Movies
Chucky vs. Annabelle a Dream of ‘Child’s Play’ Creator
Don Macini may just be the most consistent of the writer-director horror icons.
The creator of Child’s Play, and director of both Seed of Chucky and Curse of Chucky, dreams of a horror battle in the vein of Freddy vs Jason (a monster success for New Line Cinema in 2003).
This past weekend, Annabelle, the haunted doll film that was spun off from The Conjuring, nearly won box office gold, but still opened huge for an R-rated genre film.
Mancini talked to USA Today about the dream of pitting Chucky, from the Child’s Play films, against the Annabelle doll.
“I am hoping that at some future point we have Annabelle and Chucky team up,” says Mancini. “I can see that (even) in 20 years from now.”
There might even be a cameo for Annabelle in the seventh Child’s Play film, which Mancini is writing now.
“We would be into it, the only problem is that we are in different studios. That would probably be years worth of red tape to work it out,” says Mancini. “But if it all could be worked out, then yes, we’re very into it.”
There is even a power connection. Explains the site, Annabelle director John Leonetti was the director of photography for 1991’s Child’s Play 3.
In the meantime, Mancini vowed to be one of the first to see Annabelle, even just to inspect her fighting style.
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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