If you’re familiar with the works of Osgood Perkins, the director of The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, then you probably know that his films are intensely stylized, thoughtful art house nightmares, filled with callbacks to resonant imagery from through the cultural landscape.
But, if you watch his new film Gretel and Hansel, you will also discover something rather unexpected: he’s been directly inspired by Super Mario Bros.
The scene in question finds Gretel, played by Sophia Lillis (It: Chapter One) and her little brother Hansel, played by Sam Leakey, lost in the woods and starving. With no food in sight, they decide to take a chance on eating some of the many mushrooms growing near their feet… mushrooms that look exactly like the power-ups in the original Super Mario Bros. video game!
“Yeah, they sure do,” Osgood Perkins told Bloody-Disgusting in a new interview, proving that you’re not reading too much into Gretel and Hansel if you make these unexpected connections.
“In fact you’re spot on in your acknowledgement.”
“I feel like there are certain things that are really pleasantly iconic and that can never be defeated. Certain things, certain design elements, certain ways of looking at things or ways of hearing things become indelible, and I feel like – as silly as it might sound – a lot of the initial Mario Bros. aesthetic is very indelible,” Perkins says.
“I feel like it’s the kind of thing that’s bled its way into so many artists’ things, and so yes, it was a happy ‘hats off’ to something that I feel like everybody, every single person sitting in the audience is going to recognize.”
Editor’s Note: The rest of this article contains very light spoilers.
As for the scene itself, well, it doesn’t go very well for young Gretel and Hansel, who – as one might imagine, after eating surreal Super Mario mushrooms – begin tripping their brains out. Which can be tricky for young actors, who (hopefully) don’t have much experience in that arena.
“You just go for it,” Sophia Lillis told Bloody-Disgusting about the mushrooms sequence. “And we did. I was a little nervous about that. I’ve never been high before. It was less being high and more of this other kind of weird hallucination thing, but yeah I was nervous for that.”
“He didn’t do much [to describe being ‘high’] and I don’t think he needed to do anything because, mostly I was just reacting to Sammy, who was also pretending to be high and it was the funniest thing to watch,” Lillis laughed. “So I was just fully reacting to him.”
You can watch the Super Mario Bros. sequence in Osgood Perkins’ excellent fairy tale nightmare Gretel and Hansel in theaters this weekend!