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Lecture: “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge like it”: Where Victorian Ghost Stories and Film Analysis Meet
No Christmas season is complete without Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. From Muppets to classic retellings, this story regularly haunts the silver screen, but what is it about this one Victorian tale that calls to filmmakers for resurrection? A Disney version of this piece, directed by Robert Zemeckis and featuring Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, and Colin Firth opened in 2009. Although the reviews were mixed, an in-depth analysis demonstrates the film’s use of sound, lighting, and mise en scene brings to the fore that A Christmas Carol is a ghost story in the Victorian tradition. In this lecture, we explore the Victorian practice of telling ghost stories at Christmas and reevaluate Disney’s A Christmas Carol as the seasonal horror story it was meant to be.
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