Movies
SD Comic-Con ’10: Reeves Confirms Some Sorta Plans For ‘Cloverfield 2’!
Some really big news out of the San Diego Comic-Con regarding the long-gestured Coverfield sequel that we’re all praying for. While both producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves have been tight-lipped, Reeves opened up to us this weekend while out promoting his much anticipated Let Me In adaptation. “Cloverfield 2 is on hold for now… it’s not dead, it’s dormant,” says Reeves. “J.J. is very involved with Super 8 and I’ve been doing Let Me In that so we have shelved it until we can get the team from the first back together.” He also clarified that he would like to be the one back behind the camera. It’s nice to hear him actually say they PLAN on doing it still, as opposed to abandoning the project completely. Too bad we won’t be hearing anything until at the earliest next summer when Paramount releases Abrams’ Super 8.
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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