Book-to-Film Problems

This post includes a bit of a spoiler about the Season Two premiere of OUTLANDER: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD.

"The book is always better than the movie." Well, not always. While I tend to agree in general, there are exceptions. Two prominent examples are THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and ROSEMARY'S BABY, both satisfyingly faithful to their sources. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is almost perfect but departs from the novel in a subtle shift of emphasis. It foregrounds Dr. Lecter more than Clarice Starling, mainly in the final scene. Although the movie is excellent, in my opinion, it's not quite the same as the novel. The wonderful Stephen King film SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION includes some justified minor deviations from the novella, such as merging the two wardens into one character, and an important one that disappointed me, the plot change that makes Andy more complicit in the warden's crimes than the original does. No adaptation of DRACULA, alas, has ever achieved the goal of complete fidelity, although the BBC miniseries with Louis Jourdan comes very close.

PRINCE CASPIAN is the most disappointing of the three big-screen Narnia films, not only because it unwisely rearranges the order of some events and inserts a completely unnecessary attack on Miraz's castle (which has no impact on the overall plot), but worst of all, it unpardonably distorts the portrayal of Peter's character.

The notoriously bad adaptation of WATCHERS, one of my favorite of Dean Koontz's books, repulsed me so thoroughly I gave up on it early in the film. The adult male protagonist of the novel encounters a friendly dog lost in the woods. The animal, genetically engineered to have almost human intelligence, has escaped from a secret lab. The newly bonded human-canine pair comes to the rescue of a shy young woman with whom a romance develops. Meanwhile, the government tries to track down and recapture the dog while another escaped beast, malevolent rather than kind and heroic, also pursues the dog. The movie changes this absorbing plot into a banal "boy and his dog" story. When one FBI agent, who's a sympathetic, reasonable authority figure in the novel, appeared as a total jerk in the film, I turned it off in disgust.

And I won't even get into the travesty of the movie version of Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS, except to mention that it follows the general outline of the book's plot while twisting it to convey the exact opposite of Heinlein's message.

The launch of the second season of OUTLANDER: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD brought this topic to mind for me. The storyline the writers have set up has an inherent problem that seems insoluble. As you may know, this prequel series deals with the parents of Jamie and Claire when the respective heroine and hero of the main series are a small child and a not yet born infant, respectively. There's no original source to follow; Gabaldon hasn't yet written her planned previous-generation book about the star-crossed lovers who will become the parents of Jamie. The problem lies with Claire's parents. The Outlander TV series, like Gabaldon's books, firmly states that this couple died in a car crash in Claire's early childhood. At this point, they've traveled through the standing stones to Scotland in 1715. Either they will get back to the twentieth century (Claire's father did so in the season premiere, but of course we don't know whether he'll stay there) or they'll settle down in the eighteenth century. They can't return to their own time and take up their former life, because that outcome would completely change Claire's timeline as it was already narrated in the main series. If they remain in the past, though, in the twentieth century we'd be left with a crashed car and no corpses. So how could Claire's uncle (who raises her) know for sure her parents are dead? The only explanation I can imagine is that, rather than upset her with a confusing story about her parents vanishing from the face of the earth, he allows her to grow up believing they died. In short, the creators of the TV program have written themselves into what strikes me as an inescapable trap.

Moral: If you want to adapt a novel or a book series into film, stick as close as practical to the source material! If you don't really like the original in the first place, why try to make a movie of it? (Granted, the latter doesn't apply to the Outlander prequel since, as mentioned, a print source doesn't exist yet.)

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Mental Illness in Horror

The Horror Writers Association's monthly newsletter has started running a column about the treatment of mental illness in horror fiction -- how it's been done wrong in the past and how to do it realistically, sensitively, and compassionately. Too often in such stories, neurodivergent people or sufferers from mental and emotional disorders have appeared as stereotypically monstrous figures such as deranged serial killers. Yet it's hard to imagine the genre without Poe's neurotic or perhaps delusional narrators, Renfield in DRACULA, Lovecraft's protagonists driven mad by cosmic terrors, Robert Bloch's PSYCHO, and works such as Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant SOME OF YOUR BLOOD (a short epistolary novel featuring a rather pitiable blood-drinking sociopath, who, with only two exceptions, kills only small animals he hunts in the woods). THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS presents the sociopathic genius Dr. Hannibal Lecter, more of a fairy-tale monster with almost magical powers than a realistic criminal, and the serial killer "Buffalo Bill," murdering women to sew a "girl suit" out of their skins. The latter has been criticized for giving the toxic impression that transgender men are inherently unstable and probably dangerous. Lecter explicitly says "Bill" isn't really transgender and has been rejected by more than one sex change clinic (as the procedure was labeled at that time); nevertheless, the impression lingers.

There's little room to doubt that the innumerable fiction and film portrayals of people suffering from psychosis and other mental or emotional disorders as insane killers have negatively affected the public's distorted perception of actual human beings with similar problems. Also, the pulp fiction and horror film trope of the "mad scientist" probably reinforces too many people's distrust of real-life science nowadays, often with potentially disastrous real-world results.

As the panel discussion articles in the HWA newsletter point out, horror writers don't have to stop including mentally ill and neurodivergent characters in their works. Those characters can be drawn as three-dimensional figures with credible virtues and flaws, even if they're sometimes the antagonists in their stories.

I recently read Stephen King's latest novel, HOLLY, which I enjoyed very much. Like King himself, I've been fond of Holly ever since her first appearance in MR. MERCEDES. Through the rest of that trilogy, the spin-off novel THE OUTSIDER, and the novella "If It Bleeds," she has believably evolved as a character. When we first meet her, she's nervous, shy, perpetually anxious, and at least mildly obsessive-compulsive. Even then, her suppressed intelligence shines through. She also seems to be high-functioning autistic, although the texts never explicitly state that diagnosis. As seen in HOLLY, she has grown in confidence, competence, and bonding with people she has come to love, while her core personality remains the same. She still displays the same quirks, including that touch of OC, exacerbated by the need for COVID precautions. She's a well-rounded character whose strengths and weaknesses we can empathize with, yet a true hero when circumstances require. She strikes me as an outstanding example of a non-neurotypical protagonist done well.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.