Movies
First Word on ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ Remake
Bloody Disgusting has been on the forefront of everything related to Anchor Bay’s I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman) remake, which is currently lensing in Shreveport, LA. With the cast locked in and Steven Monroe behind the camera, not much is known other than Anchor Bay is pushing to get this out by October of 2010. Over this holiday weekend Moviehole caught up with Monroe who talked about his love for the original, how they’ve modernized this revenge tale and a bit about who he thinks is going to be a big time star.
Pictured: Sarah Butler
In the original, a woman is abducted, brutally attacked and raped and then left for dead. She survives, hunts her attackers and dispatches them in graphic ways. Director Steven Monroe talked a bit about upping the ante.
“We wanted to stay as true to the original as possible while making sure it was updated in a few ways,” Monroe tells Moviehole.net in an exclusive first ever interview. “There is one additional lead character, a Sheriff played by Andrew Howard, and of course we upped the brutality and length of the tortures and kills – as they were quite short in the original – which was really a disturbing Thriller at heart not a Horror film. I also wanted to update the look of the film and give it a very voyeuristic quality and gritty realism.”
In the original 1978 film Camille Keaton played Jennifer Hills, a woman dead set on revenge. Sarah Butler takes over the role in the remake, an up-and-comer that Monroe thinks will become a huge star in the near future.
“I believe Sarah Butler is going to be a huge star,” Monroe says of the actress playing heroine, Jennifer. “She took this role on fearlessly and nailed it like I don’t think anyone else could have. I can’t and will never say enough about her. There are also a lot of horror fans out there already complaining that the cast is all no names, I can personally guarantee you that no actress with a name would have had the guts to pull of what Sarah did or went through during shooting, no way. She is awesome.’”
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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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