Ti West, the slow-burn horror director who now has Johnny Depp playing Scrooge

Ti West

Photo: tanka v / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 5, 1980 Wilmington, Delaware, United States
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Pearl, X, MaXXXine
Awards	Sitges Film Festival · Gérardmer Film Festival Syfy Jury Prize · Best of Puchon, Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival · Fangoria Hall of Fame

Ti West has spent most of his career asking audiences to do the one thing contemporary horror rarely requests of them: wait. His films linger on a babysitter drifting through a dark mansion or on two hotel clerks listening to an empty corridor, and they trust the dread to assemble itself. That method now faces its biggest test. Ebenezer, his take on the Dickens ghost story with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, is a Paramount holiday release, and a filmmaker who built his name on small budgets and long silences is suddenly working on a studio’s clock.

The patience was learned far from Hollywood. West grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, in a household he has described as suburban middle class, and his unusual first name, Timon, is the surname of his maternal grandfather. Low-budget splatter films by Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi pushed him toward a camera. At the School of Visual Arts in New York, his professor Kelly Reichardt introduced him to Larry Fessenden, the independent horror filmmaker who became his mentor and paid for his first two features.

Those features, The Roost in 2005 and Trigger Man in 2007, were rough apprentice work. West, born in October 1980, was still in his twenties when The House of the Devil premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009 and showed what he was after. Set during the satanic panic of the 1980s and shot on 16mm, it copied the grammar of that decade rather than its decor alone: zooms instead of dolly moves, yellow opening credits over freeze-frames, a promotional copy sent out on VHS in a clamshell box. The crew stayed at the Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, Connecticut, during the shoot, and the staff’s insistence that the building was haunted became The Innkeepers, a ghost story with Sara Paxton and Pat Healy that premiered at South by Southwest in 2011.

The same years held his worst experience. West was hired to direct Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, then saw it re-edited over his objections. He asked to replace his name with the industry pseudonym Alan Smithee and was refused, and he has disowned the film ever since. He went back to working with friends. He shot the “Second Honeymoon” segment of the anthology V/H/S in 2012, acted for Joe Swanberg in Drinking Buddies and for Adam Wingard in You’re Next, and made The Sacrament in 2013, a found-footage drama modelled on the Jonestown massacre and produced by Eli Roth, which premiered in the Horizons section at Venice. In 2016 he wrote, directed and edited In a Valley of Violence, a western with Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, and then spent several years directing episodes of other people’s television, including Rian Johnson‘s Poker Face.

The reinvention came through A24. X, a slasher set in 1979 on a Texas farm where a crew is trying to shoot an adult film, was filmed in New Zealand during the pandemic. When a lockdown halted production, West used the pause to write a prequel, and Mia Goth, who plays both the young heroine and the elderly killer, co-wrote the script. The two films were shot back to back. X opened in March 2022 and grossed about $15 million worldwide on a budget of roughly $5 million; Pearl followed that September, a Technicolor-styled portrait of a farm girl’s murderous hunger for fame that earned West the best director prize at Sitges. MaXXXine closed the trilogy in 2024, moving Goth’s character to 1985 Los Angeles under the shadow of the Night Stalker killings, and with around $22 million worldwide it became the highest-grossing film of the series.

The craft has never silenced the charge that follows him. Since The House of the Devil, a strand of critics has argued that his homages are closer to imitation than reinvention: The Hollywood Reporter called that film derivative, and the Chicago Reader complained that X borrowed the surface of its 1970s models without their argument about economic desperation, preferring to punish its characters for laughs. The slow burn that admirers praise is, for others, simply slow. And his one earlier brush with outside control, on Cabin Fever 2, ended with a film he would not sign. That history is what makes Ebenezer more than a career step.

The past year has kept him busy on both screens. In May 2026 he directed “Our History”, the sixth episode of Widow’s Bay, Katie Dippold’s horror comedy for Apple TV starring Matthew Rhys. He has also directed music videos for Justin Timberlake’s “No Angels” and for Kid Cudi, who acted in X, on “Neverland”. Ebenezer was announced in October 2025 at Paramount, with a screenplay by Nathaniel Halpern and a cast that surrounds Depp with Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley, Andrea Riseborough and Tramell Tillman as the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit and Sam Claflin as Fred. The trailers sold it as a gothic chiller rather than a family carol.

The first reactions, after press screenings and a world premiere in London’s Leicester Square on November 9, split along a line familiar to anyone who has followed West. Critics largely praised Depp’s Scrooge and the film’s gothic design, its sets and sound, while the dissenting voices asked what one more version of a story told so often actually adds.

Away from sets, West married the Australian DJ and producer Alison Wonderland on Halloween 2024 at a chapel in Las Vegas; the couple had their first child, a son, the previous year.

Ebenezer opens in cinemas in the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain on November 13. Its opening weekend will show whether a director who taught a niche audience to sit through silence can hold a holiday crowd the same way.