Robert Eggers built a career on biblically accurate representations of things that would be terrible to live through: getting stalked by a witch (or is it vvitch?) in colonial America, being one of two guys working at a lighthouse with no one but each other and the world’s loudest seagulls for company, seeking revenge for your dead father across a barren and hostile Scandinavian landscape, and most recently, getting tricked by a vampire into giving up your horny wife. Though he doesn’t only make monster movies, monsters are one of Eggers’s trademarks. He wants us to look at evil in its most tangible self. Perhaps that’s why Eggers’s next monster, who, according to reports, is none other than Ebenezer Scrooge, feels so right. There have been several iterations of the Christmas-hating boss who learns a valuable lesson in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, involving anyone from the Muppets to animated ducks to actors in your local theater company. It’s the story of one grumpy, greedy man who hates Christmas so much that ghosts have to drop by on Christmas Eve to teach him how to be a good person. Willem Dafoe, who has collaborated with Eggers on his last three films, is reportedly stepping into the role of Scrooge, but he’d be just as menacing as any one of the ghosts.
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This is the third new project Eggers has been attached to since Nosferatu; earlier this year he teased his werewolf movie called, uh, Werwulf, and he’s also reported to be jumping into the Labyrinth sequel. His eagerness to dive into worlds of monsters and myth with an eye for gory reality has made his work thus far much more pleasurable than actually frightening (though there are plenty of scares as well). A Christmas Carol is so well-trod as to be basically myth, not unlike the Salem witch trials or Dracula. Eggers does his best when he can put his spin on familiar canon. Dickens’s story is for children, mostly, or rather, it has been until now. Once Eggers gets his spooky mitts on it, the next thing we know, the Ghost of Christmas Future will be Bill Skarsgård covered in warts and scars.
