Warm Bodies was turned into a movie. What do you think gets lost in movie adaptations for scary books? What do you think works better in a movie than a book?

Isaac Marion I notice a tendency for movies to shy away from the more psychological aspects of horror, the weird and unsettling stuff that gets under your skin. What I like most about Stephen King is the undercurrent of insanity, the sense that the supernatural stuff isn't coming from any of our culture's established mythologies but from some undefined other place that we don't want to know about. Most of King's movies have shrugged off that creeping dread of the unknown and focused on the visceral stuff like violence and monsters, and I think that's a pattern with movie adaptations because horror is still seen as a lowbrow genre and rarely attracts the kind of artists who know how to translate those subtle sensations into a visual medium. Or even if they do know how, the studios don't let them because it would make their target audience of whooping gore-hounds uncomfortable. You know the reaction--that confused grimace followed by a dismissive "That was WEIRD."

Warm Bodies isn't a scary book, so there wasn't a lot of scrubbing needed for the movie, but you can see some of this "normalizing" process in their rendition of the Boneys. In the book they have a hive mind intelligence, they "speak" into R's thoughts, they're avatars for a mysterious primal force that's never explicitly explained. But how do you fit all that into a lighthearted 1.5 hour movie that's mostly about a romance? You can't. You have to boil it down to easily recognizable archetypes, so the creepy, ambiguous remnants of a primitive natural order become traditional chase monsters, and you move on. There just isn't enough time or emotional room for unfamiliar feelings. That's one of the few disadvantage of movies: you have to pick one or two main threads and use every minute to develop them or the whole thing falls apart.

As for what works better in a movie than a book...I don't think I need to waste words in praise of movies. They're the world's dominant medium by a vast margin; I think we all know what we love about movies.

flag