Editorials
Best Blu-ray Releases of 2015: The Collections Edition
4. The Invisible Man – Monster Classics: Complete Collection (Turbine Media)
Another huge surprise for me was The Invisible Man Collection from Germany’s Turbine Media. If you’re a big fan of the Invisible Man this is probably a set you want to own. In total this is an 8-disc set, 2 Blu-rays and 6 DVDs. Each Blu-ray contains 2 movies and then the DVDs contain the same four movies with one per disc with the added bonus of two more movies. If you’re keeping tracking that’s 6 movies total, 4 on both Blu-ray and DVD and 2 on DVD only.
The four films included on the Blu-rays are The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man’s Revenge and finally closing things out is one of my favorites in Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man. The DVD only films are The Invisible Woman and The Invisible Agent. That’s a whole heck of a lot of invisible fun!
If you haven’t seen these films before they are awesome and Turbine Media did a terrific job with the release. The Blu-rays especially look good but the DVDs aren’t bad either. Plus the packaging is gorgeous. Lots of cool German-language artwork included for each film. Turbine Media knocked this one out of the park.
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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