First: I love novelizations. They’re fun and, in the right hands, they can tell a very different story than the one you already know: the movie. A killer example of this is John Skipp and Craig Spector’s Fright Night. Anybody who hired Skipp/Spector had to know they were playing with fire (that duo wasn’t going to follow any script, not all the way), and the result is a book that, well, kinda reads as if it were the source material for the movie to follow after. Of course, that isn’t the case. Fright Night was a script, then a film, then a maverick novelization. But it gets you thinking…
What would it have been like to read certain stories before they were movies? What would it have been like to watch these stories gain traction, before becoming the movies we now know them to be? And how would that initial encounter with this fictional source material change what we thought of the movies we adore?
