Movies
‘Ghostbusters’ Will Be Scarier Than Original?
It’s been raining Ghostbusters news over the past few months, but here’s something that’s not hearsay.
As we all should know by now, Paul Feig is directing for Sony/Columbia Pictures, and has opted for the reboot to be an all-female crew. Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer and Lizzy Caplan are all alleged to be interested in joining the new quartet of ‘busters.
I love the idea of flipping the script, so to speak, but I’ll be the first to admit it sounded gimmicky – as if the studio wanted to appease the recent screams for more female protagonists in entertainment. Feig, in an interview with Empire Magazine, responds to the accusations perfectly.
“A lot of people accused it of being a gimmick. I guess I can see the cynics’ view of it, but for me I just love working with funny women. People said, ‘Why don’t you do a mix?’ I’m just more interested in the idea of lady Ghostbusters. It’s the way my brain works.”
The aforementioned rumored cast is already enough to get me on board, but it’s nice to know this comes from a good place.
But that’s not the most interesting portion of the interview…
Feig has a very real goal – one I think is going to be extremely difficult to pull off. He wants the reboot to be scarier than the original…
“I want ours to be scarier than the original, to be quite honest. Katie Dipold and I are so focused on wanting to do scary comedy. We don’t want to hold back.”
He also speaks to why remake the film, which is actually an interesting perspective:
“There’s also the feeling that once the world knows ghosts and has seen them busted on such a large scale, they run the risk of becoming pedestrian. There’s something fun about introducing our world, which has never seen ghosts to the phenomenon of ghosts. I love origin stories and to introduce new characters.”
Origin stories are getting old, and feel incredibly lazy (especially over at Sony), but there’s a truth to his statement about the world within the movie and how they perceive the extraterrestrial. You can have a lot of fun with that.
Allegedly, the plan is to land “Game of Thrones” fav Peter Dinklage for the villain role. He would play the ghost of a murderer (sort of like Wes Craven’s Shocker, actually) who resurrects a ghost army based on historical characters.
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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