Good evening, friends and fiends,

Here’s a cool interview with Tim Waggoner, who writes movie tie-in novelizations, including for a bunch of horror films.

Q: Did you like that process of working with another artist on their vision?

A: I really like it because it’s a chance for me to interact with somebody else’s vision. It’s a very different set of creative muscles that I exercise. I get to go into a script and understand it from the inside out. And it’s interesting, too, because I can see how other writers construct stories. I see how they do dialogue, and then I can try to find a way to not only match their voice but then to bring my voice to it as well.

Every single novelization I’ve done has been different in terms of what the studio or the director or writer wants. For Terrifier 2, they wanted me to do 100,000 words, and I said, “Your movie’s two and a half hours, but even at that length, it’s only going to fill up about half that much.” And they’re like, “Okay, go right ahead and make stuff up.”

But Ti [West] didn’t want anything added to his script and I understand that completely. It is his vision, and if he wants that vision brought to life in novel form, I’m not going to add scenes from Pearl’s childhood or something.

And so that’s why the books for the X trilogy, they’re thinner than maybe all the novels I’ve written. They’re sort of retro; a lot of paperbacks in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s were thin, pulpy adventure kind of things. And since the movies have that aesthetic in some ways, especially the first one, it’s cool that the books turned out like that.

Obsessed with this art by Mat Pringle of M.R James’ ‘Count Magnus’, from Ghost Stories of the Antiquary.

Sweet dreams,
Laura

October 10, 2026