Movies
IFC Acquires ‘Vampires’ Mockumentary
IFC Films announced today that they’ve acquired the mockumentary Vampires from Belgium’s House of Film and director Vincent Lannoo. No release details yet, but expect this on VOD before arriving on DVD.
The pic begins when “A film crew ventures amidst a family of vampires to make a documentary. They seek answers to the crucial questions we all ask ourselves… Who are they? Do they drink anything other than blood? How do they manage their social life? Do they file their teeth? Can they sleep, dream, die, feel feelings, eat garlic? After several weeks in the company of this family of four and their friends, foes and neighbors, our brave little crew finds the answers, and a lot more… They will find themselves at the heart of a family drama that takes the friendly vampire clan all the way to Quebec. Montreal will be the theater of profound mutations that will change the international vampire community forever, and ever. The community we discover through this film is strange indeed, yet so endearing. A strange society that, in the end, is not so alien to us as we might think.”
Trailer inside!
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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