Before Longlegs, Oz Perkins' Gretel & Hansel gave us unforgettable fairy tale terror

Osgood “Oz” Perkins seems on the verge of a particular kind of cinematic explosion. The director of films like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives in the House has long been a favorite among horror devotees, but with Longlegs, his latest feature starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, Perkins feels poised for a new breakthrough. Driven by an immense wave of buzz and an expertly woven marketing campaign from its distributor, the white-hot Neon, Longlegs feels like the film that will propel Perkins into the upper echelon of horror directors, a place where he can be assured bigger and bigger mainstream audiences will turn up for future releases.

It’s an encouraging thing for Perkins fans, particularly when you consider the kinds of movies he’s directed so far: Deeply atmospheric, dread-inducing pieces of extraordinary tonal control that harness something primal in viewers even as they push forward through some combination of psychological gestures and occasional dream logic. Perkins is not, for all his rising mainstream appeal, necessarily concerned with the most straightforward story paths, and for proof, you need only look to his previous feature, the nightmarish and spellbinding fairy tale adaptation Gretel & Hansel.

Released in January of 2020 and starring Sophia Lillis as Gretel and Alice Krige as the evil Witch known as Holda, Gretel & Hansel produced a respectable box office for a horror film of its size, earning roughly four times its reported budget and debuting to mostly positive (though still mixed) reviews. Like Perkins’ other films, it received praise for its atmosphere and tone, while some reviews were less enthusiastic about a story they saw as underdeveloped and a pace they deemed too slow. For The AV Club’s part, critic Katie Rife gave the film a “B” and established the leisurely pace and slow-burning dread as a feature, not a bug, noting that “the appeal lies in the mesmerizing tone that’s established early in the film and lingers through the end credits.”

When I first saw Gretel & Hansel four years ago, I would have probably agreed with a lot of these criticisms without a second thought. The atmosphere Perkins establishes, helped along by cinematographer Galo Olivares, composer Robin Coudert, and production designer Jeremy Reed, is both mesmeric and instantaneous, but the plot, a riff on the Hansel & Gretel fairy tale, certainly takes its time, to the point that huge chunks of the film pass by without any major movement at all. Once those children get inside the witch’s house, it could almost be a stage play, a series of unnerving incidents that eventually build to a conclusion.

But when I revisited the film in anticipation of Longlegs, I found something more than a beautiful, dread-inducing tone poem. In fact, I’m pretty sure I found the keystone to Perkins’ body of work so far, as well as an important piece of insight into a certain kind of tonal horror that I’ve come to love in my years with the genre. It all hinges on a particular line that Holda the Witch utters to the young Gretel as she’s trying to teach her the ways of magic:

“Think less, my pretty, and know more.”

Gretel, when we meet her, is certainly a thinker, an agile mind pouring out its observations and understanding of the world through Lillis’ earnest eyes. The first thing we see Gretel do is go for a job interview with a local landowner, where she is swiftly rebuked for her discussion of broken societal systems, then storms off when the lecherous old man dares ask about her virginity. Her mother, broken by grief over the loss of her husband, encourages her to throw herself at the mercy of the old systems of power, but Gretel is not willing to compromise, nor is she willing to risk the wellbeing of her little brother Hansel (Sam Leakey). It’s not just that Gretel sees the way the world works. It’s that she sees the ways in which she can try to change it.

That determination, coupled with a kind of second sight that imbues her with certain knowledge she can’t quite explain, eventually leads Gretel and her brother to the home of Holda, a woman with black fingertips and a neverending buffet of delicious food that seems to emerge from nowhere at all. Hansel, half Gretel’s age, is immediately comforted and seduced by the food and the warmth and the kindness of the old woman, but Gretel’s intuitiveness keeps her alert and suspicious, particularly as Holda starts to take a particular interest in her gifts.

