Recent tweets and Patreon posts from author Mark Z. Danielewski have hinted at the possibility of an adaptation of his debut novel, House of Leaves, either in theaters or on the small screen. For fans of the novel, this is both good news (who wouldn’t want to see a book they love adapted to a new medium?) and bad news (how could any adaptation possibly do justice to the novel’s countless idiosyncrasies and unique brilliance?).
Below is a look at what makes House of Leaves so unique, how that might translate onto the screen, and why, in the end, it probably won’t.
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The House of Leaves Novel
A groundbreaking postmodern classic, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves has garnered a passionate cult following since its debut in the year 2000. A dense, immersive horror thriller delivering an innovative take on the haunted house story, the book draws readers in with relatable characters and acute psychological insights, but its most notable feature, and the thing that has sealed its ongoing place in the public imagination, is the way it defies expectations of what a book can look like.
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The novel’s plot is relatively straightforward: a suburban family discovers that their house is larger on the inside than the outside, and its constantly shifting, increasingly labyrinthine interior grows more and more sinister as the novel goes on. The simplicity of this plot, though, belies the book’s own ever-expanding formal experiments. The novel packs in every stylistic device imaginable, becoming fractured and disorienting as different colored text, footnotes, long passages of concrete poetry, and shifting narrative perspectives immerse the reader in their own type of maze.
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These stylistic extremes define the book. Certain words are printed in different colors throughout the book. For example, the word “house” always appears in blue, while the word “Minotaur” appears in red, with variations on each of these examples in different editions of the books. Large portions of the text are struck through, certain passages bleed into the next pages, some pages contain only a few words, while others are crammed with text set aside in boxes, presented as marginalia, or otherwise distorted. (There is even a rumor that the book’s first few pages, indicating Danielewski as the author, are constructed to fall out or be removed from the book, leaving only a fictional character named “Zampano” referenced as the source of the text.)
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Rumors of an Adaptation
In 2018 Danielewski tweeted a link to a pilot script he’d written for the adaptation of his groundbreaking novel. This was followed by additional teleplays published to his website and Patreon in 2019.
This pilot, according to Danielewski, was written “as an experiment” and not as part of any development deal, but worked to pique interest in a possible adaptation of the cult classic. Little more has come of this in recent years, but it’s worth considering how a text so reliant upon the literary medium (and stretching that format to its breaking point) might be adapted to the screen.
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How it Could Work
Danielewski’s involvement in writing these scripts, assuming that any future adaptation would use them, is a promising beginning. House of Leaves was Danielewski’s debut novel, and his sister recorded a companion album to accompany the book under her stage name, Poe. It clearly has a place close to his heart, and if anyone could deliver a faithful, successful recommendation, it’s him.
Poe’s album, Haunted, is itself a good sign. The project has had a multimedia element from the beginning, and the addition of a film or TV adaptation could strengthen that, especially with Poe, Danielewski, or both along for the ride. In fact, Danielewski’s father, Tad Danielewski, was a Polish avant-garde film director in the 70s and 80s. The book also had a sequel, The Whalestoe Letters, and an expansive, immersive universe would seem to fit its broader aesthetic goals all-around.
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Related: 5 Great Films Made from "Unadaptable" Source Material
Indeed, House of Leaves itself is very interested in movies. The book centers on a fictional documentary film, The Navidson Record, prominently features photography, and, as evidenced in all its formatting experiments, is very, very interested visual elements. In many ways, a film adaptation is a logical extension of the book’s heavy reliance on the way it works; one could imagine a filmmaker like Charlie Kaufman creating a meta adaptation, especially after his recent adaptation of the pseudo-horror book I'm Thinking of Ending Things. So if the stars align, it just might work.
How it Probably Wouldn’t
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All that said, there’s reason to doubt that such an adaptation could really work. The book’s existence as a book is one key to its success, both commercially and artistically. Any attempt to replicate the book on film would have to take a similar approach. Rather than try to replicate the novel’s textual experiments onscreen, it would have to devise new innovations that are rooted in film and/or television themselves. This would necessarily result in something very different from the House of Leaves that fans know and love.
It would also result in a very, very strange show. Horror fans are famously open-minded, and auteurs like Stanley Kubrick, William Friedkin, and Jordan Peele have turned to the genre to stretch the boundaries of their art, but to reach the level of the book’s uniqueness, any House of Leaves adaptation would have to be both very strange and very expensive.
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It’s this last factor that might be the nail in the coffin for any House of Leaves adaptation. Writing is solitary, but cinema is collaborative, which means it's costly. For the book itself, Danielewski could execute his innovations using nothing more than time, ingenuity, and, according to Matthew G Kirschenbaum, a visit to Pantheon Press’ New York headquarters to do the typesetting for the book himself in order to achieve his vision. Doing so on film would be significantly more difficult, requiring a huge team with technical expertise in multiple fields, innumerable sets, and a no-doubt significant budget; the type of budget that doesn’t usually get recouped by projects as deeply weird as this would be, even given the book’s devoted following.
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So yes, a House of Leaves adaptation could work. Given everything that its success would entail, though, it’s not very likely that it actually will.