Movies
Full Details on the Pang Brothers’ 3-D Sequel to ‘The Eye’
More details have been revealed for the first Asian digital 3-D horror film coming to theaters, courtesy of Universe Films and the directing twins Danny and Oxide Pang. The $4.5 million The Child’s Eye in 3D (announced on March 10) will begin shooting in June in Thailand. The Pang brothers, who are overseeing the postproduction of their $12 million comic adaptation The Storm Warriors, due in December, will return to the horror roots that brought them international attention with 2002’s The Eye, which was remade as a U.S. version starring Jessica Alba.
The visual stimulation offered by the stereoscopic 3-D format will be used to the full in the signature Pang brothers’ jump-out-of-your-seat shock tactic and spooky style, the twins told The Hollywood Reporter.
“The Child’s Eye in 3D” tells the story of six stranded Hong Kong travelers during the shutdown of the Bangkok airport in the November 2008 anti-government protest and their supernatural encounters after the disappearance of three in the group.
The showpiece of the film will be an underworld made up of paper replica houses, filled with paper dolls and paper cars — a city formed by all the paper-made facsimile of the real world burnt and offered to the deceased in the traditional Chinese ancestor worship ritual. The twins also will be introducing a monster in the film.
“The way to handle a monster is the same as creating spooky and suspenseful atmosphere, so it’s something we want to try in this film,” Oxide Pang said.
The twins will work with Hong Kong film equipment outfit Digital Magic for filming and with their longtime collaborator Fat Face Prods. for visual effects.
“We always enjoy new visual styles, so we went to see the 3-D Hollywood films the first chance we got,” Danny Pang said. “The technology of 3-D filming is now well-developed enough for us to try applying our horror style.”
The recent success of Hollywood 3-D offerings, including “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Bolt,” was the driving force behind greenlighting “Child’s Eye,” said Alvin Lam, COO of Universe Films, which has signed a 10-year exclusive contract with the Pangs.
“We see that there’s an established audience base for 3-D films,” Lam said. “Besides, a 3-D film increases the audience’s willingness to see it in a theater. 3-D is a lasting trend.”
Universe is in the final stages of negotiations with a Singapore and Malaysian distributor for the film.
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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