Movies
Did You Ever Notice E.T. Hidden in the ‘Gremlins’ and ‘Gremlins 2’ Posters?!
You’ve looked at them countless times, but we bet you never noticed the Easter eggs.
One of the most talked about movies of the holiday season is always Joe Dante’s Gremlins, which is of course the most iconic (and perhaps best) Christmas-themed horror movie out there. That makes December the perfect time to revisit the holiday classic, and while you’re at it, why not also give the totally bonkers Gremlins 2 a revisit?!
But we’re not here to talk about the movies themselves today. Rather, we wanted to shine the spotlight on two really fun Easter eggs hidden in their original posters!
They’ve very hard to spot without blowing up the images or pulling out a magnifier, but hidden within both the Gremlins and Gremlins 2 posters is the iconic logo for Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment, which is of course the image from E.T. of Elliot and his little alien friend riding a bicycle past the moon.
If you look closely, you’ll spot the Amblin logo on Billy’s button on the Gremlins poster, while it’s hidden on the wrapper of the cigar Stripe is smoking on the Gremlins 2 art!
How fun is that?!
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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