Editorials
Why Are You In Silent Hill?
In my restless dreams, I see that town… Silent Hill…
Easily one of the most iconic locations in horror, Silent Hill is a town full of terror and beauty, horror and introspection, light and darkness. It’s a place that has bewitched many, luring them in with its mournful call.
But if you found yourself in that ashy town, what would be the reason for your visit? That’s what this week’s quiz tackles! So, strap yourself in for a 20-question quiz that will tell you why you found yourself wandering the terrifying streets of Silent Hill!
I got “Suppressed Memories”, which results in this explanation:
The last thing you remember is being wheeled into an ambulance…?
After the ambulance crashes, you climb out of the wreckage and emerge in a different world, ashes catching in your hair. For what feels like an exhausting forever, you battle against monsters so personally terrifying it chills the very core of your mind. You ask yourself, “What did I do to deserve this?”After falling from grace in your community (unpopular opinion? crime? who can tell…), you became depressed. But something in your mind clicked into a different place. Just when it got to be at its worst, you invented a paradise to escape into. While your body was locked away in a mental hospital, your mind wandered about daily life as it was when you loved yourself. Silent Hill has shown you this. But will you use the tools that may help you reclaim your sanity, or will you choose to believe in a world that no longer exists for you?
Head on down and make sure to let us know why you wound up in this town!
[playbuzz-game game=http://www.playbuzz.com/ashlynh10/why-are-you-in-silent-hill]
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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