Having scared up substantial interest with their short film Mama, Andrés and Barbara Muschietti have managed to expand the horror story into an even scarier full-fledged feature.  The picture centers on two young sisters (Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse) who are discovered alive and well in the woods after disappearing five years earlier.  When their uncle (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) bring the girls home to raise, they discover that something else has traveled home with them.  For more on the film, here are four clips.During a recent video interview, the Muschietti siblings talked about the process of taking the core concept of the Mama short and developing it into a feature-length film, drawing inspiration from nature in its most brutal and most loving aspects (including the essential concept of imprinting in young animals and children) and revealed that the eventual Blu-ray could have up to forty minutes of deleted scenes.  Hit the jump to watch our video interview with the Muschiettis for Mama, opening January 18th.Here’s the official synopsis for Mama:

Guillermo del Toro presents Mama, a supernatural thriller that tells the haunting tale of two little girls who disappeared into the woods the day that their parents were killed.  When they are rescued years later and begin a new life, they find that someone or something still wants to come tuck them in at night.

Five years ago, sisters Victoria and Lilly vanished from their suburban neighborhood without a trace.  Since then, their Uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain), have been madly searching for them.  But when, incredibly, the kids are found alive in a decrepit cabin, the couple wonders if the girls are the only guests they have welcomed into their home.

As Annabel tries to introduce the children to a normal life, she grows convinced of an evil presence in their house.  Are the sisters experiencing traumatic stress, or is a ghost coming to visit them?  How did the broken girls survive those years all alone?  As she answers these disturbing questions, the new mother will find that the whispers she hears at bedtime are coming from the lips of a deadly presence.

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