Movies
Body Parts Hang in ‘Don’t Let Him In’ Promo Trailer and Art
First revealed back at the AFM last November, we just now got our hands on the sales promo and fresh art for Imagination Worldwide’s Don’t Let Him In, a new horror flick from director Kelly Smith being sold at this week’s Cannes market.
Starring Sophie Linfield (Football Factory), Sam Hazeldine (The Wolfman), and Gordon Alexander (Sucker Punch), “What if you invited a serial killer on holiday?
Handsome, charming, and arrogant, Tristan has picked up Mandy for a hot one-night stand. The love-struck girl then invites him to a rural weekend getaway with her brother, Calvin, and his girlfriend, Paige, an emergency room nurse. Tristan’s only too happy to accept because he has secrets and needs to get out of town. Once out in the country, the group hear of a sadistic serial killer. Dubbed the “Tree Surgeon”, the psychopath hangs the severed body parts of his victims in trees. Soon enough, the foursome encounter delirious Shawn, half-dead with his stomach slashed open. He claims to be an innocent hitchhiker, but then the killing starts.
Suspicion among the weekenders spirals into paranoia, and a punishing battle for survival begins.”
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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