Movies
The Tale Of Two Unused ‘Super 8’ Posters
Right before Super 8 hit theatres, a Drew Struzan-like poster for the film hit the web. It turned out to be fan-made, but it managed to capture Super 8‘s nostalgic whimsy pretty nicely and got a lot of attention.
When it was discovered that it was fake, I think a lot of people – myself included – wondered why the studio hadn’t made classic poster art for the Amblin flick and now we have an answer: they did.
According to Daniel Skubal, him and his girlfriend, Veronica LaPage, were asked by Bad Robot to come up with a poster design for the film, which sadly did not end up getting used – there doesn’t seem to be any sour grapes between the artists and the studio, though. You can read the full story here and check out the art after the break. While I like the two concept posters, I actually prefer the fan-made one (I mean, I guess these are technically fan-made, too). They’re very well done, but don’t capture the essence of the film and just seem like fully colored storyboards. That’s not the artists’ fault, though; they hadn’t seen the movie before they were asked to create them.
In the summer of 1979, a group of friends in a small Ohio town witness catastrophic train crash while making a super 8 movie and soon suspect that it was not an accident. Shortly after, unusual disappearances and inexplicable events begin to take place in town, and the local Deputy tries to uncover the truth – something more terrifying than any of them could have imagined.
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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