Editorials
Netflix Pick of the Week: ‘Darling’
Director Mickey Keating is a rising star in the indie horror arena, turning in fantastic films like Ritual, Pod, and the 2016 survival thriller Carnage Park. His most recent film Psychopaths has firmly cemented him in the arena of filmmakers to watch.
However, there has been little love and even less discussion of his Darling.
Shot in stark black and white, the film is Keating’s homage to the claustrophobic and paranoid Polanski film Repulsion. Nearly the entire film takes place in a single New York apartment, and the movie places the viewer inside the subjective viewpoint of the clearly troubled protagonist. The film teases what is real and unreal, going one step further than Repulsion by adding a possible supernatural wrinkle to the proceedings.
Lead actress Lauren Ashley Carter is in almost every frame of the movie, and she is more than up for the hairpin emotional turns this performance offers her. For such a young actress, she is a veteran of the genre, having appeared previously in The Woman, Jug Face, and The Mind’s Eye; she also worked with Keating a year earlier in Pod.
With a deliberate pace and some unanswered questions, Darling may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But for the horror fan who loves a good slow burn, some fantastic cinematography, and a sample of the great things to come from both actress Carter and director Keating, it’s well worth your time.
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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