Movies
Takashi Miike’s ‘Audition’ Gets Blu-ray Release
One of the best Japanese horror films this decade, Audition, is about to get a special 10th anniversary release, courtesy of Shout Factory, reports Twitch Film. While no date is set in stone other than an October tease, below you’ll find a list of the current extra features for both the DVD and high def Blu-ray release. In the film directed by the infamous Takashi Miike, a middle-aged widower is urged by his teenage son & film producer friend to start dating again. They devise a plan to hold a phony film audition to meet new women. The widower falls for a beautiful ballerina with a suspicious past & their courtship veers from poilte romance to psychnightmare!Shout! Factory will handle the release which is set for both DVD and Blu-ray format with the following extras in tow:
• Feature-length audio commentary with Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan, who is also scripting Miike’s upcoming remake of the chanbara classic 13 ASSASSINS. Film writer and Eiga Hi-Ho contributor Masato Kobayashi moderates the Japanese-language (and English-subtitled) commentary track.
• Video introduction by Miike
• New video interview featurettes with the film’s main cast
– From Audition to Vampire Girl: Eihi Shiina
– Tokyo—Hollywood: Ryo Ishibashi
– Miike’s Toy: Renji Ishibashi
– The Man in the Bag Speaks: Ren Osugi
• Film trailer, plus liner notes by Agitator author and Midnight Eye founder Tom Mes
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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