Horror Obsessive
Ti West spent the last several years proving low-budget horror could still rattle a mainstream audience, turning grindhouse and slasher tropes into something genuinely strange across X, Pearl, and MaXXXine. His next project looks like a hard left turn: a starry, studio-scale adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It isn’t. Strip away the carols and the goose dinner and what’s left is a haunted man alone at night, forced through three visitations by increasingly uncanny visitors. West isn’t leaving horror behind. He is finally pointing a horror director’s camera at the ghost story hiding inside the world’s most beloved Christmas tale.
Paramount will release Ebenezer in theaters on November 13, 2026, with Johnny Depp starring as Ebenezer Scrooge. Nathaniel Halpern wrote the adaptation, and the ensemble around Depp reads like a British prestige drama, not a holiday movie: Andrea Riseborough, Ian McKellen, Tramell Tillman, Rupert Grint, Daisy Ridley, Sam Claflin, Charlie Murphy, Arthur Conti, and Ellie Bamber all star. Per Deadline’s reporting, the film follows Scrooge’s supernatural journey to face his past, present, and future and fight for a second chance, with Stephen Deuters and Jason Forman executive producing.
A Ghost Story Wearing a Christmas Coat
That framing matters more than it looks. Marley’s ghost dragging chains through Scrooge’s bedroom is one of the oldest jump-scare blueprints in English-language fiction, predating the modern haunted house story by decades. The three spirits are not metaphors dressed up as ghosts. They are ghosts, full stop, sent to force a man to watch his own death play out in front of him. Dickens wrote a Christmas story that runs on the same engine as any haunting: dread building toward a reckoning a man cannot avoid.
Per Deadline’s reporting, Ebenezer is “a thrilling ghost story set in Dickens’ London” that follows Scrooge’s “supernatural journey to face his past, present and future and fight for a second chance.”
The tagline does the same trick that made Pearl land two years ago: “The name you know. The story you don’t.” Everyone assumes they already know how this goes, three ghosts, a change of heart, a happy ending. Betting the marketing on “you know the name, not the story” is a horror movie’s pitch, not a family film’s, and it is the smallest detail in the rollout that says the most about what West is actually making.
Six Adaptations In, First from a Horror Filmmaker
Dickens’ story has been filmed constantly. Alastair Sim wore the nightcap in the 1951 film Scrooge, Albert Finney sang through the 1970 musical version of Scrooge, George C. Scott took the role for television in A Christmas Carol in 1984, Bill Murray satirized the tradition in Scrooged in 1988, Michael Caine played it straight opposite puppets in The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992, and Jim Carrey went motion-capture in A Christmas Carol in 2009. None of those films came from a director whose body of work runs through horror. That gap is what Ebenezer aims to close, and it counts as a genuinely new angle on a story remade almost every decade.
Whether Ebenezer earns its scares stays an open question until November. But a horror director taking the genre’s most disguised ghost story seriously, instead of treating the haunting as background dressing for a redemption arc, deserves attention regardless of the season it gets marketed for. If West lets the dread sit the way he did in X, this could be the first Christmas Carol adaptation in decades built to actually unsettle its audience, not just warm them up for the ending.
Quick Takes
- Paramount will release Ebenezer, Ti West’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, in theaters on November 13, 2026.
- Johnny Depp stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, with a screenplay by Nathaniel Halpern.
- The ensemble includes Andrea Riseborough, Ian McKellen, Tramell Tillman, Rupert Grint, Daisy Ridley, Sam Claflin, Charlie Murphy, Arthur Conti, and Ellie Bamber.
- Per Deadline’s reporting, the story follows Scrooge’s supernatural journey through his past, present, and future.
- Stephen Deuters and Jason Forman serve as executive producers on the film.
