Movies
Rob Zombie Officially Directing ‘Halloween’ Sequel
Rob Zombie is packing up and heading back to Haddonfield for H2, the sequel to his remake of John Carpenter’s classic film from 1978. While other horror websites patronized us for reporting the story broke by Shock, it appears the egg is in their face as Zombie will return to both write and direct the sequel to HALLOWEEN for Dimension Films. Read on for the official news and full details on the deal. What do you guys think? Where should Zombie take the sequel?
Dimension Films and Rob Zombie are teaming for another chapter of “Halloween,” and he’s racing to scare up the pic for release in October.
Zombie will write and direct “H2,” the sequel to his 2007 reinvention of the John Carpenter horror classic. Production will begin in March.
The new film picks up right as the first remake ended, following the aftermath of Michael Myers’ murderous rampage through the eyes of the sister he hunted.
Zombie said it won’t resemble the original second installment, as the “House of 1000 Corpses” helmer continues to take the franchise in different directions.
Zombie took Carpenter’s original and stamped it with an original storyline that treated Myers as a clinical psychopath. The film grossed $60 million domestically in 2007.
Zombie had told Dimension chief and TWC co-chairman Bob Weinstein he wanted nothing to do with a sequel. But just like the franchise’s villain, Zombie was compelled to come back.
“I was so burned out. (But) I took a long break, made a record and I got excited again,” Zombie said. “Now, we’ll be hauling ass, and that’s the problem making a movie called ‘Halloween’: If you come out Nov. 1 or after, nobody cares. If it was called anything else, I’d be fine.”
Malek Akkad of Trancas Intl. Films will produce with Spectacle Entertainment’s Andy Gould.
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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