Editorials
Top 10 Stephen King Stories in Need of an Adaptation
Suffer the Little Children (Collected Within Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Dream Director: Mickey Keating (Darling)
“Suffer the Little Children” is a wonderfully succinct story, but one that cuts incredibly deep. The to-the-point narrative is concerned with an elementary school teacher who becomes increasingly convinced that her students are in fact horrible, horrible monsters. This is a beautiful example of King’s ability to take the everyday mundane and transform metaphors into terrifying parallel visions. Our teacher in question becomes so convinced that her students are in fact demons that she goes about killing them all. What makes “Suffer the Little Children” so enticing is that we never get one indication or the other whether our protagonist is actually right in her suspicions, or is just crazy. It’s the sort of story that has plenty of opportunities for juicy breakdowns and charting someone’s slow mental deterioration. Mickey Keating nails this aesthetic in his recent Darling, and honestly, just attach him and Lauren Ashley Carter to this project and I don’t see how it’d fail. It’s such a great mindfuck and thinking of the inevitable aftermath that follows the story is just as engrossing as the story itself.
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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