How much – if at all – was David Wong involved in the adaptation process? He wasn’t. But that’s not meant in a backhanded way, because as we made the deal and it was being con- cluded, I asked him – if it were up to him – how he would adapt this gargantuan story into a movie. And he wrote me a one-paragraph description of his thoughts on how that would go down, and it was practically identical to my plans: “Take the first chunk of the book and try to fuse it onto the ending.”
Have you any interest in adapting the sequel, This Book Is Full of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It)? Under the right circumstances? Oh, yeah! How could I not? First, I’d love to work with Rob and Chase again, and I’d love to work with Paul again. At one point I said to him, “I don’t know if that would work out so well, because your character has been killed off.” And
he said, “Why would that matter?” [Laughs.] Until that time, no one can say whether it’s going to happen, but certainly all the material is there. We’ve got two amazing lead characters, fantastic peripheral char- acters – Clancy Brown’s Dr. Marconi character, you could do a whole movie with him – so there’s a lot of potential.
Tell me a bit about your history with Paul Giamatti. It’s all Eli Roth’s fault! I was working on that Masters of Horror TV show in Canada and I got this email from him. He was over in Eastern Europe working on Hostel II, and he’d gone out for a meal with Paul, who was over there filming something else. And he said that all through lunch, all Paul wanted to talk about was Bubba Ho-Tep! If you’ve ever met Eli, you know he’s just an amazing, energetic spokesperson for the genre, but he’s never been accused of being too re- strained. [Laughs.] I thought, Oh well, you know, he’s
probably over-amplifying a bit. But then a couple of months later I was looking through one of the trade papers and there was an interview with Paul and they asked which director he’d like to work with, and he said, “Don Coscarelli – I love Bubba Ho-Tep!” I was actually stunned to see that in print. So I contacted him and we had coffee and it was true. I’d been planning that Bubba sequel and a key role – besides Elvis, of course – was his nefarious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who had such a Svengali-like control over him. So I pitched him the idea of being in this movie opposite Bruce Campbell, and he said, “I’m in!” Then I found out that Paul had a little production company and he’d been making some interesting movies – he did that Cold Souls film and Lucky Dog – and he and his partner Dan Terry volunteered to help produce the Bubba Ho-Tep sequel, but unfortu-
OHN DIES AT THE END IS A TRIP, IN EVERY CONNOTATION OF THE WORD. So too, it turns out, is the tale of how the book became a book. The novel began its life back in 2001 as a online serial, some- thing popular now, but unheard of then. Author David Wong (pseudonym for Jason Pargin, now senior editor of
cracked.com) posted new installments every Halloween, each roughly the length of a short story.
J “I was afraid if I tried to send it to a publisher they’d
mail it back soaking wet, along with a photo of an in- tern urinating on it,” says Wong of his decision to re- lease the book free on the web. “I had never written anything for publication in my life, so I was resigned to just trying to entertain a few friends by writing silly things on the internet. As a form of rebellion, I was lit- erally trying to write the most unpublishable thing I could think of.” Sure enough, John Dies at the End practically
defies summary. The horror comedy is split into two “books” and a lengthy epilogue that read al- most like a series of related novellas about our pair of unlikely heroes, Dave and John, and the brewing inter-dimensional war they’ve been unwillingly pulled into after sampling the alien, mind-expand- ing substance they call Soy Sauce. It’s one part raunchy screwball comedy, one part monster- fighter yarn, and one part gloriously splattery, ab- surd B-movie; when folks call John Dies “batshit crazy,” it’s not an exaggeration. Over the course of the careening 384-page novel, Dave and John have a showdown with a raw-meat man, witness a wall made from sentient severed limbs, chase thousands of cockroaches who have taken the form of a man in order to steal Dave’s car, attempt to avoid deadly swarms of highly infectious mutant insects and come face to face with more than one
inter-dimensional portal – with the whole thing re- layed in the first-person via Dave’s personable slacker slang. “[John Dies] was basically a Halloween prank on
the readers,” explains Wong of the story he rolled out over the course of five years. “The idea was that it started out as a traditional campfire ghost story – about the time me and my friend went to a haunted house – then the plot just got steadily more and more insane, essentially testing the reader to see how long they could stick with it before it just got too stupid for them.” Of course, the experience of serializing a novel on-
line was very different back then, before there were websites solely dedicated to sharing and promoting such works. But Wong is quick to note that along with the inherent challenges also came some freedoms. “The first chapters went up before social media ex-
isted, before the word ‘blog’ had been invented, and before anyone on Earth had ever gotten a book deal from writing on the internet, as far as I know,” he says. “So there wasn’t a system or community or business model in place, but that also was very liberating. ... I wasn’t failing to live up to anyone’s expectations be- cause my website, and the internet in general, hadn’t existed long enough for people to form any.” Wong went on to edit and hone his manuscript and, in 2007, John Dies at the End landed him a book deal
with Permuted Press. (It was later re-released in hard- cover in 2009 by Thomas Dunne Books.) “The meat of the story didn’t change, but the text
did,” says Wong of his revisions. “There are a lot of boring writer reasons for this – writing for the internet flows differently than writing for print; I could circle back and add some background/foreshadowing to flesh out parts I knew were coming later, which could- n’t be done when it was a serial – and also I think I just got better at writing between the time it went up online and when it started getting pressed into wood pulp.” But John Dies still had one more leap to make: from
book to film. Wong, who loves Don Coscarelli’s adap- tation, knew exactly what his role should be during the process. “I was very protective about the film and making
sure that it was something that all of us could be proud of. And by far the most important part of that plan was making sure I was not allowed within a thousand miles of the production. I seriously know absolutely nothing about making movies. If they had put me in charge, it would have been the worst movie ever made.”
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