Almost from the beginning of cinema itself, we’ve had horror movies, and specifically horror movies adapted from works of literature. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, all the way up to the collected works of Stephen King. But for all the well known adaptations, there are a lot more horror movies that come from books and you might never have realized it.
The newest one of these is Other Mommy, directed by Rob Savage. The film is an adaptation of the 2024 novel Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman. That book is really spooky and weird story, told entirely from the point of view of a little girl. We’ll see how much that transfers over to the movie.
But, because it’s always fun to learn things, and seeing as it’s Nerdoween’s Literary Horror week, here are some other horror movies you might not have known were based on books.
Bird Box (2018)
While we’re on the topic of Josh Malerman, the author’s 2014 debut novel Bird Box, a post-apocalyptic drama about a cosmic threat, became a movie in 2018. More than just a movie, it was an internet sensation over the holidays of that year. The story follows a woman and various other survivors as they navigate a world where an otherworldly entity causes anyone who looks at it to violently off themselves. So, they spend any time outside wearing blindfolds, lest they see the whatever-it-is.
This also led to morons filming themselves walking around their house with their eyes covered. The story isn’t my favorite, despite its eldritch roots, but you cannot deny its cultural impact. And Sandra Bullock gives a phenomenal performance, as per.
Ring (1998)
A great many J-horror movies actually come from novels, which could have been an entire list of its own. But, I’m going to include a couple on this list, and by far the most famous J-horror movie (and maybe the only one that has a good American remake) is Ring, directed by Hideo Nakata. The original novel of the same name came from author Koji Sukuzi in 1991. It’s almost a story that could only have originated in the 1990s. It deals with a cursed 20-minute VHS tape which kills the viewer one week after watching.
That in and of itself is tremendous concept, as is the inciting incident of girls at a sleepover dying because of this video. The investigation within the story reveals all of this is the curse of Sadako, an abused and murdered woman who becomes the malevolent force within the video. The movie changes the main character of the investigative reporter from male to female and I think that works really well for the film. The book and movie differ in other ways related to the plot, and the further both the novels and the film series go on, the more they diverge. But as an adaptation, Ring is close enough to be faithful but different enough to be interesting.
Audition (1999)
I never considered that Takashi Miike’s most terrifying movie (arguably, of course) had come from a novel, but it did! Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel is very much the same as the film adaptation… to a degree. Both detail a widower named Aoyama whose son encourages him to find a new partner. But he’s shy and out of the game. So, his somewhat crappy friend suggests they set up a fake audition for a fake movie as a way for Aoyama to meet women. Yes, it’s not good, and that decision comes home to roost pretty quickly.
Aoyama does find someone he finds very alluring, the much younger, very demure Asami who seems to be his exact type. But we very quickly learn that she had a rough childhood (to put it mildly) which has led to her mind warping and taking to torturing and murdering men whom she deems “liars.” And, let me tell ya, it gets worse from there. The book is much more concrete about explaining why Asami does what she does, while the movie is more nebulous. But in either case, the finale is not for the squeamish.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
This is one of two entries on this list that truly surprised me. Hot on the heels of Scream, screenwriter wunderkind Kevin Williamson wrote this slasher movie, in which four friends accidentally kill someone with their car and hide the evidence. A year later, someone sends them notes saying they know what the group has done. Enter a hook-wielding maniac in a raincoat.
The novel comes from 1973 from author Lois Duncan who also wrote the source novel for Hotel for Dogs, fun fact. Like most of Duncan’s bibliography, her novel I Know What You Did Last Summer is a YA title which does not have a slasher element at all. It still has the accident and cover-up, but it’s much more a noir-esque thriller and the body count is very low. Sorry to fans of slickers and boathooks.
The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter’s remake of the Howard Hawks 1951 sci-fi movie The Thing from Another World is pretty different and much scarier and gnarlier. And yes, some of that is decade and effects ability. But it’s also down to Bill Lancaster’s paranoid script hewing much closer to the original 1938 novella Who Goes There? written by John W. Campbell. I read this a few years ago and was really taken by just how close the two stories are.
Chief among the similarities is how much of the horror relies on scientific speculation, what this mimicking entity could do if allowed to make its way to the mainland. We also have the iconic blood test scene in both. The only real difference is that the movie has an action hero ending whereas the novella doesn’t. Either way, a terrifying cosmic experience.
Willard (1971)
Horror authors love rats. I feel like all your major ones have written tales of hideous, vicious, or super intelligent rats. Rats are already very smart and pretty darn large, so I get it. Northern Irish author Stephen Gilbert had an unexpected success with his 1968 rat novella, Ratman’s Notebooks. The book is the journal entries of an unnamed and awkward youth who forms a close bond with the rats at his dying mother’s house. He eventually trains them, with the kindly Socrates his favorite and the hulking and vicious Ben as his nemesis.
Only three years after the book’s publication, director Daniel Mann gave us the movie Willard, which names the main character. Otherwise, it’s a pretty darn faithful adaptation of the book, aside from the ending. The movie proved a big hit, too, with a sequel, Ben, coming the following year. The eponymous theme song, sung by Michael Jackson no less, received an Academy Award nomination. Decades later, in 2003, we got a remake of Willard starring Crispin Glover. The remake is much weirder than the original.
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
One of the absolute weirdest and most fun horror movie concepts of the early 2000s involved an elderly Elvis Presley living in an East Texas rest home, having successfully swapped places with his best impersonator, and who has to defend his fellow old people against a soul-sucking mummy in cowboy boots. Don Coscarelli’s movie, which starred Bruce Campbell as the foul-mouthed Elvis, also starred Ossie Davis as a fellow resident who believed himself JFK. A delightful movie.
Also delightful is the 1994 short story upon which the movie was based. Writer Joe R. Lansdale penned the story for, of all things, an anthology of stories about Elvis. The story is only 47 pages long, but Lansdale’s writing has an elegiac sarcasm that really sings. Coscarelli brought most of that to the screen through Campbell’s narration and it’s the highlight of the movie.
The Meg (2018)
This is the other movie based on a book that shook me to my core. Look, I know Peter Benchley’s Jaws became the preeminent shark movie of all time. I also know other such books over the years have turned into movies. But the Jason Statham movie about punching a massive prehistoric fish in the face surely doesn’t need to have been a book, right?
And yet, it was. In fact, novelist Steve Alten not only wrote 1997’s Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, but The Trench, its 1999 follow-up, also became a movie with Meg 2: The Trench from 2023. If you’re a fan, get ready, because Alten has six other Meg novels already written and raring for Jason Statham to punch more monsters.
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