Movies
Every Freddy Krueger Kill in 1-Minute is the Video You Need Today
Wanna suck face?
Freddy Krueger has claimed over 40 victims since arriving on the big screen back in 1984, a number that quite frankly pales in comparison to the likes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. What Freddy lacks in quantity, however, he damn sure makes up for in something even more important: quality.
Throughout the course of the 7-film original Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, Freddy laid waste to his teenage victims in some of the most clever and bonkers ways in the entire history of the slasher sub-genre. My personal favorite kill? Freddy turning poor Debbie into a roach in Dream Master was a creative high point of slasher cinema.
What about Robert Englund’s favorite kill? You might be surprised to discover that it’s from one of the most maligned sequels, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.
But why only shine the spotlight on one or two of Freddy’s kills? Check out all of them, from the original film through New Nightmare, edited into one 60-second killing spree!
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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