Hansel and Gretel

• This was Robert Eggers' first film as a director, made roughly eight years before The Witch (2015) and well before he transitioned into film full-time in 2009 after years working as a New York theater and production-and-costume designer.
• Eggers cast his own mother, Kelly Eggers, as the witch. The children, Hansel and Gretel, were played by Luke Allison and Isabella Pease.
• It runs just under 30 minutes and is shot entirely as a black-and-white silent film, using dialogue and transition title cards plus a slower frame rate to mimic the look of silent-era horror and German Expressionism, with a soundtrack heavy on skittering violins.
• The short went missing for years and was effectively lost until the YouTube channel Famous First Films posted it online in April 2022, putting Eggers' debut back in front of fans for the first time.
• Eggers' background as a designer shows in every frame, the same obsession with period-accurate production design and costume that he'd later push to extremes on The Lighthouse and Nosferatu.
• He followed it with a companion short, an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart (2008), shot by Jarin Blaschke, the cinematographer who'd go on to shoot every one of Eggers' features.

Watch the witch's introduction and you're already watching The Witch. The extreme close-ups and the way Eggers frames her as pure shadowy menace are the seed of the rural dread he'd weaponize in 2015, right down to imagery that prefigures Thomasin signing the devil's book. This isn't juvenilia you grade on a curve, it's a director announcing the exact thing he'd spend a career perfecting.

Choosing silent black-and-white isn't nostalgia, it's a thesis. By stripping out spoken dialogue and leaning on title cards and a slower frame rate, Eggers forces the horror into composition and shadow rather than gore or jump scares, betting that wordless dread hits harder than anything the budget could buy. The whole short reads as an argument that the oldest cinematic grammar is still the scariest.

The fairy tale was always a story about hunger, and Eggers treats it as one. Stripped to abandonment, starvation, and a predator who feeds on children, his version restores the Grimm cruelty that decades of sanitized retellings sanded off, which is exactly why a horror crowd recognizes him as one of their own from frame one.

Before The Witch made him a name, Robert Eggers carved out his debut here: a half-hour silent retelling of the Brothers Grimm tale, shot in stark black and white and stitched together with title cards. Two children, abandoned to the woods, follow a trail of crumbs to a house that wants them, and a witch who means to fatten and eat them. Eggers strips the story to its cruel bones, the hunger and the dark, and lets shadow do the talking long before anyone gets close enough to scream.