Movies
[Kill of the Week] Axed Down the Middle in ‘Wrong Turn 2’
Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
Here on Bloody Disgusting we’re big fans of Joe Lynch, whose new (and quite possibly best) film Mayhem (read our review) is now playing in limited theaters alongside a VOD release. Samara Weaving and “The Walking Dead” star Steven Yeun go on a bloody rampage through an office building in Lynch’s latest, and oh boy is it a fun one.
But 10 years before Lynch unleashed Mayhem, he took a Wrong Turn.
Lynch, an untested director at the time, was the man tasked with directing Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, released in 2007 as a sequel to the 2003 film. And with his debut feature, Lynch wasted absolutely no time winning over our gore-loving hearts and showing just what kind of filmmaker he was.
Within the first six minutes of Wrong Turn 2, “American Idol” contestant Kimberly Caldwell plays a version of herself in a sequence that instantly made me a fan of both Lynch and the film. Driving through West Virginia, Caldwell’s character hits a man while distracted by her phone, pulling over to the side of the road to check on him. This proves to be a life-ending mistake, as the man is a cannibal… and his family is not far behind.
After the man gruesomely bites her lip off, his three-fingered brother slams an axe directly into the top of Kimberly’s head, splitting her clean down the middle. Her guts spill out on the road, and the brothers each grab a side and drag her carcass away.
Sequels are rarely better than the first film. But Wrong Turn 2 defied those odds.
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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