These past two weeks I’ve been reading a short story anthology called Haunted Reels from Dark Matter Ink. The conceitIn literature, allowing a metaphor or unexpected comparison ... More is basically that if we take directors of horror films and ask them to write horror short stories (which is basically what they did for each other during the pandemic), we’d get some pretty fine terror. Well, some, anyway.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend reading it for about a half a dozen of the roughly 30 horror stories here (including “Muzzle” by the Pierce Brothers Brett and Drew, who I openly admit are former students of mine and also mighty fine filmmakers in that department including 2019’s The Wretched. End of gratuitous promo.) But I have to admit, six stories (well, five) out of 30 isn’t such a big hit for horror from people who breathe it. What went wrong?

If I had to guess, it’s that many missed a key idea of translation to a different medium: transformation. Creating story for a poem, podcast, movie, painting, symphony, short story, campfire talk, or novel are each significantly different acts, each with its own techniques for communicating its strengths. Medium, a kind of structure or installation for story, conditions the nature of the telling. Ultimately, it determines where the power of the story lies, and here, the nature of the horror revealed. 

Screenwriters to Prosers, At Their Worst

Take Haunted Reels at its worst. One writer, so caught up in the special effects of sound design, found opportunity for all-caps onomatopoeia virtually every other paragraph: “Quietly she snuck into the room. CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! She flipped the lightswitch but the light did not work. She carefully slipped into the bed with her husband. SMACK! She kissed him gently on the ear.” (Only-slightly-exaggerated demonstration my own.)

Several other writers seemed to have no clear concept of narrative point of view, sometimes substituting instead a camera point of view. “He came out of the desert, facing us. He was alone and had dozens of miles to go. We see his face, the sweat steaming away from it. And as we look ahead, the endless desert stretches away.” (Ditto.)

And what is missing from (all but five, well four) of the stories? Internal dialogue, metaphor, or nuanced diction in imagery. Instead, the writers lean heavily on stark visual images and mere summaries of character conflicts. It was as if, well, they were writing screenplays in prose form.

“Medium, a kind of structure or installation for story, conditions the nature of the telling.​”

Different Muscles

I can hardly blame them. They are largely all new to the form. And I would no more dare to write a screenplay that did as well. I don’t mean to be (overly) harsh. Instead, Haunted Reels has helped verify my hypothesis: that different mediums and structures demand different muscles. This isn’t a matter of style, but one of meaning. It’s the difference between ‘red’ and ‘scarlet,’ between ‘fear’ and ‘unconscious apprehension,’ or between the ‘CRACK! of a bat’ and 

the connection which surprised a shock up to his shoulder, one he had longed to feel if his fist ever once found Donny’s face, of the kick of his hunting rifle at 23, the drill press which took his sleeve and almost his hand at 47, of the too-early stroke he would feel at 52. There was little glorious in it, nothing of victory though the crowd cheers were plain enough; it felt to him, inexplicably, like a harbinger. 

Sure, prose can’t show us the image of that kid in the third row of the stands, watching and cheering, but we don’t need him. In moving to filmic image, navigating that translation of the internal, of the delicacy of nuance, into visual image requires a re-vision, a re-seeing of the written page. 

It may mean–as the story opens itself into a new structure–a shifting of attention and character, even of plot. But it should not abandon theme, though it may (should) play upon it if it wishes to honor the original.   

Filmic Flexing

It makes me sad when I hear uber-fans arguing over film plot or scenic details which do not match what they imagined or what the author disincluded. (It makes me more sad when those arguments involve prejudiced reactions like race or gender. Looking at you, Hunger Games and Star Wars fan-atics.) It’s not merely that their responses are petty, but their grasp of the power of storytelling is equally shallow. 

The fairly infamous Kubrick translation of King’s The Shining is a case in point. King’s book is really centered around our writer Jack’s fall into obsession, into his addiction to his work and to alcohol, and away from a family who he loves. Kubrick’s, largely, is about a haunted hotel and what happens when an already fairly crazed man is introduced into it. King hates the Kubrick film (and helped create a later TV miniseries of the book in 1997), but perhaps Kubrick understood (and even learned from his earlier partnership with Arthur C. Clarke on 2001) that leaning too heavily on those internal conflicts (so marvelously probed by King’s lengthy spelunking into the unconscious) could not play well on screen—so Jack’s internal demons became external ones; after all, only Jack and his hyper-sensitive son actually see them. In any event, Kubrick’s version received far more accolades (and memories) than King’s later TV retread which was more scene-for-scene true to the novel. 

And films sometimes, therefore, may even improve upon the original novel. I would never argue that Gregory Maguire’s Wicked is superior to the tightly-written and magically-uplifting stage musical or film. And anyone who has seen the difference when a Michael Crichton novel is handled literally (Congo, Sphere) vs. when it is transformed by a fine director (Jurassic Park, The Lost World) understands. The Wizard of Oz, Mean Girls, Jaws. There are plenty of examples of directors who know their storytelling craft better than novelists know their own.

Experiments in Translation

But this isn’t meant to be about comparing, which one is better. This is about the act of translation and the shifts in meaning which result. When the poetry of the novel cannot be carried over, what choices remain? 

I was amused and entertained by all of the directors who struggled with these decisions in adapting Shakespeare (already a partly visual medium) to film. How to keep the poetry? Some simply recreated a film version of the stage play, upgrading the camera angles and sets: 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing or any number of Hamlets. Some update the settings but weirdly keep the dialogue virtually whole: 1995’s Richard III or the1996 Dane/DiCaprio Romeo & Juliet; and still others playfully say “to hell with it” and preserve nothing but a trace of the original: 2023’s Anyone But You, 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You, or 2011’s Gnomeo & Juliet. 

No matter. In each case, the director (for the sake of simplicity) reasoned through creative choices to tell the written/staged tale in film. And each of the three approaches has had its share of wins and weiners. 

So what can I expect going forward into this 13 Days of Halloween exploration of books to horror films? Probably more of the same.  Along the way, however, I imagine we might find some specific techniques and compromises in each medium that impact both effective storytelling and the temperature of terror.