8 Years Ago, An Unfilmable Horror Book Almost Became a TV Series (And the Creator's Ideas Got WEIRD)

While it’s common for books to be adapted into movies or television series, there are some that most people have written off as unfilmable. There are a variety of reasons a book might be considered to be impossible to adapt for the screen, like stories that rely on the inner thoughts of its characters or stories with non-linear storytelling, or even those with massive worlds and settings that would make the cost to bring them to life simply out of reach (or just wouldn’t be profitable.) Sometimes books manage to overcome such hurdles — Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, for example, took the long considered unfilmable Frank Herbert epic and successfully brought it to life. And then there are books that come close to making it from page to screen, though in the case of one such book, the creator’s ideas for what the adaptation would be like were somehow even more weird than the book itself.

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Eight years ago, author Mark Z. Danielewski entered talks to adapt his novel, House of Leaves, into a television series. The idea that anyone would even attempt to bring the book to television was met with a bit of surprise and for good reason. House of Leaves is a notoriously contentious piece of literature. The book is so complex it almost defies explanation, thanks to its highly unconventional structure including massive amounts of footnotes, multiple different fonts (and font colors), strange on-page structure (including maze and labyrinth like text) as well as it’s complicated story told over multiple perspectives that, in broad strokes, tells the story of a man analyzing a documentary about a family’s home that is mysteriously bigger on the inside than the outside and the seemingly random notes of a tattoo artist who discovers the manuscript. It’s a deeply disorienting book, but Danielewski almost brought it to life — and what he came up with would have made things even stranger.

Danielewski Wrote Not Just a Pilot, But Three Additional Scripts That Would Have Taken Readers Far from House of Leaves

In 2018, Danielewski revealed his 62-page pilot for House of Leaves and it’s a script that takes a surprising turn from the jump. Straight out of the gate, the screenplay reveals that the House of Leaves book wasn’t actually a novel at all, asserting that the complicated story the book contained — including the bizarre, disputed “Navidson Record” documentary that is part of the novel — was actually true. This revelation in turn leads to the literary community denouncing Danielewski for the hoax he perpetrated with the original novel, seeing things up for a very meta experience. Things get even more convoluted when a “Director” then hijacks the pilot and starts getting into the technical weeds of making an episode. It’s very strange and though various elements of the book actually appear in the pilot, including the infamous “Five And a Half Minute Hallway” sequence, it serves as less of an adaptation and more of an expansion.

When House of Leaves wasn’t picked up as a television series, that should have been the end of things but this is a story that doesn’t operate under any rules or standard conventions. One year after the release of the pilot script, Danielewski dropped three additional teleplays on his Patreon, all connected to a House of Leaves adaptation, but at the same time, completely different. The three scripts are entirely separate from the pilot and get even stranger. They feature new characters in addition to some of the standard House of Leaves characters, but that’s not where things get weird. What gets weird is how the story changes. The screenplays offer up the idea that the house in House of Leaves has either developed new or evolved powers that extend well beyond the house into something larger and world changing. Like the book itself, Danielewski’s ideas in these scripts are complicated, disorienting and all consuming, just now it extends beyond the house into something larger and more confounding and in many ways more thrilling.

Danielewski’s Three Screenplays Are Weird, But Prove House of Leaves Could Be Adapted (And Would Rule)

What’s truly interesting about the pilot script as well as the three screenplays is that despite having some weird ideas, it actually does prove that House of Leaves could be adapted and would make for an interesting story — just maybe not as a direct adaptation of the book’s text. The screenplays in particular update the overall story for a more digital age (remember, the novel itself was first published in 2000 and the world is a very different place now) and brings in new characters with their own connections to the story, playing on the idea that yes, The Navidson Record documentary was indeed real and that the film as well as the work of the original investigation by Zampano in the novel was seized by a mysterious company. It turns the whole story into more of a thriller that connects back to the novel but is more its own story altogether. It’s adaptation in the best sense of the term, taking one concept and transforming it into something else entirely.

However, while Danielewski’s screenplays seem to exist largely as a storytelling experiment at this time — there do not appear to be any current plans to pursue an adaptation of House of Leaves — that could always change. The rise of short-form video, like what is popularized by social media platforms like TikTok, have also seen a rise in the popularity of the so called The Backrooms analog horror genre. While House of Leaves isn’t exactly a backrooms style story, the structure short form video gives those stories might ultimately end up being a perfect way to capture the weird and unsettling world that Danielewski has created, first with the House of Leaves novel and the unusual expansion of the story he attempted for television. Until then, the mystery of House of Leaves remains on the page for new readers to discover.

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