Movies
Why ‘The Signal’ Would Have Been a Massive Hit In the 1990’s
Thanks to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, and his rash of self-masturbatory films with twists, we’re all pre-conditioned to watch for the big reveals in a movie.
Nearly every person I know feels the need to exclaim, “I figured out the twist!,” at some specific point in a film. That’s great, asshole. Movies aren’t video games, and you aren’t supposed to ruin the experience for yourself making guesses all the way through the feature. I guess living in a world of immediacy has its faults, considering people can’t sit still for 90 fucking minutes.
Anyways, I finally caught William Eubank’s sci-fi thriller The Signal, which stars Laurence Fishburne, as well as Brenton Thwaites, Olivia Cooke, Beau Knapp, Lin Shaye, Robert Longstreet, and Jeffrey Grover.
It follows a group of college students are lured to the middle of the desert by a hacker.
The movie has been out long enough that you shouldn’t be angry if I slightly spoil the movie in revealing that there’s a huge twist – which is the point of this article.
I loved The Signal, and feel like it’s being under appreciated. Why? Because we’re always waiting for the damn twist. Signal easily would have been a blockbuster back in the 1990’s. It has such an insane finale that people would have been talking about it for weeks, and critics would be proclaiming its brilliance upon the world.
Obviously, the cat is out of the bag now, but I still hope to sway you to rent the sci-fi brain fuck this coming weekend and enjoy it for what it is.
Seen in already? Talk below…
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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