Movies
‘You Shall Not Sleep’ Trailer Awakens to Strong ‘Conjuring’ Vibe
Gustavo Hernández is back with his next horror film You Shall Not Sleep (No Dormirás), which Fox International is releasing in 2018.
One of the most underrated of the found-footage craze was Hernández‘s festival hit La Casa Muda, which was eventually remade here in the States under the title The Silent House starring Elizabeth Olsen.
In his You Shall Not Sleep,
“In an abandoned psychiatric hospital, an avant-garde theater group experimented with insomnia for the preparation of the montage of a work created twenty years ago by a group of patients. With the passage of days without sleep, they reach new thresholds of perception, that face them to energize and histories hidden of the place…
“When Bianca, a young promise of the theater, joins the cast, competing for the lead role, must survive not only the intensity of work and her companions, but an unknown force that pushes her, like the others, to the tragic Denouement of the original staging.” Belén Rueda, Eva De Dominici, and Natalia de Molina star.
The full trailer has been released, and while there are no English subtitles, it still looks bonkers. It reminds me of the classic “Russian Experiment” CreepyPasta story in which sleep deprivation brings out some sort of internal demon. However, in You Shall Not Sleep, it appears the pain and suffering are self-inflicted. The trailer looks dope and carries many shots that appear to be inspired by James Wan’s horror library…
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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