Since the 2000s began, Tim Waggoner has been a writer of horror fiction and non-fiction of all kinds and lengths, winning praise and multiple Bram Stoker Awards. Amidst his many original tales, he has also written novels inspired by the Alien and Nightmare on Elm Street films and TV’s The X Files and Supernatural, along with official adaptations of Halloween Kills and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, among others. Last week saw the debut of X, the first in his triptych of novelizations of Ti West’s recent trilogy for A24 Publishing. Pearl will follow November 19, and MaXXXine is scheduled for release early next year.
X recaptures and elaborates on all the graphic sex and violence of West’s saga of ’70s porn filmmakers terrorized by the elderly owners of the remote Texas property they’re using as a location, while also, ahem, fleshing out its characters. It elicits all the dark joys of the tie-in books from the decade in which the film is set and promises equally fun and disturbing things from the Pearl and MaXXXine novelizations. Fango spoke to Waggoner about translating West’s celebrated screen trio to prose form.
How did you get the gig of novelizing the X trilogy?
Jon Dieringer, an editor who works with A24’s publishing division, emailed me last January about the possibility of writing those. Of course, I said I was interested! I had a Zoom meeting with Jon and editor Maya Binyam, and they asked me to write an audition piece using the scene in X where Pearl and Howard make love in the bunkhouse while Maxine is hiding under the bed. They and Ti all thought I did a good job with that, and I got the gig. I think writing the novelization of Halloween Kills helped raise my profile as a writer, and that’s why Jon originally contacted me.
Had you previously been a fan of Ti West’s movies?
Oh yeah! X, Pearl, MaXXXine, The House of the Devil, The Sacrament, and The Innkeepers are some of my all-time favorite horror films. I love Ti’s rich characterizations and dialogue, and I thought he did a fantastic job of giving each movie in the X Trilogy its own individual style, while at the same time linking them all together thematically, textually, and visually. It’s a huge artistic achievement.
How closely did you work with West when writing the books?
X is the first work of fiction A24 Publishing has ever produced, so Jon, Maya, and Ti wanted to read the pages as I wrote them. I sent them the first 30 pages and continued writing. Eventually, they felt more comfortable with me and my writing and just had me finish the entire book. Ti read the novel, sent his feedback to Maya and Jon, and they passed it on to me, along with their own suggestions for revision. I never spoke or corresponded with Ti directly, but I didn’t expect to. I knew he was busy finishing MaXXXine and preparing for its release. I was surprised he found time to read the pages at all!
What elements of the screenplays that didn’t wind up in the movies did you use in the novels?
In all three scripts, there were scenes that were shortened or condensed in the finished films. Ti said that anything that appeared in the screenplays was fair game to include in the novels, so I put it all in. The order of scenes was sometimes different in the final movies, so I had to decide which order to follow in the books—the script order or the screen order. There were no major differences between the scripts and the films, but I hope readers enjoy the extra material in the books.
What embellishments of your own did you add?
Film scripts are short compared to full-length novels, so normally writers have to add a significant amount of material to produce a novelization. Ti, however, didn’t want to add any new elements that weren’t in the screenplays. Jon, Maya, and I discussed the situation, and I told them that a movie script without added material would only make a book of around 40,000 to 50,000 words. By contrast, a full-length novel is usually between 80,000 and 120,000 words. Jon said a shorter book would be fine, and noted that that length would match the pulp-fiction paperbacks of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, which in turn would match the settings and styles of the films.
But even sticking strictly to the screenplays, I still had to add material. Most of this explored what the characters were thinking and feeling during various scenes, and every once in a while, I created a small bit of character background. For example, in the X script, Wayne has a line about how he hopes making a porn movie will get him “out of the red for good.” I needed reasons why Wayne would be struggling financially, so I added that he was a bit too fond of gambling and had tried a number of different schemes to make money and get himself out of debt, but they’d all failed. And in the scene where Bobby-Lynne is watching RJ film Jackson gassing up the van, I had her think about how much she loved the sun and the heat, and how she’d walk around naked all the time if she could get away with it. These sorts of additions are little bits of extra seasoning, and I hope they give readers more insight into the characters.
Did knowing Pearl’s past and Maxine’s future from the second and third movies inform the way you wrote the X novel?
MaXXXine hadn’t yet come out when I wrote X and Pearl, and there wasn’t a final script yet for me to work from. All I knew about Maxine’s future was the basic plot of MaXXXine: It took place in the ’80s, Maxine was in Hollywood trying to make it as an actor in non-porn films, and the real-life Night Stalker serial killer would play some kind of role in the story. I guessed that Maxine’s father would have a part in the third movie, so I included a few hints of that in the X novel. I figured Maxine’s all-consuming drive to achieve fame would be even more intense in MaXXXine than in the first film, so I strengthened that aspect of her personality—which was already pretty damn strong!—in the X adaptation.
