Movies
Who is Resurrecting ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’?
While Universal Pictures isn’t 100% sure how they’re going to begin unrolling their new monster universe, it’s looking like The Bride of Frankenstein could possibly follow this summer’s The Mummy on June 9th.
Deadline is reporting that Bill Condon, who directed two of the Twilight sequels as well as the live-action Beauty and the Beast, is in early talks to take the helm of the remake. They add that Condon and Uni are both excited to collaborate on The Bride of Frankenstein, which Condon has said in previous interviews is one of his favorite classic monster movies of all time. The original, which starred Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff, was directed by James Whale back in 1935.
The Bride of Frankenstein remake is being produced by Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan from a script by David Koepp (Uni’s first two Jurassic Park films) that is said to have kind of a feminist bent to the new story.
No word on if Angelina Jolie is still the studio’s target. She was rumored to be in the mix back in 2015.
We still think Tom Cruise, who stars in The Mummy, is being set up as the new Van Helsing. So, it would be interesting to see if he ends up as part of the Bride storyline.
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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