The Ebenezer Trailer Remembers A Christmas Carol Is a Ghost Story

Johnny Depp will get swallowed by his personal mattress within the first trailer for Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol. Wes Craven pulled him right into a mattress again in 1984, in his first display screen position, and A Nightmare on Elm Avenue turned that mattress right into a geyser. Greater than forty years later, Ti West sends him again underneath. The shot lasts a second or two, simple to overlook, and it says loads about what sort of Christmas film Paramount thinks it’s promoting.

Paramount dropped the footage Thursday as a part of its San Diego Comedian-Con push, sooner or later after a first poster launched Depp’s Scrooge underneath the tagline “The title you recognize. The story you don’t.” West directs from a script by Nathaniel Halpern, the creator of Outer Vary, and the movie reaches theaters on November 13, 2026. The official synopsis guarantees “an exciting ghost story set in Dickens’ London, following one man’s supernatural journey to face his previous, current and future as he fights for a second probability at redemption.”

Learn that synopsis once more. No heartwarming, no beloved, no cherished household custom. Paramount is promoting a ghost story, which occurs to be what Dickens wrote within the first place.

What the trailer reveals

Blood pink textual content opens the trailer and reintroduces Depp as “the Grasp of Misfits,” a nod to 4 a long time of oddballs, earlier than he seems in interval gown and delivers the road “It’s good to be again.” The London round him runs on two registers. By day it’s a snow-covered postcard the place Scrooge pelts passersby with snowballs, geared toward their heads, thrown with actual spite. After darkish the ghosts arrive and the postcard curls on the edges.

Andrea Riseborough’s Ghost of Christmas Previous drifts by the footage as a pale spectral determine, nearer to a Victorian seance {photograph} than the nice and cozy glowing information most diversifications favor. Ian McKellen’s Jacob Marley stays quiet and nonetheless whereas Depp’s Scrooge rages at him. The stillness is worse. After which the mattress folds Scrooge into the darkish, as if the home itself joined the haunting.

None of this appears to be like like a rewrite. The beats packed into the 82 seconds are those each reader is aware of: the counting home, Bob Cratchit, the three spirits, an previous man compelled to look at his personal life play again. What West has modified is the temperature. The advertising and marketing by no means makes use of the phrase horror, and the trailer doesn’t want it to.

Depp himself performs it larger than the gloom suggests. His Scrooge sneers and mutters by the daylight scenes, then reacts to the spirits with a wide-eyed panic that sits nearer to his gothic oddball period than to a granite Victorian miser. It’s his first lead in a serious studio movie in years, and Paramount clearly is aware of it, for the reason that trailer spends its opening seconds reintroducing him. Whether or not the movie can maintain comedy and dread in the identical body is a November query.

A haunting wants the fitting landlord

West spent the X trilogy, that means X, Pearl and MaXXXine, on interval settings and on characters who wished larger lives and have been ruined by the wanting. Pearl wished the stage. Maxine wished fame. Scrooge is the one who really obtained all the pieces he requested for, and Ebenezer is in regards to the bill arriving. A filmmaker who builds dread out of wallpaper, persistence and silence now has a Victorian home, a responsible man and three spirits with limitless entry. That’s not stunt hiring. It’s a match.

The supporting solid runs deep. Severance’s Tramell Tillman performs the Ghost of Christmas Current and Rupert Grint performs Bob Cratchit, alongside Daisy Ridley, Sam Claflin, Charlie Murphy, Arthur Conti and Ellie Bamber in roles Paramount has not absolutely detailed. Emma Watts produced, with Stephen Deuters and Jason Forman among the many government producers. The manufacturing started filming in London and Dublin this previous January, a fast turnaround for a movie this dimension.

Dickens obtained there first

No person is forcing horror onto this materials. Dickens put it on the 1843 title web page: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Marley walks in sporting chains he cast hyperlink by hyperlink. Spirits enter a locked residence every time they please. The ultimate imaginative and prescient is a uncared for grave with Scrooge’s personal title on the stone. The hotter diversifications, together with those with singing greens, have carried the story superbly for many years, however they carry it by turning down the amount on the corpse on the middle. West doesn’t appear within the quantity knob.

Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol opens in theaters on November 13, 2026.

So the ground is yours. Would you like a Christmas Carol that treats its ghosts like ghosts? And which model nonetheless owns the season for you: Sim, Scott, Murray, or the Muppets?