Movies
‘Attack the Block’ Sequel, Remake and Potential TV Series?
One of the best movies of the year is easily Joe Cornish’s sci-fi horror Attack the Block (review), which followed a gang of South London teenagers defending their housing project home against an alien attack.
This afternoon IFC posted an interview with Cornish who revealed that an American remake and television series spin-off are been discussed, and also gave the first details about one of the ideas around an Attack the Block sequel. Could a franchise be in the works? Just to make this happen I’d carry a rotting alien corpse around on my back…
Newcomer star John Boyega, who plays the teenage group leader and chief monster-killer Moses, is also the leader of ideas: “He has this image of a bigger alien attack on London, as if the attack we saw in ‘Attack the Block’ was just the [first] wave and there’s another wave of bigger creatures. And he described to me this image of Moses leading a whole army of hood kids across the Thames, next to the houses of Parliament,” said Cornish to press. “He had an image of Moses on a police horse. So he’s on a horse leading this army of South London kids across the river to take on this bigger wave of aliens.”
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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