Movies
Urban Legend Director Attracting 3D ‘Flies’
While I still haven’t taken the time to write a review for his remake of LONG WEEKEND, Jamie Blanks (Urban Legend, Storm Warning) is already out prepping his next horror film. During an interview with Inside Film, Australian producer David Hannay announced he would be teaming up with Anthony Egan to bring us a new 3D horror film entitled Flies, which will be directed by Blanks from a screenplay by Egan. Read on for the skinny.
Veteran and legendary producer David Hannay (Stone, The Man from Hong Kong) is teaming up with editor/writer Anthony Egan to produce what could potentially be Australia’s first feature film in stereoscopic 3D.
Hannay hinted to INSIDEFILM that Flies, expected to commence production in the first quarter of 2009, has already piqued the interest of a prominent sales agent at Cannes this year.
Written by Egan and set to be directed by Jamie Blanks (Long Weekend, Urban Legend), the horror comedy Flies will be about genetically altered insects that escape a laboratory that attacks a town about to open a tourist attraction in the shape of a giant blowfly.
And although Blanks’ LONG WEEKEND is about man vs nature, FLIES will look at it from another perspective.
“It was a concept we thought that no one has really touched on the subject of `nature goes nuts’ in Australia,” said Egan. “So we thought up an idea that would fit that genre and have appeal in the national marketplace.”
Click here to read the entire article where they talk a bit more about 3D technologies.
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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