Movies
The Biggest Horror Stories of 2016
There’s no debating that 2016 was a GREAT year to be a horror fan. Our beloved genre is everywhere and if 2017 is any indication, it’s just going to keep getting better. I took a look back over the past 12 months and picked out the biggest stories of the year (based on how many times they were viewed) and wow, there were some amazing horror stories this year.
10. After getting possibly the greatest Christmas present ever in the form of an Alien: Covenant trailer, it looks like most of our wishlist is going to come true.
9. The King of the Monsters is always a popular topic on BD, and when these spoilers were released you all just couldn’t resist.
8. Love it or hate it, when Lionsgate revealed that The Woods was actually Blair Witch, the internet went crazy and readers flooded in to view the trailer.
7. We all got excited when there was finally some real Zombieland 2 news, and while there haven’t been many updates since then it’s still in development and hopefully we’ll hear something sooner than later.
6. Remember when 10 Cloverfield Lane was a mystery? Everybody was trying to figure out how this film was going to fit into the Cloverfield universe, and now we can’t wait for the third film.
5. There aren’t many shoes harder to fill than Pinhead’s, and when we revealed who was going to take on the role in Hellraiser: Judgement it was a big deal. We later got our first look at Pinhead in this teaser image.
4. Rob Zombie is always a controversial topic, and when ’31’ finally got an R rating after receiving the dreaded NC-17 from the MPAA not once but twice it was pretty big news. Now if we only knew where that unrated cut was…
3. Here’s a perfect case of something being too good to be true. The most recent update from Michael Keaton makes it seem like a Beetlejuice 2 might be a lost cause.
2. Stephen King’s IT is definitely the story of the year, and that’s proven by how many people clicked to get a first glimpse of Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise.
1. After all the teasers and speculation, when the American Horror Story season 6 theme was finally revealed it was the biggest single piece of news by a longshot.
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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