I’d seen Pearl several times before writing the X novel, so I did use Pearl’s past to inform my characterization of her in that book, and tried to add small connections between the movies here and there. When I wrote the Pearl novelization, I used my knowledge of Pearl’s future in X to foreshadow various aspects of her character. For example, in the scene with the scarecrow in the cornfield, once Pearl is done satisfying herself physically with it, I had her think how nice it would be to have a man like the scarecrow, one who’s there when she wants to use him, and who she can forget about until the next time. This foreshadows the captives that Pearl and Howard keep trapped in the basement for Pearl’s pleasure. I can’t say for certain, but I’m fairly confident that Ti implied that connection in Pearl, and I decided to make it more explicit.
I included more characterization of Pearl in the X novel based on my knowledge of her past, but ultimately, we cut much of that out to hew more closely to the original script. For the first half of that movie, Ti wanted Pearl to be like a classic movie monster, a figure of menace who’s more a dark force of nature than a person. He felt that too much characterization of her early on in the novel would dilute that aspect of the story.
How did you translate West’s distinct visual style from each movie to the page, and did you write each book in a different style?
Ti’s scripts have a lot of detail about how he wants to visually depict certain scenes and effects, which only makes sense since he was both the writer and director of the trilogy. I was able to use that imagery to help replicate the visual styles of the films. And since I was able to watch the films as I drafted the novels—MaXXXine was available on streaming by the time I wrote that book—I had their actual visual schemes to draw on.
Each movie already had its own distinct narrative style, of course. X is a ’70s horror film in the vein of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Pearl is a combination of 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s movies along with suspense thrillers like Psycho, and MaXXXine is a combination of ’80s crime films and ’70s and ’80s Italian giallo horror. I tried to write each book in those styles while at the same time including the immersive character work I like to do in my original fiction.
How did this project compare to your past novelizations?
I’ve already mentioned that I was limited in what I could expand on in the story, and normally, you write a novelization long before the finished film is released, so you don’t get to see it before you write. But in the case of the X Trilogy, I was able to watch all three films as I wrote, freezing images whenever I wanted to get a closer look at details on the screen. I think this allowed me to write richer stories. Jon, Maya, and Ti were also very thorough editors, and we went through numerous revisions. Usually, novelizations are scheduled to come out a week or two after a film’s release, so there’s only so much time for writing and editing. The X and Pearl novels are so much better thanks to Jon and Maya, and I have no doubt the same will be true for MaXXXine [still in edits at the time of this writing].
What are the specific joys and challenges of writing a novelization, and of writing characters that have already been defined on screen as opposed to people you invent yourself?
Writing a novelization is like translating a work from one language to another, but in this case, the original language has both visual and verbal components. You’re not merely typing the script up and presenting it in novel form. You literally have to create a new version of it in a different art form. Novelizations are also like a writing collaboration with someone you’ll most likely never meet. The X Trilogy novels are not just my books; they’re my books and Ti’s books. When I write a novelization, I always try to make sure it’s a blend of my voice and vision as well as the screenwriter’s.
When I was a teen in the late ’70s and early ’80s, we didn’t have cable or VCRs yet, so the only way we could experience films again—if we couldn’t get our parents to take us to the theater more than once—was to read novelizations. It would take at least a year for a film to be shown on broadcast TV, and then it would have scenes cut for running time or because they were “inappropriate” for a home-viewing audience. Novelizations were great because you got to experience extra scenes that weren’t in the movies. Since scenes were written from the viewpoints of specific characters, you had access to their internal worlds and learned what they were thinking and feeling at different times in the story. Being able to write novelizations as an adult lets me reconnect to that time in my life.
As I’ve said before, usually you have to add a great deal of material to flesh out a script and transform it into a whole novel. Finding areas in the script that you can expand or places where you can insert new scenes—and conceiving of those new scenes in the first place—can be a challenge, but it’s also where a lot of the fun is for a writer!
What novelizations do you have coming up?
My novelization of Terrifier 2 comes out on October 8. I had a blast writing that book! It’s 100,000 words long, and half of that is original material I created to add to the story. I’ve written the novelization of Terrifier 3 as well, but I don’t have a release date for it yet. The plan is for me to write the novelization of the first Terrifier next, and—I hope!—Terrifier 4 after that.
