Our editorial board member and regular contributor Christina Connor sat down (virtually!) for an interview with Paul Tremblay (author of A Head Full of Ghosts, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, and The Cabin at the End of the World, now a major motion picture soon to be released, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, called Knock at the Cabin). They discussed writing, inspiration, and what it’s like to have your work adapted for the big screen. The full interview will be published in our forthcoming special issue devoted to fiction, “Tales of the Fantastic.” Here is an excerpt from that interview:
CC: Have you gotten to see the final cut of the film?
PT: I have not, but I am going to the premiere with my family. That’s really cool.
[…]
CC: Dave Bautista [star of Knock at the Cabin] told me the other day that you came by the set to work with the actors, and he was very complimentary of you. What was it like to work with the artists—the actors, directors, technicians—who are bringing the adaptation to life?
PT: The set visit was amazing; it was surreal but without the political aspect of surrealism. I met them at a sound studio outside of Philadelphia where they had built a cabin inside of a warehouse for the interior shots. When I first walked in, I was like, whoa, look at all this stuff: all these people, all this equipment, all these lights, all these things that they need to make a movie. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but the inside was beautiful, with its hardwood floors. And then there are [actors] Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge taped to chairs [for a scene in the film], and there’s Night [the director]. I quickly shook everyone’s hand, and then I went to the cabin’s bedroom to watch them on the screen.
Before filming, I emailed Stephen King to ask about his experiences with adaptations [of his works]. He said sometimes they were nothing like the book, but he said sometimes it feels like the director “walked into my head and saw what I was seeing.” I didn’t feel like the director walked into my own head; however, everything from the two days of filming [I attended] had the spirit of the book, particularly the actors and their performances. I thought they were fantastic. And I wasn’t working with them officially, but on the second day of shooting, I spent quite a bit of time with the actors in between takes. They were so generous with their time, asking me a lot of questions about the book.
[…]
CC: Cabin deals with a hot-button issue in our world today: the dangers of cult thinking and conspiracy theories. What did you consider when brainstorming that story, taking a large-scale social issue and bringing down the scope to a single family with a single choice? Why address it from that perspective? Did it come to you as a fully formed idea? Or did you whittle it down from different options?
PT: With this book more than any of the others that I’ve written, I did consider the political context early on. Usually, I don’t start that way; I start with the story itself. But let me back up a little bit….
I wondered: if I don’t like home invasion stories, how would I write one that I would be interested in reading? That was really the start of Cabin.
I was on a plane coming from a book festival in Los Angeles, and I was thinking, “what am I going to write next?” I typically brainstorm like an obnoxious writer, with moleskin notebooks, and I was just trying to come up with ideas. At one point, I zoned out, and when I looked down, I had doodled a little cabin. Now, I can’t draw, so when I say it was a cabin, it was a square with a little triangle above it. I thought instantly of the horror sub-genre of home invasion. I don’t really like home invasion stories, partly because they’re so terrifying to me and partly because too many are violent just for the sake of violence. I was actually weirdly excited, though, because I wondered: if I don’t like home invasion stories, how would I write one that I would be interested in reading? That was really the start of Cabin, but once I got into it, which was during the 2016 presidential primaries and the storm clouds of President Trump were looming, I wanted to infuse that book with the anxieties of upcoming Trumplandia. I had been obsessed with conspiracy theories and misinformation for a long time, including my two prior novels. Both feature the idea: how do we know what’s real when we have all this media crush? A Head Full of Ghosts features a reality TV crew and a blogger, and in Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, there are references to Snapchat and Twitter and other social media. These books aren’t a trilogy, but thematically I think these three books make a similar arc, featuring families in distress, but also featuring the impact of misinformation and conspiracies.
The full interview will be available in Studies of the Fantastic, Vol. 14, a special fiction issue entitled Tales of the Fantastic. Pre-orders for Tales of the Fantastic are available now!