A review by throatsprockets
Halloween: The Official Movie Novelization by John Passarella
1.0
I came to this book hoping it would add something to the movie. Maybe some depth of characterisation, interesting extra detail, hints of things that were in the script but missing from the finished film. All I got was the movie retold with an abundance of unnecessary over-description and repetition. I lost count of the amount of times a scene from a couple of pages earlier would be repeated from a different character’s point of view with nothing new added. (The handful of scenes that aren't in the finished film are the same ones found in the Deleted Scenes on the blu ray - at least one of which creates a continuity error with Halloween Kills.)
Back in the older times, thirty or forty years ago, movie novelisations served a purpose. If you loved the movie it was a way to revisit it cheaply, or maybe you a kid who wasn’t allowed to see a popular movie and this was a way to catch up during the long wait for video or tv release.
Some of the better novelisations added to the experience, eg Gremlins/ by George Gipe created background on where the Mogwai came from, which director Joe Dante has said he would have added to the movie if he’d known about it in time. The Goonies by James Khan is told in first person from two characters’ point of view, so we get their often amusing insights as well as a few scenes that were in the script but deleted from the finished film. Lethal Weapon by Joel Norst is based on Shane Black’s original script, before it was rewritten to lighten the tone and completely change the ending, so it gives the readers whole new experience from watching the movie.
In these times when a movie starts streaming online barely after theatrical release and where access to movies in general is high, a novelisation really needs to add some of these details to avoid being redundant. But in this case, we just get a description of the movie with lots of unnecessary verbiage to extend the thing to book length. I could almost see the writer looking at the word count and going back through the manuscript to see where he could pad things out some more.
This might not be entirely the writer’s fault. Even some of the better novelisation writers, like Alan Dean Foster and Max Alan Collins, have talked about how in some cases they were contractually obliged to not add any story elements. Given how thin the movie’s script already was, that would have made for an impossible task; without the charisma of the actors even a writer as evocative as Dennis Etchison (who wrote two of the better earlier Halloween novelisations under the pseudonym Jack Martin) would have trouble making anything much out of Halloween 2018.
Back in the older times, thirty or forty years ago, movie novelisations served a purpose. If you loved the movie it was a way to revisit it cheaply, or maybe you a kid who wasn’t allowed to see a popular movie and this was a way to catch up during the long wait for video or tv release.
Some of the better novelisations added to the experience, eg Gremlins/ by George Gipe created background on where the Mogwai came from, which director Joe Dante has said he would have added to the movie if he’d known about it in time. The Goonies by James Khan is told in first person from two characters’ point of view, so we get their often amusing insights as well as a few scenes that were in the script but deleted from the finished film. Lethal Weapon by Joel Norst is based on Shane Black’s original script, before it was rewritten to lighten the tone and completely change the ending, so it gives the readers whole new experience from watching the movie.
In these times when a movie starts streaming online barely after theatrical release and where access to movies in general is high, a novelisation really needs to add some of these details to avoid being redundant. But in this case, we just get a description of the movie with lots of unnecessary verbiage to extend the thing to book length. I could almost see the writer looking at the word count and going back through the manuscript to see where he could pad things out some more.
This might not be entirely the writer’s fault. Even some of the better novelisation writers, like Alan Dean Foster and Max Alan Collins, have talked about how in some cases they were contractually obliged to not add any story elements. Given how thin the movie’s script already was, that would have made for an impossible task; without the charisma of the actors even a writer as evocative as Dennis Etchison (who wrote two of the better earlier Halloween novelisations under the pseudonym Jack Martin) would have trouble making anything much out of Halloween 2018.