Who's Hungry? (una revisión de Hansel y Gretel)
2009 · 5m · Estados Unidos
Directed by David Ochs
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
An updated, slightly gore retelling of the Hansel and Gretel tale by the Brothers Grimm.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2009 gore retelling of a fairy tale sounds like the kind of thing everyone's already done, but Ochs actually finds the subversive marrow in the premise — the real horror isn't the witch, it's the hunger, the desperation, the question of who's actually predatory. This is the kind of dark comedy that makes you uncomfortable in the right way, the way consensus-chasing shorts never do.
Ochs positions himself within a lineage of revisionist horror folklore that runs from Perrault through contemporary splatter aesthetics, but the film's formal control — how it manages tonal whiplash between the grotesque and the comedic — is what separates careful interpretation from mere provocation. The editing sustains that precarious balance without ever winking at the audience.
The crucial move here is the decision to keep the violence visceral but almost matter-of-fact, letting the sound design do the heavy lifting rather than luxuriating in gore — it's the restraint that makes the horror actually land, and on a five-minute budget, that economy of gesture is what transforms a retelling into something that sticks.