Books, Interviews, Movies
Yesterday, St. Martin’s Press republished John Dies At The End, a comedic horror novel by Cracked.com editor David Wong. The story began as a webseries in 2001 before it was printed as a novel in 2007.
It follows a pair of college dropouts- John and David (Yes, the latter is the author’s surrogate)- who, through an insane drug called Soy Sauce and an abnormally smart dog named Molly, encounter the supernatural and must stop an impending apocalypse.
Today, the author, with his usual sharp humor, enlightened HorrorCrush about the background of the book, the upcoming film adaptation from Phantasm director Don Coscarelli, and the future of John and David.
I used to daydream to escape the tedium of my old day job, because they didn’t let us have internet access. The fantasy I kept coming back to was about a team of ghost hunters who were really bad at ghost hunting. They kind of fell into it as a job, so they had the same attitude toward it as the people working in the cubicles around me. There was no Scooby-Doo sense of wonder about it, the whole thing was just a tedious annoyance that they sort of resented.
I had a personal website at the time and on Halloween one year I posted a short story about these guys, investigating a spirit possessing a freezer full of processed meat products. [Editor's Note: This first story appears as the Prologue of the novel. You'll never look at turkey, sausage, and ham the same way again.]
People seemed to really like it and it became a Halloween tradition on the site. I posted a new bit of story every year and it just took off from there. Five years later it was in print and I was getting offers on the film rights. Meanwhile I was still in the cubicle, feeling blindsided by the whole thing.
I have one hope: that the audience will feel the same way the reader feels after reading the book. They should walk out of the theater shaking their heads and saying, “What the hell just happened to us?”
What I DON’T want is a scene-by-scene retelling of the book. The worst book adaptations you’ve seen tried to follow that formula.
I made the mistake of seeing Watchmen without having read the graphic novel first. I was lost. I thought it was a beautifully shot, confusing mess. Then fans say, “Well, you have to have read the comic.” No, damn it! That’s not what movies are for! The movie should, completely on its own, in its own way, convey the same themes and ideas and feeling as the book. And yes, that will mean changing the story. Novels and movies are radically different formats. It’s like translating an encyclopedia into song.
I felt like in Watchmen, by trying to convey the same story word for word, the point got lost. That’s the paradox of movie adaptations; to convey the same point, they must make changes.
Fans say they want the movie to be “faithful” but then they pay to see the same story they’ve been picturing in their heads for years, only now the characters have the faces of famous actors, and they feel vaguely empty. That’s because that isn’t what being “faithful” to the book would look like.
I want a movie that surprises me, I want actors taking the characters in new directions, I want to see how that world looks through Don’s camera. If, in order to surprise the audience in the same way the book did, he turns John into a sassy Latina woman, or kills off Dave in the second act, so be it. If you can’t color outside the lines, you’re not making art.
3. Is there anyone you envision as part of the cast?
We asked Brad Pitt’s people if he’d have any interest in playing Dave. That is, I sent several messages through his Facebook page. I didn’t hear back but I think it’s because a lot of the training demands were too strenuous (six months of Krav Maga, two months of Chainkata, the martial art of chainsaw fighting). It’s just as well, there’d be an extra expense on the CGI end to make his ab muscles look more defined than they are in real life.
My second choice after Brad would be to simply find actors who “get it.” Guys who’ve read the book, like it, and can slip into the voice of the characters without even seeing a script, because they can see the world the same way.
The most fun I’ve ever had reading a horror novel is Dean Koontz’s Fear Nothing, and its sequel, Seize the Night. If you liked John Dies at the End, you’ll like those. The abrupt transitions from high tension to laugh-out-loud humor have to be read to be believed.
As for my favorite horror film, when I say Phantasm (directed by the aforementioned Don Coscarelli) people think I’m just doing cross promotion. But watch Phantasm and then read JDatE, and you’ll see how much I borrowed from the structure (including a particular twist at the end).
My Mom took me to see that film when I was 10 years old, at a midnight showing on Halloween. She didn’t realize how terrifying the movie was, or she would never have taken me. But it has stuck with me ever since. Even at that age I had gotten bored with most horror, which always followed a template of, “mysterious monster appears, hero figures out the nature of the monster, hero kills monster.”
Phantasm blew all that to pieces. Every time the characters think they know what’s going on, the story veers off in another direction. By the time the credits roll the thing has gone so far off the rails you think it must have been written by a madman.
I tried hard to do the same with JDatE, to make it so that every time the reader thinks they know where the story is headed, it goes crashing through the guardrails and rolling down the mountainside.
That’s why when Don first emailed me about the film rights, I thought it must have been a practical joke my mom was playing. Only she doesn’t know how to use email.
Soy Sauce would be like that times a thousand, like if they rigged a fiber optic input right to your brain that forced the entire internet in there in real-time. You’d almost have the knowledge of a god. But you’re not a god, you’re just a guy, so it would wind up being so much random noise and, ultimately, terrifying. You’d quickly find out things about the world you did not want to know.
I do have a dog like Molly, a 10 year-old Golden Retriever whose IQ only seems to be about five points below mine.
I always felt like that’s one thing the original Invasion got wrong: the main danger would not be from the pod people, it would be from our fellow human beings once news of the pod people got out. As we’ve seen over the last year, a whole lot of people want to believe the worst about their neighbors, they want to feel like they’re under seige, they want to barricade themselves in their homes. They’ve always felt like the rest of the world was sub-human, so the news of the Body Snatchers would almost be a victory for them.
It would get ugly fast.
As for how that will play out in the JDatE universe, the sequel exists now as a series of notepad scraps and post-it notes in a drawer. When I’m on a conference call or something I’ll have an idea for a scene or plot point and jot it down. In the drawer it goes.
However, I can’t read my own handwriting, so every few months I’ll sift through the drawer and try to make sense of the notes (”CT = MONKEY? IMAGINE IF SATAN WAS HAMBURGLAR”) and, in frustration, throw them all away.
I’ll figure something out.
Wait, what about JDatE the temple of X’al’naa’thuthuthu? Wasn’t that the sequel to JDatE?
It is, but the version posted on the JDatE website is only part 1 of an ongoing project.
From what I understand David is continuing that story with a project called John and Dave and the Fifth Wall.
[...] In his interview with HorrorCrush, John Dies At The End author David Wong shared that he set out to make an unpredictable horror novel. “Every time the reader thinks they know where the story is headed, it goes crashing through the guardrails and rolling down the mountainside.” [...]