I’ll take pretty much any excuse I can to post this video, but today I have a good one: the writer/director behind Død Snø (the movie this clip comes from, which opens in June) has a new project in the works.

Tommy Wirkola has an idea: “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.” Wirkola pitched Will Ferrell’s production company on the idea of exploring how things played out for the poor siblings 15 years after that whole gingerbread house incident. Simply put, they’re now specialized bounty hunters looking to put down the cackling black-hat set.

“The idea is, they’ve grown up and they hunt witches,” Adam McKay said. “It’s a hybrid sort of old-timey feeling, yet there’s pump-action shotguns. Modern technology but in an old style.  We heard it and we were just like, ‘That’s a freakin’ franchise! You could make three of those!’” [Yahoo]

Okay, settle down, spaz.  In the original, Hansel and Gretel burned the witch alive in an oven.  But if I know anything about bounty hunters, it’s that the worst thing they do to anyone is shoot them with mace or paintball guns.  Oh, and they hate black people. So basically, this is a modernized version of a germanic fairy tale in which the protagonists burn people in ovens and hate black people.  Talk about The Reader all over again.

Død Snø, aka Dead Snow, a Norwegian film about Nazi zombies and the møøse who bit their sister, has been picked up by IFC Films. They plan a theatrical release later this year.  I know I like to complain about zombies as a tired concept a lot, but that’s mainly because George Romero keeps trying to pitch them as a timely metaphor.  The makers of Dead Snow clearly realize that zombies are much more effective as a metaphor for a guy getting blood puked on his face, or cutting off his own arm with a chainsaw.  That kind of symbolism is as old as time.  Older, even.