Editorials
Black Friday Chopping List: Video Games
PlayStation 4
Until Dawn
This is my favorite video game of the year. There is no debate. Yes, some might consider it a movie, but it is first and foremost a video game. It’s a near-perfect horror game (our own Adam Dodd gave it a glowing review) that uses it’s Butterfly Effect mechanism in a very creative way. It’s a shame Supermassive Games didn’t give it more of a marketing push, but it looks like the game didn’t need it. It’s become the sleeper hit of the fall.
The Order: 1886
Another game that many consider to be more a film than a video game (must be a Playstation thing), The Order: 1886 disappointed in sales and has thus dropped in price to just $19.99 on Amazon! It’s not a fantastic game, but it’s definitely worth that price.
Bloodborne
If difficult games are you thing, order Bloodborne now. Bloodborne follows you through the fictional city of Yharnam, whose inhabitants have been afflicted with an abnormal blood-borne disease. It sounds simple enough, but it rivals Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls in terms of difficulty. It’s also a stunningly beautiful game with extremely detailed environments and great combat.
Resident Evil Origins Collection
Okay, okay, this one doesn’t come out in January, but while we patiently away the Resident Evil 2 remake or even Resident Evil 7, you can pre-order this badboy and relive the glorious GameCube games remastered for HD. Personally, I’m not a fan of digital downloads, so I didn’t purchase the Resident Evil REmake back in January. I love my hard copies, so I’ll definitely be picking this one up and I suggest you do as well!
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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