Editorials
Trace’s 5 Worst Horror Movies of 2016
5 Pretty Good Horror Movies You Might’ve Missed in 2016
[Poll Results] The Bloody Disgusting Readers Chose the 10 Best Horror Movies of 2016
10 Biggest Horror Stories of 2016
Let’s Play Pretend and Give Academy Awards to 2016’s Best Horror Movies
2016 was one of the best years for horror films in a long time. Unfortunately, even the best years have to have a clunker or two, and that is why “worst of” articles exist. It’s not enjoyable to trash films, but it’s a necessary evil that must be done. I didn’t get to see quite as many horror films as I would have liked (only about 70 out of 120), but to see what was up for consideration you can see the list of 2016 horror films I watched on my Letterboxd page. Let’s get started, shall we?
Dishonorable Mentions
There weren’t many truly atrocious horror films released in 2016, but there were plenty of mediocre ones. First there’s the disappointing (sorry) The Disappointments Room (my review). Then there’s the Inception/The Exorcist hybrid that is Incarnate (my review). Thomas Dekker’s ambitious but lackluster directorial debut Jack Goes Home (my review) meant well but was more a pretentious mess than a substantial character study. You can’t forget about the ghost story Visions (my review)*, which was unceremoniously dumped on Netflix back in January, no matter how much you would like to. Wes Craven’s final producing gig gave us the mean-spirited and sloppily put together The Girl in the Photographs. Finally, there’s Greg McLean’s first major American horror film The Darkness, which is so dull that you’d be forgiven for not realizing it was a horror film.
*I just realized I used the exact same phrase in the title of my reviews for Incarnate and Visions. Whoops. My New Year’s resolution for 2017 will be to get more creative with those.
The films listed above may be mediocre, but they cannot compare to the five worst horror films of the year. So without further ado, I give you these turds. The films listed on the next page earned a pretty strong reaction from me, and had I reviewed them they would have earned a 1.5/5 or lower on our skull scale.
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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