Movies
‘Hack/Slash’ Screenwriter Talks Story Details
Where are you already?! THE STRANGERS was a huge success, now Rogue Pictures should be giving the thumbs up to the highly anticipated Hack/Slash, the adaptation of the popular comic book that sends Cassie Hack, a woman who travels to small towns across the country, off hunting slashers (like Jason Voorhees, Chucky, Freddy Krueger etc). A new interview with screenwriter Justin Marks appeared online, which details what we can expect from the adaptation. Read on for the skinny and cross your fingers that Rogue gets this ball rolling sometime soon.
Marks, who is writing the adaptation for the big screen, tells Newsarama that the film won’t be an origin story.
“It won’t be an origin story, per se, but the origin will be covered. I think you’ll see the Lunch Lady as well as Cassie and Vlad. But we wanted to do something very different, because this is the first chance to see a slasher movie where there is more then one slasher! Because it follows a hunter, you’re going with her and her accomplice as they go from one to another, and building out the mythology of how this world works with its undead slashers. Cassie is a wonderful character, the one that Tim [Seeley] created and this is a character based movie, your going to get to know the people who are surviving or dying. I’ve been pulling lines, moments and scenes from the comics leading up to the numbered run that fans will notice.”
As for a rating, will the film be R or a whimpy PG-13?
“It was written with that mentality in mind (an R-rating), yes, and the creator is involved and working intimately with the production.”
Click the link for the full interview.
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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