With this weekend’s Gretel & Hansel, Orion Pictures puts a dark new spin on the classic Brothers Grimm fairytale.
The new take flips the script on the classic fairytale in a dark and twisted way, this time giving Gretel -played by IT: Chapter One‘s breakout star Sophia Lillis – the spotlight and focusing on her journey as a true coming-of-age tale with a unique and terrifying twist.
Director Osgood Perkins appeared as a guest on this week’s “The Boo Crew” podcast (Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, RSS) and tells us that Gretel’s story could be just the beginning.
“Without saying too much…my idea for it was to create our own fairytale world, our own fairytale universe,” Perkins tells Bloody’s podcast.
“I don’t wanna say Shrek, but you know how Shrek is all the fairytales, they all coexist, and you’re in that enchanted world? So, the idea is to suggest there isn’t just [this] one [place], there are entities all around and references to other fairytales,” he adds, “and people say things, and there are a couple of easter eggs in the movie that reference other older movies and things.
“The idea is that Gretel could certainly go forth from this movie and get into more trouble.”
Listen here and then continue below for more, with spoilers…
In fact, our very own William Bibbiani also spoke to Perkins, who talked about a specific sequence in the film that foreshadows the possibility of a fairytale universe. (Extreme Spoiler Warning.)
“So we introduced the idea of the huntsman, sort of just what you say, to subvert the huntsman in a way,” Perkins revealed. “To say here’s a guy who typically, because in fairytales typically the huntsman rescues everybody and is conveniently placed to rescue the people who can’t do it for themselves. The huntsman is obviously famously the person who cuts open the wolf and lets Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother out, and I wanted to say yes, here’s the huntsman. He is very impressive. And now he’s gone. He’s not our answer. He’s not the answer to anything for us. So in a sense, it was to introduce him solely for the purpose of then losing him.”
“Then the script came to me it was a much more sort of evolved… there was a lot more to that sequence and it started to feel like a skin flap of a bit, where we were diverging too much from the forward momentum,” adds Perkins, who explains his final intent with the scene. “So yeah, the idea is this. The idea is that in a fairytale, everything is potentially magical. Everything is potentially enchanted, right? So the idea to have someone who’s human or not, or a ghostly or not, or alive or dead or what, is to me… he’s just a soldier of enchantment. That was the way it was supposed to play.”
It would be incredibly exciting to see Lillis’ Gretel grow into the role and battle other horrific Grimm monsters from the wolf to Rumpelstiltskin. What say you?
Listen to the hour-long “Boo Crew” interview here…
Ep99 Available Now! The Boo Crew Follow the Breadcrumbs into the Woods with Writer, Director and Actor Oz Perkins! @GandHMovie #OzPerkins #horror @BDisgusting
(Episode links below)https://t.co/BmKAbcKX9T pic.twitter.com/GDL6aH6Cpj— The Boo Crew (@talesfromtheboo) January 28, 2020