Movies
Warner Bros. Taps Black List Writer for H.H. Holmes Murders
Warner Bros has acquired The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America, the 2003 non-fiction book by Erik Larson, reports Deadline.
The studio has set Graham Moore to script the story of Dr. HH Holmes, one of the most notorious serial killers in Chicago history. Leonardo DiCaprio is attached to play Holmes. Moore created a stir with his spec script The Imitation Game, which was acquired by Warner Bros in a 7-figure spec deal before it was judged to be the top script on The Black List that was released earlier this week.
Warner Bros acquired the project from Appian Way partners DiCaprio and Jennifer Killoran and Double Features partners Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher.
They will produce, and they acquired the novel late last year with “DiCaprio attached to play Holmes, the 19th Century equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. A cunning charmer, Holmes preyed on anywhere from 27 to 200 people at a time when the city of Chicago was enthralled with hosting the World’s Fair of 1893. Holmes constructed The World’s Fair Hotel, an inn more lethal than the Bates Motel, especially for young single women. The sociopath used charm and guile to lure guests into what became known as a “murder castle,” a haunt that had a gas chamber, crematorium and a dissecting table where Holmes would murder his victims and strip their skeletons to sell for medical and scientific study.” Watch this amazing doc on H. H. Holmes:
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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