Movies
Ti West’s Brooklyn Home Infested With ‘Bedbugs’
Tango Pictures, a new production venture created by producers Christina Lurie, Steven Shainberg, and Andrew Lazar, has acquired film rights to the Ben H. Winters’ bestselling horror novel Bedbugs and has set Ti West (The Innkeepers, House of the Devil, The Roost) to pen the screenplay, says Deadline.
The book features a premise that is all too relatable to anyone who travels to a major city like Manhattan or Toronto and turns over the mattress to see if anything is crawling as bedbug infestations become more common each year. “ ‘Bedbugs’ is a tale of urban paranoia set in Brooklyn that follows the Wendt family as they move in to a new home and suddenly start to encounter strange occurrences. Susan Wendt begins suffering what she suspects are bedbug bites, but she’s the only one getting bitten and suddenly fears she may be going crazy. That’s until she’s confronted with a more menacing explanation for the strange things happening to her and the family.”
“Reading ‘Bedbugs’ as a manuscript felt like the literary equivalent of a Ti West horror movie—a slow-burning supernatural story with fully realized characters, light on gore but heavy on menace and dread,” said Quirk associate publisher and creative director Jason Rekulak.
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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