Editorials
5 Ways Capcom Can Save ‘Resident Evil 7’
This month has brought us the announcement of a remastered Resident Evil REmake, which may be followed up with a sequel to Resident Evil: Revelations and possibly even an Arklay TV series based on the franchise. All this news has heightened speculation over the direction of the canonical seventh game in the series.
Resident Evil 6 was a critical and commercial disappointment. Sales eventually topped five million, though Capcom had originally projected a gargantuan seven million copies sold. Combine that with the fact that critics mostly disliked it and fans were ambivalent toward its more action-oriented gameplay, and you have a series that is in desperate need of change.
The problem is, how do you reimagine a series that is always in flux? Think about the changes that have taken place over the course of the last seventeen years. What began as an eerie survival horror series slowly morphed into a horror-action epic of Bay-esque proportions. Resident Evil is not a franchise that stands still, so a single answer to the question of “How do we fix it?” cannot be had in this discussion.
However, given the overall direction of the last few games — ignoring, perhaps, all of the secondary, non-numbered titles bearing the Resident Evil logo — it might be possible to compile a list of ideas for Capcom to incorporate in order to bring the franchise back to a place where both fans and the company can be happy with Resident Evil 7.
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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