Well, we certainly didn’t have this on our 2025 bingo card. According to Deadline, horror maestro Robert Eggers has his next project after Werwulf (shooting later this year) lined up: An adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with his longtime collaborator Willem Dafoe set to play Scrooge (this casting is unimpeachable). Like adding a shot of espresso to a glass of orange juice, this pairing of story and filmmaker seems unusual at first. However, it’s a surprisingly good combination (and if you don’t believe us, try it) and is rooted in a certain amount of history.
Like how Italians served up a lemon wedge with an espresso shot, it was a tradition in Victorian England to tell proper Ghost Stories at Christmastime, surrounded by friends and family, with a yule log presumably burning in the hearth. As anyone who has lived through a cold, dark Christmas season knows, it’s a creepy fucking time of year, and the combo, once again, makes sense. This trend eventually gave way to a literary genre (folks who couldn’t make up good stories still had to contribute, after all), and Dickens’ iconic work took this tradition to new heights of cultural recognition worldwide.
So, yeah. This is reasonably on track for Eggers, who specializes in making period horror flicks, and who seems to make fucking bank when his movies are released in December as opposed to, you know, April or something. Anyhow, we’ll have to wait until Werwulf is done before we get any more information on this one or the Labyrinth sequel he was working on with Sjon, which is a bummer because we have a lot of questions about the latter.
Good lord — if you think this is weird and unexpected, a Robert Eggers take on Labyrinth without Jim Henson or Bowie would be a trip and a half.