Movies
‘Kill List’ Director Taking Over Sci-Fi ‘High Rise’
Sightseers and Kill List helmer Ben Wheatley is newly on board to direct Jeremy Thomas’ long-gestating JG Ballard adaptation High Rise, reports ScreenDaily.
Kill List and A Field in England writer Amy Jump has written the script with Film4 on board as backers and HanWay handling international sales.
Thomas and Wheatley are lining up a 2014 UK shoot for the ‘faithful’ adaptation of Ballard’s unnerving 1975 novel about life in a modern tower block spiralling out of control.
“Set in a luxury high-rise building, the book follows a group of affluent tenants hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on ‘enemy’ floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem.
Human society slips into violent reverse as the inhabitants of the ultra-modern high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.“
The satire is a long-time passion project for Thomas, who was a friend of iconic writer Ballard, who died in 2009.
Splice director Vincenzo Natali had long been attached to direct his and Richard Stanley’s adaptation of the book but when the rights for the project recently lapsed Thomas decided to take the film in another direction. Thomas nearly made the film in the late 1970s, with Nicolas Roeg directing.
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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