← Back to the films
Original illustration: An engraved Victorian counting house with an empty spectral overcoat, chain and fireplace beneath the title.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

Fantasy drama

Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost

StrangeGentle Great first watch · Easy Fantasy drama

Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by Marley’s ghost and visions that compress Dickens’s Christmas story into a few inventive minutes.

Year
1901
Director
Walter R. Booth
Country
United Kingdom

What to expect

This is the earliest surviving screen adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Walter R. Booth uses superimposition and staged apparitions to make memory and warning visible before feature-length literary cinema had settled its rules.

How to ease in

The film assumes that viewers know Dickens. Treat each apparition as a signpost—past, present, and possible future—rather than waiting for the novel’s full chain of explanations.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes supernatural imagery, poverty, death, and a very condensed surviving narrative.
Momo's Note May contain spoilers Who is Momo? →
Open the note ↓ Close the note ↑

I like how a story associated with abundance survives here as a handful of urgent images. The missing detail makes each ghost feel less like a character than a thought Scrooge can no longer avoid.

— Momo

Momo thinking about this film

Credits & versions

Version map

Surviving BFI National Archive fragmentThe Library of Congress describes the original as about five minutes long, with about three and a half minutes surviving at the BFI National Archive. These approximate figures do not establish the exact duration of a particular viewing copy.Source: Library of Congress — More Favorite ScroogesRuntime reference · Checked 2026-09-24

Where to go next

Want a gentler, shorter, or stranger next film? Ask Momo for something like this →
Momo is on shift. Visit Momo Cinema →

Continue through the catalogue →