This patient, eerie table-setting makes up the first half of the film’s 87-minute runtime, and the sheer force of filmmaking craft sweeps us along as Gretel & Hansel slowly unfolds what it’s really about. Perkins’ forest is in perpetual twilight, halfway between summer and autumn, half-dead but half-alive too, a liminal space of gold and green. When the children finally come upon the witch’s house and its companion shed, the dwelling emerges as a brutalist black blade cutting through the woods, all angles ornamented by carvings that call to mind vaguely human shapes. Inside, the walls are painted with images of the forest outside, black silhouettes of wolves and trees.

This is a shadow world, both in composition and in spirit, and Perkins takes full advantage, visually evoking everything from Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain to Yershov and Kropachyov’s Soviet supernatural classic Viy. It’s a world meant to evoke transition, passage, dark journeys with potential change (and potential hope) lying at the end.

Once inside the witch’s house, that same sense of shadowy transition is present, but with it is a Kubrickian sense of space and movement. The house is simultaneously cramped and vast, intimate and cold, its shadows rising and falling at the whim of sickly candle flames and the occasional intrusion of golden morning light. Holda (portrayed with Bergmanian intensity by Krige) seems to exist everywhere at once; sometimes the frail old women stews over a nest of dried herbs, sometimes she lurks in the shade in the twilight silently watching Hansel learn to chop wood. It all lends the film a sense of dread and quiet, simmering tension, helped along by Holda’s constant recitation of knowing observations (“Women often know things they’re not supposed to,” she says with a smirk) and Gretel’s fervent search for answers amid the shadows of the house.

It’s not hard to see where Perkins and writer Rob Hayes are going with this. Gretel’s wearing a white dress the first time we see her, while Holda appears in black, and to really drive the point home the girl gets her period while sleeping in one of the witch’s beds. What we’re witnessing is a folkloric confrontation between Maiden and Crone, with the woman Gretel may or may not become existing in a hypothetical space between. Holda, naturally, wants Gretel to be like her, to follow in her black footsteps and seize the power the men Out There in the wider world don’t want her to have. Gretel is drawn to the power and, more than that, understands it. She feels something on an intuitive level that tells her she too can break the oppressive social roles she’s so longed to escape, but at the same time she’s terrified to do it exactly like Holda, because she doesn’t want to become that particular breed of child-eating (spoilers for a centuries-old story, I guess) crone.

So, how does this resolve? Well, in the words of the story: “Think less, my pretty, and know more.”

Perkins and Hayes, even when they’re playing by certain fairy tale rules, are not eager to explain everything. The formula is there, yes, but the film deliberately slows itself down whenever those expecting the traditional narrative think things should be speeding up. Instead of showing us a scheming, wily and virtuous young woman trying to beat an old witch, it shows us that same young woman wanting to be a witch herself, if not exactly the same kind of witch. We linger in that space for a long time until the story finally resolves itself in the closing minutes, and while it would have been quite easy for Gretel & Hansel to lean into a Witchy Girlboss vibe through its exploration of gender roles and emerging womanhood, it refuses to be that simple. Gretel’s rise into her own power happens more intuitively and less narratively, more magical thinking than magical system. It helps that we’ve got Lillis and Krige’s wonderful performances to carry us through certain more abstract (though nevertheless frightening) sequences along the way, but in the end the film still refuses to clarify every plot point, or answer every question.

This, I’d argue in opposition to all those earlier assessments, is also a feature of Gretel & Hansel, not a bug. In fact, it’s the feature. It’s the embodiment of the “think less, know more” theme informing the characters, their magic, and more importantly, Oz Perkins’ larger body of work. We talk about fear of the unknown in horror quite a lot, the idea that there are things lurking under the surface of this world that would drive us mad, but this is not that kind of horror. This is horror about people who can see the unknown, touch it, manipulate it, yet still don’t have a rational explanation for why. Gretel & Hansel is not about the terror of knowing something, but the terror of knowing something without so much as a thought, and then contending with what that knowledge means for you. Feeling like you’re losing control of your own mind and your own body is, of course, a powerful metaphor for adolescence, but it’s also a universally potent horror device. If you know you can kill someone with a thought, but you don’t know why, things can get very scary, very fast. This is the particular terror that Perkins conjures in Gretel & Hansel, birthed from the same sense of magical thinking and dreamy discovery that lurks in his other horror films.