Editorials
Remember When “Scooby-Doo” Spoofed ‘The Blair Witch Project’?
In mid-1999, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s found footage film The Blair Witch Project came out and quickly became the movie event of the year. Yes, it ended up being the 10th highest grossing film of the year but each movie that beat its domestic box office gross was a major studio production, including films like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and The Matrix. The Blair Witch Project was the indie horror film that brought about the found footage craze that we are still seeing today in films like As Above, So Below, The Taking of Deborah Logan, and [REC].
The popularity of The Blair Witch Project was so great that Cartoon Network created their own spoof of the film using the characters of “Scooby-Doo“, airing the parody in segments during commercial breaks of their “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?” marathon on Halloween Day of 1999. At the end of the marathon, the segments were combined into the final full-length parody, which ran just under 10 minutes.
The spoof, which is pretty damn funny, follows the gang as they investigate a curse in a forest. Each character is drawn over a real filmed background, which is something they poke fun at. Shaggy breaks the 4th wall and nervously comments, “Things just look more…realistic!”
Poking fun at The Blair Witch Project but also poking fun at the show’s own silly tropes, the parody is a wonderful meta recognition of how silly horror can sometimes be. It’s also perfect for children, the intended audience, as they can then learn to not take horror 100% seriously. While it’s sometimes necessary, sometimes you are allowed to have a laugh!
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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