YMMV / Hansel and Gretel (1893)

• Nausea Fuel: Richard Jones' reimagining of the show has a particular scene where the Witch takes every dessert in her kitchen and blends them into a messy mush, then force feeds it to Hansel through a funnel and pipe. While it's Played for Laughs, it certainly isn't a pretty sight.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • When the kids are calling out, voices seem to answer back.
    Hansel: WHO'S THEREEEEE??
    Echo: You there! There!
    Gretel: Is someone there?
    Echo: Where? Here!
  • While the Witch is more of a Faux Affably Evil Large Ham than a truly scary villain, she can still be frightening in her "Hocus pocus" chant, where she casts a spell on Hansel and Gretel so they can't move, then forces Hansel to walk into a cage.
  • In the 1981 studio film version, the Witch looks like an ordinary old woman at first, but when she casts her spell on Hansel and Gretel, her appearance turns more grotesque with each flash of her wand, until her true form is revealed as a hideous, wild-haired, inhumanly tall hag, and then she takes the children into her house, which has a bleak interior that looks like a mad scientist's lab.
  • The Richard Jones productions are quite well-known for their grotesque and scary imagery. The angels are now creepy-looking chefs and anthropomorphic trees, the Witch is an obese Gonk who essentially turns children into gingerbread corpses (with Gretel screaming in horror when she finds the Witch's closet flooded with them), and the entrance to her house now takes the form of a giant human mouth against a red, fleshy backdrop.
  • Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's Covent Garden production is less dark than the Richard Jones version as a whole, but in the Witch's house, her previous child victims aren't gingerbread yet – they're actual corpses, frozen in a meat locker and waiting to be baked into gingerbread. Fortunately, they all come back to life when the Witch dies in the end.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Opera Australia's 1992 filmed production portrays "Mother" as Hansel and Gretel's stepmother, and besides the stress of hunger, it implies that the tension between her and the children stems from the fact that she's still adjusting to parenthood while they're still grieving for their Missing Mom. (Although she's still less wicked and more loving than the stepmother of the fairy tale.) During the Dream Pantomime, Hansel and Gretel dream of a happy picnic with their father and birth mother, but then are forced to relive their birth mother's death and cry in their father's arms as the angels take her to heaven.
  • The restoring of all the gingerbread children to life can evoke Tears of Joy, as can Hansel and Gretel's reunion with their parents in the end.
• Values Dissonance: The 19th-century mother's threats of corporal punishment toward Hansel and Gretel, and the father's threatening her with a broomstick when he learns that she sent the children into the dangerous woods. Modern English-language productions usually keep the former (it's a plot point that while chasing the children to spank them, the mother knocks over the jug of milk and leaves the family with nothing for dinner), but leave out the latter unless it's a Darker and Edgier production.

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