Movies
Sony’s ‘Flatliners’ Isn’t a Remake, It’s a Sequel
We’ve been reporting that Sony’s upcoming take on Flatliners was a remake, a brand new take on the original 1990 film. However, it turns out that this isn’t the case as word comes directly from Kiefer Sutherland, who starred in the original, that the film is, in fact, a sequel.
“I play a professor at the medical university. It is never stated but it will probably be very clearly understood that I’m the same character I was in the original ‘Flatliners’ but that I have changed my name and I’ve done some things to move on from the experiments that we were doing in the original film,” Sutherland tells Metro.
Sutherland played Nelson Wright in the original film, a medical student who wanted to see what the afterlife held by allowing himself, and his partners, to be killed only to be resuscitated minutes afterwards.
“I loved making the first film and when I was asked if I would be interested in taking part in this, it didn’t take more than a minute to say yes,” Sutherland excitedly tells the site.
The sequel will star James Norton, Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, Ellen Page and Kiersey Clemons and is being directed by Niels Arden Oplev.
Flatliners comes out August 18th, 2017.
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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