Movies
Take a Trip to Victor Salva’s ‘Rosewood Lane’ in Trailer Premiere
“Little Barrett Tanner, they put him in the ground, and when they did, he didn’t know, he never would be found.”
You’ve already seen a ton of hi-res images from Jeepers Creepers director Victor Salva’s Rosewood Lane, now inside you’ll find the official trailer for the film premiering at this weekend’s Screamfest Horror Film Festival in Hollywood, CA.
Rose McGowan, Ray Wise, Lin Shaye, Lauren Vélez, Lesley-Anne Down, Bill Fagerbakke, Rance Howard, Judson Mills, Steve Tom, Ashton Moio, Sonny Marinelli, Tom Tarantini, Christopher Gehrman, Mark Irvingsen and Deanna Lynn Walsh all star.
“Radio talk show therapist, Sonny Blake, moves back to her childhood home after her alcoholic father dies. Upon her return to the old neighborhood, Sonny discovers her neighbors are terrified of the local paperboy.
She thinks this is ridiculous, until she encounters the boy herself, and learns the hard way that he is a cunning and dangerous sociopath. One who may have killed her father, and several others.
When the boy starts to call Sonny’s radio show, reciting eerie nursery rhymes, an unnerving game of cat-and-mouse begins, which makes Sonny doubt her own sanity.
As the game escalates, she suddenly finds herself in a terrifying, all-out war that forces her to redefine her ideas of good and evil, and has her fighting to stay alive.”
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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