Editorials
What’s The Biggest Problem With Modern Horror?
That headline isn’t a question I’m going to answer in this piece, it’s a question you’re going to answer.
2013 was the best year for horror in quite some time, and it was certainly the best since I started here at BD in 2011. This was the first year where I had at least 10 movies I wanted to include in my year-end “best of” list (for the record it had 12, but I could have easily added a few more and felt good about it). My time at the site aside, it just felt great as a horror fan in general. I’ve loved the genre ever since I saw An American Werewolf In London at age 10 and the best scary movies still give me a high, that slightly illicit feeling when something is thrilling me and I’m not sure if the filmmakers (or me as the viewer) should be allowed to get away with it.
This year gave me plenty of that, or as much as I can expect as an adult who sometimes has to remind himself that he’s allowed to be unabashedly thrilled at times. It was also fun to watch you guys have fun with the unexpected surplus of good titles out there. Even more interesting? Watching what you guys didn’t like. There was some stuff I loved that a lot of you hated and some stuff a lot of you loved that I couldn’t really get my head around.
Is this endemic of a larger problem? Absolutely not. The fact is, everyone is different and if we all liked the same shit things would get boring pretty damn fast. I think of it as a blessing that I’m continually blindsided by opinions that I didn’t see coming; opinions I often see a lot of merit in once I really consider them. For instance, it seems like a lot of you guys dislike All The Boys Love Mandy Lane. I myself love (and will likely continue to love) that film. The fact that its characters are all well drawn, fun and fully realized is pull enough for me. I get that some folks were expecting it to reinvent the wheel (this stuff tends to happen when you hear about something for a few years before seeing it), and I can empathize with that first viewing where you have to recalibrate your expectations away from the film that was in your head and towards the film you’re actually watching. Then again, there seems to be a segment of the audience that was able to do that and found that the movie simply wasn’t their thing – fair enough.
In turn, there are also some elements in emerging horror that turn a lot of people on while leaving me cold. I hate it when horror movies are relentlessly dour and brutal with no sense of fun. Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy some fairly intense, gory and mean stuff in the right context. But there’s an awful lot of stuff out there that seems to be begging to be taken seriously on the sole virtue that it takes itself seriously. To me, it’s the genre equivalent of what started happening to superhero films after The Dark Knight – properties that didn’t need to be mired in gloom were subjected to it anyway and thusly embraced by a fanbase looking outwards for their love to be validated (as if their own fandom wasn’t enough). There’s no need to make something not fun on purpose, even in horror (granted when it’s something like Irreversible and has something to say that’s one thing, but usually we don’t get that kind of urgency), it just comes across as immature to me.
We’re not going to “solve” anything here, one man’s fix is another man’s failure. But it’s always fun to talk. What’s YOUR biggest problem with modern horror (besides the fact that the next Friday The 13th will be found footage)?
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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