Editorials
[Spoilers] Does ‘Knives Out’ Pay Tribute to ‘Friday the 13th’?
Major, major spoilers follow. You’ve been warned.
Everyone’s a suspect in Rian Johnson‘s murder mystery Knives Out (read our review), which powered its way to a $70M global opening.
In the film, a renowned crime novelist is found dead at his estate just after his 85th birthday and a detective is hired to investigate. Unlike most murder mysteries, the killer is revealed in the second act, which throws the audience for a loop and turns the entire investigation on its head.
The investigator eventually unravels the mystery and the dastardly plans of the author’s grandson, Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans). And while the audience has several red herrings thrown at them, Ransom’s intentions were always in plain sight.
In one big way, Johnson’s film appears to be a tribute to Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th. In the very first Friday the 13th, it’s revealed in the closing moments that it’s actually a revenge film, and Pamela Voorhees (the mother of a young boy who drowned in Crystal Lake due to the neglect of the counselors) is the killer.
Knives Out follows a similar arc in which the audience is led to believe that the caretaker, Marta, accidentally murdered the famed author, only to learn that the film is actually Ransom’s revenge story against his grandfather.
While the plot carries minor similarities, horror fans were being tipped off from the get-go. You see, Ransom enjoys wearing sweaters incredibly similar (from the stitching right down to the color) to those worn by Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th.
However, the biggest comparison comes in Knives Out’s closing moments when Ransom raises his arm over his head and attempts to murder Marta with a knife, a shot that’s a direct nod to the finale of Friday the 13th.
And if you wanted to question Johnson’s love of horror movies, it’s worth noting that Halloween‘s Jamie Lee Curtis was cast as Ransom’s mother in the film.
What do you all think?
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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