Movies
Darren Lynn Bousman Sells Untitled Conspiracy Pitch
After getting behind the camera for Saw II-IV, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Mother’s Day and 11-11-11, director Darren Lynn Bousman is taking his talents into the “thriller” genre selling an untitled pitch for a cerebral thriller to Andrew Adamson and Aron Warner’s Strange Weather Films shingle that is said to be “quite violent.”
Bousman also plans to produce and direct the project, a thriller in the vein of The Parallax View and The Firm involving flash mobs.
“It’s exciting getting more back into creating my own material,” Bousman told BD. “This year I sold a monster script I wrote, ’11-11-11,’ and now this new project. I can’t say a lot about it – it’s not ‘horror’ per se – but more of a dark thriller.”
He continues comparing it to classic conspiracy thrillers: “I love movies like ‘The Game, ‘ ‘The Firm,’ ‘The Star Chamber’, etc – films that live in paranoia and conspiracy. I have always been fascinated in what ‘evil’ people and corporations are capable of…” Juicy!
Bousman’s Mother’s Day is awaiting release. He currently is in post on 11-11-11, a religious horror that will take on the idea of 11 gates of Heaven and how on 11:11 on the 11th day of the 11th month, the 11th gate will open up and something from another world will enter the earthly realm for 49 minutes.
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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