Movies
IGN Editor to Adapt Clive Barker’s ‘Down, Satan!’
Some interesting news was reported over at IGN this morning as they revealed that their very own DVD Editor, Christopher Monfette, has scripted an adaptation of Clive Barker’s short-story Down, Satan!, one of Barker’s infamous Books of Blood stories. Read on for details on the adaptation, along with a synopsis for the short story.
DOWN, SATAN!, one of the shortest stories, relates the tale of a wealthy middle-aged businessman, Gregorius, who becomes depressed when he believes God has deserted him, and he comes up with a plan to build a Hell on Earth in order to summon Satan, believing that God will then sweep him (Gregorius) out of Satan’s clutches and into His heavenly fold. In his vast Satanic Cathedral, Gregorious soon loses sight of his original intention of attracting God’s attention, and he is captured after torturing to death hundreds of people in the well-equipped torture chambers. It is deliberately left ambiguous whether Gregorius went insane, or if he really did succeed in tempting Satan into taking residence in his own personal Hell.
Monfette talked with IGN a bit about how difficult it was to turn a 4-page story into a feature length screenplay.
“It’s not easy,” he says. “But we found a way into the narrative that expands upon the ideas without stretching or distorting them. There’s drama and horror and suspense and scale and if we’ve done our jobs, we should have something intensely original.”
Click here for the full story or check here for a complete list of announced BOOKS OF BLOOD adaptations.
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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