Movies
Making Popcorn With ‘Chernobyl Diaries’!
Last week we got a look at the trailer and poster for Chernobyl Diaries, the Oren Peli and Brian Witten-produced horror survival film directed by Brad Parker. Today the LA Times has a brief interview with Andrew Kosove of Alcon Entertainment, who owns the North American rights.
It’s an interesting read because it at least attempts to tackle the inherent issues of fashioning a piece of entertainment out of a real-world tragedy. Kosove asserts that offending survivors of the disaster (families of the victims) is not on his agenda. “It’s a popcorn film. I don’t think the movie takes itself so seriously as to tread on those real disasters.” I don’t really have an opinion about this. The film’s tagline is “experience the fallout” which I suppose could be read as kind of tacky, but then again I don’t think there’s much that should be off limits. Humor heals, I suppose.
As for why he thinks its a good setting for a film? “It’s not like going to Club Med in Barbados. It’s frozen in time, and it’s visually arresting.” The article also touches upon the extreme tourism industry that has cropped up around the site. Apparently you can purchase a day pass to check out the city of Prypiat. As someone who avoids the backscatter mating at the airport, I don’t think I’ll be signing up for that one.
In theaters May 28 from FilmNation, “A group of friends become stranded in an eerie and desolate city. Years before in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, nature has begun to reclaim everything. As the sun sets on this radioactive ghost town, inhuman cries cut through the night air. It seems they are not alone.” It stars Jonathan Sadowski, Devin Kelley, Jesse McCartney, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Nathan Phillips, Ingrid Bolso Berdal and Dimitry Diatchenko.
Head inside for the film’s trailer. You can check out the article here.
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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