Holda is the main antagonist of the 2020 horror film Gretel and Hansel which is based on the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm. She is the film's verison of the candy witch.
Biography[]
Holda was an ordinary woman who had children, one was a young girl with a pink cap. When she became ill, Holda's husband saw an enchantress to cure her.
The enchantress does so, but at the cost of her gaining black magic. The powers gave her the ability to look into the future. After many villagers sought her for her predictions, the girl began killing them, including her father. Enraged, Holda attempted to abandon her in the woods, but she still lingered in her mind.
When she realized that she also had some leaning towards black magic, her daughter offered to share her powers with her if she were to give in to the darkness. She complies by killing and eating her other children. From there, she takes the form of an elderly woman to lure abandoned children into her house with enchanted body parts disguised as food, after which she kills and eats them to empower her black magic.
Upon meeting Gretel and Hansel, she allows the two to work for her in return for their stay and somehow senses Gretel's powers deciding to make her her apprentice. She takes some of Hansel's hair and entices him. Slowly, he becomes suspicious of her true intentions before seemingly disappearing after Gretel makes him leave. After Gretel failed to poison her, Holda takes her to a room downstairs of the house where she reveals her true form and binds Gretel's hands to a table before hypnotizing Hansel into climbing a ladder into a fire pit. Gretel uses her witchcraft to cause a magic satff to pin her to the wall getting decapitated by it. Her body is then burned by the flames of the fire pit.