Movies
Have a Taste for More Brains!? It’s ‘A Return to the Living Dead’
Just when you thought it was safe to be dead! Members of the creative team behind the award-winning Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy and Bio Channel’s Inside Story: Scream have joined forces once again to unearth the story behind cinema’s coolest zombie movie, The Return of the Living Dead.
More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead is the definitive exploration of the outrageous splatter classic which has continued to terrify and entertain horror fans for over twenty-five years with its delicious mix of blood, guts, sex and punk. Boasting off-beat humor, plenty of attitude and one of the most famous zombies ever committed to celluloid, it’s easy to see why the film’s legacy continues to grow.
This entertaining and informative project will be the ultimate account of the tongue-in-cheek, stylish and apocalyptic zombie movie. It features — for the first time ever! — contributions from all the main cast as well as clips, photographs, storyboards, conceptual art, publicity materials, archival documents and behind-the-scenes footage.
“Watching movies like Return of the Living Dead at a young age set me on a course for the horror films I love today,” says director Bill Philputt. “It’s an honor to work so closely with people I’ve known for years. Getting such great insight into the making of the film, as only the cast and crew can give, has been a fantastic experience.”
Executive producer Michael Perez agrees, “Working with the cast of the film very closely for the last five years, they became more than clients and turned into great friends. Being able to see the impact they and the film have had on fans all around the world is incredible, making me realize Return of the Living Dead has a real story to tell. I decided I wanted to help bring that to life and I hope the fans of the franchise will embrace this incredible retrospective as they have the movie.”
“When I was approached to produce the project, I quickly proceeded to rewatch the original film,” adds producer Thommy Hutson, who has some experience unlocking the behind-the-scenes secrets of horror genre classics as writer/producer of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy and Inside Story: Scream, among others. “Within minutes I realized I couldn’t pass the opportunity up. Return of the Living Dead is classic 80s horror: it’s scary, funny, gory, sexy and completely cool. I just really loved the idea of exploring how the film was made and quickly realized the behind-the-scenes stories were sometimes as scary, funny, gory and sexy as the film itself!”
Beverly Randolph, star of the original 1985 film and executive producer of the retrospective, adds, “It has been so wonderful to finally set the record straight. Our incredible fans have so many great questions that they want answered and we are finally able to give them what they want. It has been such a wonderful and warm stroll down memory lane, and I am forever grateful for this chance to remember something so special and to be able to capture it forever!”
In addition to the comprehensive two-hour documentary, the October DVD release of More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead features an additional two hours of killer extras that will make viewers want to come back from the grave and party!
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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