Editorials
2011 HORROR MOVIE PREVIEW: SONY PICTURES
With the Underworld franchise under their belt, and a love for PG-13 horror released through Screen Gems, Sony Pictures has established themselves as a studio with genre films aimed at tweens. 2011 doesn’t look much different, sans Columbia Pictures’ highly anticipated release of Battle: Los Angeles, and James Wan’s return to horror with Insidious. What are you most looking forward to?
–SONY PICTURES 2011 HORROR MOVIE PREVIEW–
PARAMOUNT / UNIVERSAL / DIMENSION / RELATIVITY / VARIOUS
CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR SYNOPSES, TRAILERS, DETAILS & MORE STILLS (If Available)
Dates Subject to Change
The movie will center on Sara, a college student randomly assigned to a freshman dorm with a stranger named Rebecca. They start off as friends but things turn deadly as Rebecca begins to target people in Sara’s life.
EXPECT THIS TO SHIFT DATES: The story concerns a shy but brainy high school girl who returns for senior year after having slimmed down six dress sizes. She finds herself flirting with the handsome English lit teacher, but the mutual crush turns deadly when the teacher’s obsession with the student compels him to exact maniacal revenge on everyone who was cruel to her.
From Darkness Falls and TCM: The Beginning director Jonathan Liebesman, for years, there have been documented cases of UFO sightings around the world – Buenos Aires, Seoul, France, Germany, China. But in 2011, what were once just sightings will become a terrifying reality when Earth is attacked by unknown forces. As people everywhere watch the world’s great cities fall, Los Angeles becomes the last stand for mankind in a battle no one expected. It’s up to a Marine staff sergeant (Aaron Eckhart) and his new platoon to draw a line in the sand as they take on an enemy unlike any they’ve ever encountered before.
A young family makes the terrifying discovery that the body of their comatose boy has become a magnet for malevolent entities, while his consciousness lies trapped in the dark and insidious realm known as The Further.
The film is an adaptation of a TokyoPop comic book, the story is set in a world ravaged by centuries of war between man and vampire and follows a warrior priest who turns against the church to track down a murderous band of vampires who have kidnapped his niece.
The new Straw Dogs follows Los Angeles screenwriter David Sumner (Marsden), who moves with his wife to her hometown in the deep South. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts re-emerge with the locals, leading to a violent confrontation.
In QUARANTINE, an apartment building in Los Angeles was quarantined by the CDC (Center for Disease Control), trapping the frightened residents inside as a deadly mutant virus turned the residents into rabid killers. QUARANTINE 2: TERMINAL picks up later that night at LAX, as passengers board a flight to Nashville. When a passenger becomes violently ill with a mysterious rabies-like virus, the plane makes an emergency landing at a large metropolitan airport. Jenny (Mercedes Masohn, CBS’s “Three Rivers”), a heroic yet inexperienced flight attendant, takes charge of the safety of her passengers. Relieved when a swarm of heavily equipped emergency vehicles, police units and the CDC arrive, Jenny and the passengers soon discover that they have been quarantined and are now trapped. Desperate to escape, Jenny enlists the help of one of the surviving passengers, a kindergarten teacher, Henry (Josh Cooke, A Fork In The Road, I Love you Man), to devise a plan to survive.
The story concerns a Vegas bachelor party that turns grisly when the groom (Hallisay) learns that his longtime best friend (Pardue) has targeted him for ritual murder.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.