Movies
Bruce Campbell Would Be Fine With a Young Actor Taking Over as Ash
At this time, nothing at all is happening with the Evil Dead franchise (aside from some sort of video game that Bruce Campbell will be lending his voice to), but one thing we know for certain is that Campbell is DEFINITELY retired from playing Ash in the world of live-action. Will we next see a sequel to the remake? A cross-over between the remake and “Ash vs. Evil Dead”?
Perhaps another reboot entirely, with a new Ash?
Speaking with EW this week, Campbell expressed an openness to a young actor coming in to play a new take on Ash Williams, if it ever comes to that.
“I’d be perfectly fine if they find some young Ash, do some new incarnation, let some other poor bastard get covered in blood,” he told the site. “It’s all good.”
Campbell added, “I hope there are very many variations of Evil Dead. You’ve got the leftover characters from the series, you’ve got the characters from the remake that we did a few years ago. You can intersect universes.”
Why Ash, we say? With Campbell retired, that should probably be the end of the character, yeah? If we get more Evil Dead films, why not bring back Jane Levy’s Mia as the lead?!
For now, we wait…
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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