Gretel & Hansel Director Teases Film Could Launch Shared Dark Fairytale Universe

The tale of Hansel and Gretel has been famous for centuries, thanks to the Brothers Grimm, with director of the upcoming Gretel & Hansel film Osgood Perkins recently teasing that this could merely be the beginning of a shared universe of horrifying interpretations of classic fairy tales. Given that the story features a witch who lives in the woods who wants to fatten up children to subsequently eat them, there’s an inherent terror in the storyline, though the whimsical nature of the concept has allowed various storytellers to lean into the more playful premise, while Gretel & Hansel aims to fully embrace the story’s horrors.

“Without saying too much…my idea for it was to create our own fairytale world, our own fairytale universe,” Perkins shared with Bloody Disgusting‘s The Boo Crew podcast. “I don’t wanna say Shrek, but you know how Shrek is all the fairy tales, 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 fairy tales.”

In the film, “A long time ago in a distant fairytale countryside, a young girl (Sophia Lillis, IT) leads her little brother (Sammy Leakey) into a dark wood in desperate search of food and work, only to stumble upon a nexus of terrifying evil.”

The filmmaker went on to tease that this could merely be the beginning of Gretel’s exploits, with the film featuring references to other iconic fairy tales that could potentially be explored further in subsequent films.

“People say things, and there are a couple of easter eggs in the movie that reference other older movies and things,” Perkins pointed out. “The idea is that Gretel could certainly go forth from this movie and get into more trouble.”

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has helped popularize the notion of shared universes, horror has a long history of finding new ways to bring together iconic characters. Thanks to films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and a number of adventures in which Abbott and Costello collided with horror figures, the shared universe was utilized as far back as the ’40s. Thanks to New Line Cinema owning both Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, audiences saw them go head to head in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, while 20th Century Fox delivered multiple films featuring crossovers between the Alien and Predator franchises.

Gretel & Hansel lands in theaters this Friday.

Would you like to see this franchise continue with more fairytale horrors? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!