I really liked the part of A Prayer for Owen Meany where Owen joins the cast of the crappy old community theatre production of A Christmas Carol and breathes new life into it by making The Ghost of Christmas Future *actually terrifying*
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It's a ghost story Especially as a stage play, it gets all its juice from the Ghosts being scary The more you drain that energy from it and make the Ghosts friendly the less there's any point to the story
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My whole hobbyhorse is that even though Future is the most obviously and traditionally scary Ghost (being among other things an aspect of the Reaper), the other two Ghosts in canon are *also* scary af and people don't play them that way nearly enough
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Past is not a hot girl, or an adorable child, it's some kind of strange androgynous emotionless being of blinding light Present is the most human one, but he's unsettlingly rapid-aging in real time, until at midnight Scrooge realizes he's an old man at death's door
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(Owen Meany is right, of course most of us think the scariest Ghost is the one who knows what's going to happen, the inevitable consequences coming down the pike But, shit The older you get, the less scared you are of that And the more you're scared of his opposite)
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(You remember Don Draper's mantra, "This didn't happen"? The Ghost of Christmases Past is the Ghost who tells you "Yes, IT DID HAPPEN" The idea of a total recall pill, of having to live through all the stuff that happened AGAIN and know NONE of it can be changed That's hell)
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A Christmas Carol Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker
Being ravaged for parts by pop-culture until you forget that they are actually two genius and creative pieces of work.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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The old (pre-Tudor, at least) Christmas traditions like home -invading mummers, horse skull singers, and beings like Krampus were all pretty spooky bits of Christmas. It feels like Carol and Nightmare tap into an older Christmas tradition of the macabre, to me.
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even post tudor there was a tradition of ghost stories in england, at least according to smithsonian magazine.
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In England, telling ghost stories used to be a Christmas tradition. Not sure why... but that's why the Doctor Who Christmas special is usually some sort of "ghost" story.
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