Movies
Meet the ‘Prometheus’ Space Jockey Known Simply As “The Engineer”
Only in horror is the man in a rubber suit revered as a God, which is appropriate considering the enormity of the following scoop.
With a fair spoiler warning to prelude this story, Damon Lindelof’s screenplay for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, is said to begin when a group of humans discover a map of the universe that leads them to their creators – or “Gods”. Said Gods are the Space Jockeys as eluded to in the corpse seen in Scott’s 1979 Alien.
In Twentieth Century Fox’s Prometheus, arriving in theaters June 8, one of these Space Jockeys is referred to as “The Engineer”. While there are said to be multiple engineers, Bloody Disgusting can exclusively report that Ian Whyte will portray one of them. He will soon be referred to as our “creator” or “God”…
Whyte also worked in costume as the Predator in both Alien vs. Predator films. We’ll hopefully have more soon as there are quite a bit of interesting rumors surrounding this casting. We’ll work on confirming before we report back.
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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