If not for my beloved Cathy’s Curse, it’s very likely that the bad/amazing movie I spend most of my time recommending would be The Pit. Released in 1981, this Canadian production (but filmed in Wisconsin) tells the story of Jamie, an intelligent but strange 12-year-old who is bullied, but for somewhat good reason since he’s also a perv. His lone friend is his teddy bear, Teddy, who may or may not be alive. Oh, and he occasionally feeds people to a group of Troglodytes who live in a pit in the woods near his house.
As you might have guessed from that description, it’s a very odd movie. It didn’t help that the original screenplay made it clear that the Troglodytes, and even a chunk of the film’s entire third act, were all in Jamie’s troubled head, only for rewrites to remove the psychological aspects and make it a surface level monster movie. Another issue is that the role was written for someone younger, around 7 or 8; they aged the character up to 12, and cast a 14-year-old (Sammy Snyders).
However, they didn’t change anything about his actions, so while an 8-year-old talking to a stuffed animal and intruding on his babysitter taking a shower would come off as innocent, a teenager doing these things is just unsettling while also giving the audience the impression that the character may be developmentally disabled.
As older adaptations often are, the obligatory novelization by John Gault (which retains the original title for the film: Teddy) reflects an older draft of the screenplay. But oddly enough, it doesn’t quite match the version described by screenwriter Ian Stuart, either. As with the movie, the monsters are indeed real, and Jamie is described as being 12, so it’s clear that he was working from a draft that other writers were working on after Stuart moved on. But it also has several key differences from the movie, suggesting the script went through even more reworking, or Gault was pulling a Dean Koontz/The Funhouse and essentially coming up with his own alternate version of the story.
For starters, his take spends a lot of time with Officer David Bentley, a character who only appears in a few extraneous moments near the end of the film. Unlike the movie’s flash-forward opening depicting one of Jamie’s eventual crimes, the book starts with our protagonist in the woods witnessing an older man, Reverend Morley, fall into the pit (Jamie actually shouts for him to stop before he falls in, as a matter of fact). Once the man is reported missing, Bentley and his fellow officers search his last known whereabouts, and while they can’t find his body, the man senses something is very wrong with that pit.
Gault then checks in with Bentley with some regularity as more disappearances are added to the mix, and he recalls the disappearance of a boy around his age decades earlier, wondering if they’re connected. He even has a relationship with Ms. Livingstone, the librarian who is one of Jamie’s primary targets (in both the film and the movie), adding a little melodrama to the proceedings. Given that the film runs a bit too long anyway for such a thin story (96 minutes, with most of the action in the final 30), it’s good that this character’s time was reduced or else it’d be over two hours long.
As you might expect from the title, the book also has far more time with Teddy. In the movie, he’s essentially just another one of Jamie’s weird habits, and when it “talks,” it’s clearly just Jamie’s voice. So it comes off as, ironically, part of the story’s original conception of how everything is happening in the young man’s head. In the novel, Teddy has a different voice and the two characters often argue, with Teddy sometimes knowing things that Jamie does not. He also finds a new owner at the end of the story (as in the movie, Jamie ends up a victim of the pit himself), further suggesting it is an actual living entity.
This version of Teddy is also quite horny. He encourages Jamie’s peeping excursions, demands to hear full descriptions of the women’s bodies, etc. In fact, the book as a whole is more sexually charged than the movie, which is probably for the best since a novel, while still unsettling to read, doesn’t require young actors to say/do these things in reality.
Book Jamie eventually tries to rape his babysitter Sandy, whose own sexual activities with her boyfriend are depicted in full. Jamie (and Teddy) also peruse an adult magazine at one point, with the young man… well, doing what young men do when they have adult magazines (except we rarely get cheered on by talking teddy bears). If filmed as written, the movie probably would have been canceled even in 1981; I can’t imagine how it would be received today.
Another key difference is that in the movie, Sandy dies accidentally by slipping into the pit, and Jamie even tries to save her. She’s not so lucky here; after feeding her boyfriend to the monsters earlier, Jamie leads her out to it, lying and saying that the guy just fell in and he was unable to get him out himself. When she peers over the side to try to see him, Jamie pushes her in and laughs off her pleas for help by basically going all incel, saying she should have been nicer to him instead of “f—ing her boyfriend.”
The people in the movie that Jamie kills are pretty terrible to him, so it’s more or less like the usual kind of Carrie revenge tale, where you’re a bit sympathetic to his actions, but in the book, he crosses over into straight-up evil.
It’s also worth noting that none of this comes off as silly as it does in the movie. Again, Synders is too old for the part, which gives the performance a bit of an unusual/quirky flavor, and the terribly cheap costumes for the monsters don’t exactly inspire much fear, whereas Gault does his best to make the pit scenes fairly scary.
The few onscreen scenes with Bentley and the police Chief also come off a bit like comic relief, closer to the silly cops in Halloween 5 than the standard procedural vibes given by their book counterparts. Essentially, the book is a disturbing, full-on horror story, akin to something that might have been covered in Paperbacks From Hell, but it’s not one of those. It’s ostensibly the novelization for a movie that is just plain whacked out.
So it’s hard to say which is better. I guess it depends on your sensibilities. Personally, I love the movie’s haphazard tone and questionable casting choices, but I’d be first to admit it’s a total failure as a genuine horror movie. The book, however, plays out far closer to something that would scare an audience, but it’s also hard to recommend to just anyone due to the sexually explicit material featuring its very young protagonist.
But since pretty much everything in the movie is also depicted in the book, they certainly make for an interesting comparison, illustrating just how much different a scene can play out when the actors and director are on a different page than the person(s) who wrote it in the first place. It’s a pricey one to track down (I lucked out a while back at a book sale when I found it in a box where everything was marked $2) so only the die-hards need apply, but thankfully the movie itself was rescued from obscurity and given a special edition Blu-ray by Kino Lorber a while back. Give it a look if you’re an aficionado of such fare.