The Ruins: Five Other Horror Adaptations We Want to See
by Tom Burns

BOOK: Erik Larson's Devil in the White City

WHY IT WOULD MAKE AN AWESOME HORROR MOVIE:

OK, bear with us here for a minute. Yes, we know that Devil in the White City is an extremely successful nonfiction best-seller. Yes, we know that your nana bought herself a copy at CostCo and read it for her book club. And, yes, we know that a Devil in the White City movie is already in the works – Tom Cruise was originally going to produce and the rights were re-acquired by Paramount back in early 2007. So why are we including it on this list? Because, while we know that a Devil in the White City movie will be made one day, we want to make sure that any prospective directors realize how utterly HORRIFIC the story really is. Granted, it’s easy to get lost in the book’s A-story, the honestly-astounding true story of how Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair inspired the creation of a gleaming white city on the shores of Lake Michigan, foreshadowed decades of artistic and technological innovations, and influenced a whole generation of Americans. If you’ve ever gone to Disneyland, rode a Ferris Wheel, watched a belly-dancer, or ate Shredded Wheat – among so many other pervasively everyday aspects of modern society – then you’ve been touched in some way by the legacy of the “White City.” Cool story, eh?

BUT the book also has an equally engrossing B-story that simply can’t be forgotten in any movie adaptation. The “devil” in Devil in the White City is H.H. Holmes, one of America’s first ever serial killers. Holmes was a shady businessman and “doctor” who opened a hotel right outside of the theme-park-esque White City to capitalize on its unprecedented crowds. However, instead of offering a turndown service, Holmes’ “Murder Castle” (as it was known) featured special chutes that would deliver his young female victims into his den of horrors, where he would imprison them, gas them, kill them, strip the flesh off their bones, dip the remains in acid, and then sell the skeletons of his victims to medical schools. And that really happened. This is nonfiction, remember? While Holmes only admitted to 27 murders (and only 9 could be confirmed), some estimate that the not-so-good doctor could’ve killed HUNDREDS of poor young transients who headed to Chicago to see the Fair. The construction of the White City is an amazing story, but Larson knew what he was doing by contrasting the optimism and idealism of the fair with the opportunism and sadism of Holmes’ hotel of horrors. It’s such an effective story of the highs and lows of our developing nation, and you really don’t get the same impact of the Fair’s significance without acknowledging the terrors that resided right outside its gates. Any Devil in the White City movie has to be part-Aviator and part-Silence of the Lambs, and, since the A-story is so cinematic, we’re just a little worried that Holmes’ tale – one of the most frightening true stories in American history – might get overshadowed by the gleaming city by the lake.

BOOK: Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted

WHY IT WOULD MAKE AN AWESOME HORROR MOVIE:

Because, if we’ve learned anything from the surprisingly effective Masters of Horror series, it’s that the world needs to witness the return of anthology horror. And Haunted, the loosely connected short-story collection by Chuck Palahniuk (the guy who pulled Fight Club out of his sticky subconscious and slapped it onto the page) is, quite possibly, the PERFECT vehicle for a 21st-century hardcore Treehouse of Horror film. Anthology horror – scary movies that present a selection of terrifying tales – has run the gamut from dated and lame (we’re thinking of the 1970s Joan Collins Tales from the Crypt movie) to bizarre and shocking (check out Takashi Miike’s chapter in 2004’s Three... Extremes to see what we’re talking about), but Haunted is unlike anything that modern movie horror has seen yet. And while the premise and stories aren’t your typical horror fare – no vampires, exorcisms, or demons – the source material is so vicious, shocking, and stomach-turning that film critics will be debating for years whether to classify the film as satire or scarefest.

The framing story is that seventeen authors are invited to attend a secret writer’s retreat in Oregon and, upon arriving, their mysterious host, Mr. Whittier, locks them in an empty theatre and gives them each three months to write a story. The writers are provided with any amenity they would need to survive, but the fame-obsessed scribes soon realize that their captivity would make a much better story (i.e. reality show fodder) if they suffered more. So the authors start sabotaging each others’ food, water, and other supplies, and the retreat quickly devolves into freezing feral nightmare. It’s an amazingly subversive take on our modern obsession with meaningless celebrity, it’s a great horror premise, and that’s just the set-up. That’s not even getting into the stories, which (while, again, not being traditional horror tales) involve cannibalism, molestation, murder, mutilation, and some of the most disgustingly sense-shattering imagery ever put to paper. Don’t believe us? This collection contains the short story “Guts” – which you may have already heard discussed on the internet in the kind of gruesome whispers that accompanied “Two Girls/One Cup” – a story so horrifying that, when Palahniuk does pubic readings, as many as 50 people at a single reading have FAINTED while he read it. No foolin’. While there may be no torture or chainsaws, few writers have plumbed the mundane horrors of the modern middle-class better than Palahniuk, and a Haunted movie (done right) could be a Clockwork Orange-esque cult classic for the new century.

The Ruins: Five Other Horror Adaptations We Want to See Page 3