Movies
‘Lestat’ Reboot Happening Quickly…
TheWrap is reporting that The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone is in early talks to stake a claim on the new Lestat movie for Universal Pictures.
Boone is being eyed to both write and direct.
Rather than a remake of “Interview With the Vampire,” the new film is expected to draw from the second and third books in Rice’s series — “The Vampire Lestat” and “The Queen of the Damned” — and will likely be faithful to the source material.
Lestat de Lioncourt was played by Tom Cruise in Neil Jordan’s star-studded 1994 adaptation of “Interview With the Vampire,” though the character will be recast.
A few years back, Universal acquired the rights to author Anne Rice’s novels in “The Vampire Chronicles” series and set Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer to produce along with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.
Universal and Imagine will have an entire body of existing and future novels in Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles” series, including the adapted screenplay for “Tale of the Body Thief,” written by Rice’s son, author Christopher Rice.
Other novels in the series include “Interview with the Vampire” and the upcoming “Prince Lestat.”
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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