you’re steeped in nature and all of its brutality, but also all of its divinity and spirituality, what would that just feel like on a deeper soul level? A lot of the research was focused on just trying to capture that human side of existing back then.”
The Death of Robin Hood avoids retreading the familiar origin story of the outlaw and his Merry Men; the past is a distant memory steeped in blood for this iteration of Robin Hood. Save for Little John (Bill Skarsgård), very little calls back to the familiar folklore fixtures and iconography.
“It wasn’t straightforward,” Sarnoski says of his writing process and choosing which characters to incorporate. “It kind of happened organically. I knew I just wanted the pieces that I needed for that character, but then at the same time, I wanted to acknowledge that he’s grappling with what he believes his life was, and the violence of that life and of that time. But then at the same time, he’s also not a fully reliable narrator. He has been jaded for decades and has just been steeped in that violence. Even he and Little John especially aren’t 100% sure which of these things were stories and which were real in some way, because I think even in our own lives we have that, where our memories become these stories that we just tell each other.”
“I wanted to make sure that we’re doing some justice to that Robin Hood legend, and there are a lot of references to that. I wanted to use it sparingly and specifically, but then also acknowledge that no one in this world is 100% sure who this guy was, not even the guy himself.”
Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/A24
While Jackman commands the screen as the world-weary outlaw, it’s Murray Bartlett (“The Last of Us”, Opus) who steals scenes as the enigmatic leper standing vigil over the Priory.
Bartlett’s complex performance, buried under unrecognizable costuming and prosthetics, surprised even Sarnoski in more ways than one. “The initial surprise was finding such a great actor who was willing to completely disappear. And that takes a lot of ego death and bravery and excitement for the pure creative, emotional side, and also bravery in the performance side of, ‘You’re not going to have 90% of the tools that you usually use. You’re going to have to do this with your eyes, your voice, and just your physicality.’ So, I think just the surprise of finding someone who was like that was the feature, not the bug. He was so excited about that, and he found it very liberating.
“Then, it sounds kind of obvious, but the next surprise was just you write this character on the page, and you’re like, ‘Okay, he’s supposed to have this depth, he’s mysterious, but he’s also gentle, and he becomes this almost teacher.’ In your mind, you’re like, ‘Okay, I think this character can work.’ But then you see Murray embody it and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is so far beyond what I ever could have hoped for.’ And it’s so moving and so human in spite of all the limitations on the performance.”
Sarnoski notes this character acts as the ferryman, right on the cusp of life and death. That, along with the period, also informed the Leper’s look, “In those old monasteries, they had these orchard cemeteries that were also where they buried the body. It’s this place of graves and growth. He has subtly different outfits that he wears depending on if he’s ferryman or orchardman. There was a lot of thought that went into all of that.”
Credit: Aidan Monagha
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