Director Oz Perkins puts a grimmer spin on the famous German fairy tale in the new trailer for his upcoming horror movie, Gretel & Hansel. With so many classic European folk stories in the public domain, Hollywood had a field day re-imagining them back in the early 2010s. Some of those adaptations leaned more into their source material's horror elements than others, like Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood and even Tommy Wirkola's Hansel & Gretel "sequel", Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. By comparison, Perkins' Gretel & Hansel is a more traditional rendition of the Brothers Grimm's dark fantasy, albeit one that plays up its creepiest aspects.
IT's Sophia Lillis stars in Gretel & Hansel as Gretel, a sixteen-year old girl who lives in a "distant fairy tale countryside" (per the film's synopsis) with her eight-year old brother Hansel (Sam Leakey). Orion Pictures dropped a teaser trailer for the film last September, highlighting its chilling visuals and offering a sneak peek at Alice Krige (Star Trek: First Contact, Silent Hill) as the powerful witch that Gretel and Hansel cross paths with while searching for work and food in the woods one day. Now, with the movie's release just four weeks away, its full-length trailer has arrived.
The official trailer for Gretel & Hansel is now online and will likely screen with The Grudge reboot in theaters, beginning this weekend. You can check it out in the space below.
Visually, Gretel & Hansel continues to impress thanks to the efforts of Perkins and his DP Galo Oilvares (a cinematography collaborator on Roma). The story by Perkins and his cowriter Rob Hayes looks more or less the same as the centuries-old tale everyone already knows, but with a few twists thrown in for good measure. Specifically, the trailer shows Gretel "bonding" with the witch, as the latter suggests Gretel might possess some disturbing supernatural abilities of her own. The implication is Gretel and Hansel will be more of a dark coming of age narrative about Lillis' character, which also explains why the original fairy tale's title has been switched around to emphasize Gretel's importance over her brother.
January horror movies aren't exactly known for being good, so the hope is Gretel & Hansel will buck that trend and give audiences something that's both decent and scary to enjoy as the new decade gets fully underway. Perkins, for his part, hasn't broken out as a horror director the way some of his peers (Robert Eggers comes to mind) have in recent years, and his first two movies (The Blackcoat's Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) were praised for their slow-burn stylishness, but didn't leave much of an impression on critics beyond that. We will see if third time's the charm for him when Gretel & Hansel opens later this month.
Source: Orion Pictures
