Movies
Listen to Audio Recordings That Inspired ‘The Conjuring 2’
With just over two weeks until The Conjuring 2 hits theaters on June 10th, Warner Bros. has released a short featurette that showcases some of the actual recordings the Warrens captured during their investigations in Enfield.
Although the clip isn’t that long nor are the recordings terribly exciting, it’s still rather cool to hear fragments of what Ed and Lorraine Warren were a part of. And while I said that the recordings presented weren’t terribly exciting, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a strong air of eerie hostility about them…
In the sequel to the smash hit, “Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) travel to 1977 England to help single mom Peggy Hodgson and her four children, particularly daughter Janet (played by Madison Wolfe).”
[Set Visit Report] We Visited the Filming Locations of James Wan’s The Conjuring 2!
In theaters June 10, 2016, The Conjuring 2 is said to open with The Amityville Horror case. After, the sequel will tell of the infamous “Enfield Poltergeist,” which took place at a council house in Brimsdown village, borough of Enfield, England during the late 1970s.
Rounding out the cast are Frances O’Connor (“The Missing”) as the single mom, with newcomers Lauren Esposito, Patrick McAuley and Benjamin Haigh as her children; Maria Doyle Kennedy (“Orphan Black”); Simon Delaney (“Roy”); Franka Potente (“The Bridge”); and Simon McBurney (Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation).
In addition to directing the film, Wan wrote the screenplay with Carey and Chad Hayes, and David Leslie Johnson.
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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