Today is the day that David Slade‘s Dark Harvest is released on VOD platforms.
Writer Michael Gilio was tasked with adapting the renowned Halloween horror novel from Norman Partridge.
We caught up with Michael to talk about the task of bringing Sawtooth Jack to life.
It’s been a long road but Dark Harvest is finally being released, is there a sense of relief for you as the writer?
Certainly. Between a global pandemic, Amazon Studios acquiring MGM, a studio regime change, and two union strikes, Dark Harvest’s production and release have been challenged by a perfect shitstorm of cosmic bad luck, but here we are …
Can you tell us your first experiences with Norman Patridge’s novel?
My agent represents Norman Patridge and he slipped me the book 15 years ago. I read Dark Harvest, was blown away, and wanted to adapt it into a feature film. But the rights weren’t available, and they remained unavailable for over a decade; every year I’d check in with my agent, and ask if the rights were available, and he’d tell me No, and that went on and on until 2018, when producers Matt Tolmach & David Manpearl were able to secure the rights. Coincidentally, I was working with Matt & David on another project, so we got to talking, and they offhandedly mentioned setting up Dark Harvest as a feature; I immediately committed myself in that conversation to adapting the novella.
I absolutely loved Norman’s voice, and every Halloween I would read his book; it reminded me of the Ray Bradbury short stories I grew up on, but with a punk sensibility. I was raised in the Midwest, a small town in rural Illinois just as it started to develop into a suburb – a brand-new subdivision of row houses and strip malls, yet surrounded by vast acres of farmland. In grade school, during recess, we’d get lost in the cornfields behind our school, or have lightsaber battles with dead cornstalks. At night, if you squinted, you could see the skyline of Chicago on the horizon, a glowing reminder of a more exciting and glamorous life. The city was about 45 minutes away by car, but for a child, Chicago might as well have been a city on the moon. I deeply felt the novel’s longing to run away.
What do you think makes stories set around Halloween so appealing?
It’s an annual holiday where we’re told that all the bad things we repress all year long might crawl out of graves, haunt the streets, and if we’re not careful, pull us to the Other Side. It’s a liminal time of year, the perfect setting for a transformative story.
Tell us about the collaborative process with David Slade?
David is uniquely collaborative and generous. He’s a director who sees the writer as a creative partner, which is refreshing in Hollywood. I think this has something to do with his extensive work in television, but it may also be a cultural thing; the Brits respect the writer. We bonded on growing up in small towns and loving The Misfits.
Is the hardest part of adapting a novel knowing what to keep or get rid of, or do you have to be more brutal?
Dark Harvest the novel already reads like a killer screenplay – it’s fast, concise, and uses vivid, cinematic language, so reading it, I thought, “this is going to be a cinch”, but, of course, it wasn’t, and in the end it turned out to be one of the hardest adaptations I’d ever done.
Unlike most book adaptations where you have to distill the story down to its essence, with Dark Harvest, I had to invent and broaden the story to make sense of the mythology. Norman Patridge has said that the book is a metaphor, that he wasn’t particularly interested in the logic of the folk tale, but for a movie, the logic has to be airtight; an audience has to suspend its disbelief long enough to accept all the batshit places we’re going to take them. This was our challenge, among a myriad of other things. Audiences will determine whether or not we succeeded in overcoming this challenge, but Norman Patridge was very happy with the result, so I’m happy.
How did the writing process compare to something like Dungeons and Dragons?
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves appealed to me as a rare opportunity to write an original screenplay with original characters on a big blockbuster canvas. It was a lot of fun – curating from the vast resources of D&D worlds, magic, and monsters; I got to approach the script as if I were a dungeon master coming up with a campaign, but also create and play all the characters on a quest. It was a giant sandbox to play in.
I wrote Dark Harvest because I had to; it was a personal and urgent story for me.
Do you think this story has franchise potential?
Definitely. Dark Harvest is a folk horror tale about a Halloween ritual that’s been going on for centuries. There are a lot more stories to tell …
Dark Harvest is available now on VOD platforms.
Bloody Flicks 