Movies
Charisma Carpenter Seeks ‘Deadly Sibling’ Revenge
Your obsession is about to return to the big screen as “Buffy” and Expendables star Charisma Carpenter will be toplining the new thriller Deadly Sibling Rivalry, says the star via Twitter. “I will play twins! Rock climbing involved. – YAY!” she stated.
The flick, which is shooting in L.A, is directed by Hanelle Culpepper and written by Steve Peterson and John Murlowski.
Here’s the plot crunch:
“Identical twins Janna and Callie have always had a sibling rivalry competing for their father’s love. After a horrific climbing accident kills their father, the twins grow further apart and carry out their lives in the wake of the tragedy. Janna gets married and has a daughter while Callie floats from one job to the next, getting tangled in illegal dealings. After a near fatal crash puts Janna into a coma, Callie secretly steals her sister’s identity in an attempt to start over with a new life and keep her sister out of her way. Callie stops at nothing to seek revenge on a sister that has always had the seemingly better life.”
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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