Two gentlemen collecting for the poor stand in a gray London counting house and ask Johnny Depp’s Scrooge what they should put him down for, and he answers with one flat word, “Nothing.” Then he shows them the door with a cackle that sounds like it has been rehearsed for decades. That is how the second trailer for “Ebenezer” opens its story proper, and it is the most traditional thing in a trailer otherwise determined to make “A Christmas Carol” frightening again. Paramount released it on October 1st, ahead of the film’s November 13th opening in theaters.
The film is directed by Ti West, the horror filmmaker behind “X”, “Pearl” and “MaXXXine”, from a script by Nathaniel Halpern, and it marks Depp’s first Hollywood studio movie since 2018. The cast around him is stacked: Ian McKellen plays Jacob Marley, Rupert Grint plays Bob Cratchit, Andrea Riseborough is the Ghost of Christmas Past and Tramell Tillman is the Ghost of Christmas Present. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for both “Ebenezer” trailers and for how the film handles each of the three spirits.
The film is directed by Ti West, the horror filmmaker behind “X”, “Pearl” and “MaXXXine”, from a script by Nathaniel Halpern, and it marks Depp’s first Hollywood studio movie since 2018.”
The new trailer runs two minutes and thirty-six seconds, close to double the length of the first, which Paramount put online in July around Depp’s in-character appearance at San Diego Comic-Con. It also carries its own on-screen captions, which makes every line easy to follow, and the lines are where much of the fun lives. After the charity collectors suggest he wishes to remain anonymous, Scrooge corrects them with the old line, “I wish to be left alone,” and Depp leans on every syllable as if it were a punchline he had been waiting all year to deliver.
Then the Paramount logo appears in a fog bank, a voice whispers “Ebenezer,” and a face looms out of the brass knocker on his front door, which is the cue for the film to change genre. McKellen’s Marley arrives gray and decayed in Scrooge’s bedroom with the classic warning, “You will be haunted by three spirits.” Scrooge’s reply is where West and Halpern start having fun with Dickens, because this Scrooge tries to negotiate: “Perhaps I could just meet with them all at once and have it over and done with.” It is a joke, but a very in-character one. It shows the bargaining instinct of a man who sees even his own damnation as an appointment to be shortened.
Riseborough’s Ghost of Christmas Past is the trailer’s most striking design, a pale figure in a white veil that looks closer to a Victorian mourning photograph than to the glowing child of older adaptations. “Walk with me into your past,” she tells him. “I shall not leave this bed,” Scrooge declares, clutching the covers. Moments later he is being dragged across the floor and shouting “Let go of me, bed!” as the bed flings him out. That beat captures the tone the trailer is selling, which is genuinely eerie imagery undercut, deliberately, by a lead performance that keeps finding the comedy in terror.
Tillman’s Ghost of Christmas Present is introduced at a candlelit feast, wrapped in fur and tearing into a banquet, and he greets Scrooge with a dry “You’re late.” Scrooge, unable to help himself, remarks on the spirit’s “feisty appetite.” Tillman, who broke out as Mr. Milchick in “Severance”, plays the part with a stillness that suggests the warmth of the original character may be in shorter supply here, although two shots are too little to judge a performance on. Between the spirits, the trailer drops its tagline in red capitals: “Think you know his story? Think again.”
The past sequences carry the emotional weight, and they look closer to the novella than the horror marketing suggests. There is a crowded, lamp-lit dance hall that reads as Fezziwig’s party, a young woman in red who calls his name, and an older Scrooge watching from the edges. “What was she to you?” a voice asks. “Everything,” he answers. A younger Ebenezer is told “You can’t see who you’ve become,” and in the trailer’s best moment the old man shouts at his own younger self, “You go after her! You will regret this moment for the rest of your miserable life!” It is a scene that could carry the whole film if the rest of it earns it.
The horror arrives in earnest with the last spirit. A hooded figure stands in a snowy street, a crow takes flight, and Scrooge appears to be pitched down into an open grave, the moment Variety described as Depp “getting buried alive.” Earlier, a crowd of ragged, corpse-like figures surges toward him through a tunnel while a spirit offers, “You’re welcome to take your chances out there,” and Scrooge replies, without much hesitation, “I’d rather not.” There are also brief, snarling faces in the dark that look designed to make an audience jump, which is exactly what West does well.
The trailer does not hide the ending, presumably because almost everyone knows it. Scrooge throws open a window on Christmas morning and shouts “I’m alive!” to a boy in the street, then admits, “I’m alive! I don’t know what to do,” before capering around his room in his nightclothes. Later he laughs so hard at a Christmas gathering that he has to apologize: “Forgive me, I do not know where that sound came from.” The closing card, “The holidays begin with a humbug,” is a fair summary of the whole approach, which is to make the dark stretch darker so that the turn at the end lands harder.
West is an interesting choice for this, and a more natural one than it first looks. His films have always been about atmosphere and patience, about letting dread build in old houses and long corridors, and Empire reports that he has said some of his earliest exposure to horror came from adaptations of “A Christmas Carol”. Dickens’s story is, after all, a ghost story at its core, with a visitation from a dead man and a vision of the old miser’s own grave. Plenty of versions over the years have softened that. This one clearly will not.
The supporting cast suggests Paramount is treating the film as a prestige holiday release rather than a novelty. Daisy Ridley, Sam Claflin, Charlie Murphy, Arthur Conti and Ellie Bamber also appear, though Paramount has not said which roles they play, and nobody has yet been named as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Variety’s cast list also includes Henry Lloyd-Hughes. Variety reports the marketing line, and it reads like a challenge to every previous version: “The name you know, the story you don’t.”
Then there is the matter of Depp himself, which the marketing does not avoid so much as lean into. The first trailer opened by invoking his old roles, Jack Sparrow and Edward Scissorhands among them, under a card announcing “The Master Of Misfits Returns”, and both Deadline and Empire noted his Scrooge saying “It’s good to be back.” His last studio film was “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” in 2018, after which he was dropped from the franchise and worked mostly abroad, including the French period film “Jeanne du Barry”. His 2022 defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard is the backdrop to all of it. A jury awarded him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages, and awarded Heard $2 million on her counterclaim.
Whether audiences show up for that comeback is the open question, and “Ebenezer” is not his only bet. He is also set to star in “Day Drinker”, a Lionsgate thriller with Madelyn Cline and Penélope Cruz, which Variety reports is due in March 2027. For now, though, this is the test case, and Paramount has given it a sensible slot: a mid-November opening, two weeks before Thanksgiving, when the holiday season is just starting to fill theaters. On the evidence of these two and a half minutes, the film might be the rare “Christmas Carol” that is scary enough to be worth watching in October.
What Do You Think? Is Ti West the right director to turn “A Christmas Carol” into a horror film? Does Johnny Depp’s Scrooge look like a comeback or a curiosity? And which spirit do you most want to see on the big screen in November?
See you on the next binge!
