Movies
There’s a Guy on Fire in the Latest ‘Pet’ Trailer
A new trailer for the abduction thriller/horror film Pet has been released and there’s a brief shot of a guy on fire. Like, not just his arm has a few flames on it. Nope, this motherfucker is engulfed in flames to the point that you could roast some marshmallows off of him for some s’mores. Is that insensitive? Maybe. Probably. I’m too busy stuffing my face with s’mores to really care.
The film stars Dominic Monaghan (“Lost”, The Lord of the Rings series), Ksenia Solo (In Search of Fellini, “Turn”), and Jennette McCurdy (“iCarly, Sam”, “Cat”), and had its World Premiere at the 2016 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin.
In the vein of HARD CANDY and GONE GIRL, PET is a psychological thriller that deals with the themes of identity, loneliness, selflessness and what it means to truly belong to another. It’s told through the prism of two isolated people, Seth and Holly, seemingly different yet more similar than they even knew. PET is at its heart a dark love story that examines how much one is willing to sacrifice in the name of love.
Trace explained in his review that “Pet is best viewed as a wacky horror romance filled with enough gallows humor to satiate the Coen Brothers.”
Torrens tells Bloody Disgusting:
“PET’s a very twisted suspense thriller with quite a bit of dark humor and romance. Though dealing with some very dark material, we’ve approached it in a very accessible way, and hope it can be enjoyed by mature audiences everywhere.”
Orion Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films will release the film in U.S. theaters and on demand on December 2, 2016, and it will be available on DVD on December 27.
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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