Movies
First Official Plot Synopsis For ‘The Last Exorcism 2’
StudioCanal’s secretive The Last Exorcism 2 made an appearance at the American Film Market in Santa Monica this past week. In the film, Ashley Bell returns as Nell Sweetzer, the possessed young girl, with Ed Gass-Donnelly is directing.
While we exclusively broke the story to you, here’s the official synopsis:
“Eli Roth & Strike Entertainment bring us an even more terrifying and bigger scale sequel to The Last Exorcism that grossed $70 million worldwide. It looks like Nell Sweetzer’s last exorcism was not foolproof. She is back… and so are her demons.
Continuing where the first film left off, teenage Nell Sweetzer is found dirty and terrified in the woods having just escaped a demon ritual in which a cult helped her give birth to a demon baby. Confused and scared, Nell is examined by doctors but she doesn’t remember much about the previous few months except that as a result of everything, her family is now dead. She is moved into Davreaux – a girls’ halfway house in New Orleans, where she will try to put her life back together with the help of the therapist, Frank Merle. She even begins to date a boy named Chris and starts a job at a local hotel.
But something doesn’t feel right to Nell. She is being sought after by the demon who possessed her in the first Last Exorcism. It wants Nell, but in a different way than before…”
Head inside for the first full pic!
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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