The Scene of Haunting in Silent Adaptations of A Christmas Carol

Murray Leeder

Murray Leeder University of Manitoba, Institute for the Humanities https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3315-5055

Résumé

This article argues for the “lanternic” or “phantasmago- rical” qualities of Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol, in which the ghosts are figures of authorship and manipulators of images. It further articles that the qual- ities carry over strongly into the story’s silent-era film adaptations, of which four (dated 1901, 1910, 1913 and 1923) are examined for a sense of medium awareness ex- pressed through film form. It ends with remarks on the 2009 Robert Zemeckis adaptation as a digital era-inheri- tor to this reflexive tendency.

Biographie de l'auteur

Murray Leeder, University of Manitoba, Institute for the Humanities

Murray Leeder is a Research Affiliate at the University of Manitoba’s Institute for the Humanities. He holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University. He the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).