Movies
John Carpenter to Direct ‘Darkchylde’!
THE master of horror is set to bring you the girl of your dreams. John Carpenter – who just saw his latest feature, The Ward, premiere at TIFF – is onboard to direct the long gestured Darkchylde, based on the comic by Randy Queen about a good hearted southern teen cursed to become the creatures from her many recurring nightmares. Every time Ariel Chylde transforms, she sheds her skin and a new nightmare emerges from her Id to act out her deepest, darkest impulses.
John Carpenter and Sandy King’s Storm King Productions have allied with Randy and Sarah Queen’s Darkchylde Ent. to produce the film, following the release of test footage created by Richard Taylor’s Academy Award Winning Weta Workshop (The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, King Kong, The Hobbit).
John Carpenter says, “Randy Queen’s hijacked angel, Ariel Chylde, is the best young female character since Laurie Strode in Halloween. Bringing Ariel and her dark mysteries to life should be quite an adventure for us all.”
Adds Queen, “I’m beyond thrilled that John Carpenter, one of our most important, and legendary genre directors, and the man responsible for such landmark films as THE THING, and HALLOWEEN has come onboard with Weta Workshop to help bring the nightmarish tale of Ariel Chylde to the silver screen. As a horror fan, the thought of Carpenter and Weta together, beautiful dreamscapes, and multiple transformations, makes me incredibly excited. There is a reason nearly his entire catalogue has, or is being remade, and it’s because Carpenter is a genius.”
Offering a stark contrast to super hero comics, Darkchylde was a breakout sensation of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, garnering immediate acclaim, and an unusually large female fanbase. The property went on to outsell Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman in both domestic and foreign audiences, and has been realized in toys, trading cards, apparel, lunch boxes, mini busts, and more recently a hit crossover with Top Cow, and a statue from PopCultureShockToys. Fans can now read the Ariel Chylde saga online via Wowio and Darkchylde.com and a trade paperback collecting the “Legacy” and “Redemption” series of books ships in January from Image Comics.
John Carpenter is an acclaimed director, screenwriter, producer, and composer, who won an academy award for his short film while still just a student at USC. His storied career includes such seminal films as Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York, Starman, Christine, In the Mouth of Madness, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and The Fog. His most recent outing, The Ward, starring Amber Heard as an institutionalized woman tormented by a sinister spirit, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Watch New Zealand’s WETA test footage for Darkshylde on YouTube.
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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