Movies
One Step for Man, One for Alien Creature in ‘Apollo 18’: Poster and Viral Video!
On the heels of various bizarre reports (from China) of a NASA coverup on the moon, Dimension Films/The Weinstein Company has unrelieved a badass teaser poster for their sci-fi horror pic Apollo 18, which teases the tagline “There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon…” Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego (King of the Hill) is directing with Russian visionary Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Night Watch) producing for a March 4, 2011 release (my birthday is gonna rock!) The only info is that it’ll be an extraterrestrial film that was greenlit when Bekmambetov presented film footage purported to have been shot by the crew of Apollo 18. That moon mission from the early 70s was officially canceled by NASA, but according to urban legend, it actually happened. Timur’s footage shows signs of alien life, and the events of the mission are built into a thriller story line. In addition, when searching for this footage, one might discover the following viral video lurking about the Web.
Watch the newly launched official website, visit Twitter and Facebook pages.
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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