Tim Waggoner
Christine Avery
Sometimes Tim Waggoner can make up scenes, and sometimes he can’t.
Take his work on Terrifier 2, a novelization of the popular 2022 killer-clown slasher movie. The studio wanted a 100,000-word prose adaptation of a film that was under two and a half hours, necessitating some creative license from the author. “If Art the Clown is running around killing people, I can just have him kill some more people,” says Waggoner of that book, which published this past October. “At one point in the movie, he’s driving a van, so I’m like, ‘Oh, where’d he get his van?’ So I wrote a scene where he got the van.”
But on Waggoner’s first published works for A24 — book adaptations of the X trilogy — the mandate was different: Don’t complicate writer-director Ti West’s creative vision. And so in X (published Sept. 24), Pearl (Nov. 19) and the upcoming MaXXXine (scheduled to release in early 2025), Waggoner worked to bring the Mia Goth-starring horror films alive in novel form, writing them in a way that he compares to journalism. As a result, the books are slim, with appearances akin to the pulp fiction of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, he notes.
Waggoner is a veteran of the Hollywood tie-in industry, having penned novelizations for the films Halloween Kills, XXX: Return of Xander Cage, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Alien, Kingsman: The Golden Circle and the television series Supernatural, Grimm and Stargate SG-1. He’s also a novelist who writes his own original material and the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of books on how to write horror fiction.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Waggoner talked about the specific challenges posed by working on the X trilogy, the state of the media tie-in business and how he envisions the thought processes of characters intended for the screen.
Did writing these books for A24 present any new creative challenges for you compared to your past work in the tie-in space?
One of the things that usually occurs with a novelization is the studio gives you a script and that’s the only thing. You don’t ever interact in any way, shape or form with the filmmakers; it’s always somebody who’s in charge of licensing at the studio, protecting the IP or monitoring any work that’s done with the IP. Since the movie is not out yet and they don’t ever show you a screener or anything — they’re still working on the movie, usually, when you’re writing the book — you have to go by just what the script says. So you have to imagine a lot. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll try to look for any kind of publicity pictures or video, or if somebody snuck video [during] shooting, whatever I can find to give me an idea of what things might look like.
But with the X trilogy, they were all out before and not only had I seen them, I could watch each one on streaming. And so I could write it in a way almost like I was reporting. I had the script, but I could also watch the scene. I could pick up on mood and atmosphere because of lighting, because of the direction, and I also was able to use the actors’ performances. All of that, I think, made it a richer experience in terms of my writing. And it made it feel more like an overall collaboration. [In this case] the writer, the director, the actors and everybody else who made the film had an impact on the book in one way or another.
How did you first get involved in the media tie-in business?
When I was a preteen and teenager, it was just right before VCRs came out, and so the only way you could revisit a movie or a beloved TV show that was canceled was through tie-ins. We really turned to those books just for more. And they always fascinated me because there were no special features back then, so it’s the only way you’d ever get extra stuff that was in the script. But more importantly for me, you got a chance to find out what, like, Captain Kirk was thinking or feeling in one of the Star Trek movies. And I just found that different perspective really fascinating.
Eighteen is when I started to dedicate myself to writing and started sending stuff out. Eventually, I had a mentor, the fantasy author Dennis McKiernan, [who] introduced me to Mike Stackpole, another writer who had done Star Wars tie-ins and Shadowrun and BattleTech, and Mike told me the ins and outs of the tie-in business and introduced me to a few people. Bit by bit you kind of start to do work in the field and you start to get known, and once you have enough out, people start to approach you or your agent and ask if you’d be interested.
How does your creative process on film and TV novelizations differ from your process on writing your original books?
The process is really, really different. In terms of the mechanics, the first thing I do [in a novelization] is read the script and then I type up all the dialogue because I know I’m going to keep it, and then I fill in around it. In some ways, it’s easier because there’s a template already for me to follow, and so I can just go ahead then and get into the characters and their minds more. I did Terrifier 2, the X trilogy books, and a few years back I did some original novels based on Supernatural: You know all these fans are out there and they all have a different vision in their heads for what a story about these characters should be like. And so you want to think about honoring that and giving them something they’ll enjoy without being so creatively hamstrung by it that you can’t write. And that’s not something I ever have to think about when I do my own books. Then also, with both the Terrifier book and the X trilogy, the writer-director was involved. I knew they were going to read the work, they were going to comment on the work and give me suggestions, and so that was something brand new with these. I’ve never had that before.
Did you like that process of working with another artist on their vision?
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 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.
Since fiction can be a more interior medium than film or TV, what is your course of action when it comes to writing about the thought process of characters that were initially envisioned for the screen?
I get asked a lot of times, what’s the number one piece of advice you give to new authors? And I tell them that one of the things that we have to overcome is that in our culture, most people, even if you love to read and read a bunch, still experience thousands upon thousands of hours more of visual media. And the perspective you experience it from is [that of] a passive audience member, removed from the action, that just lets it wash over you. And when you write, you have to imagine that you are that actor in that scene. I started off in college as a theater major before I shifted over into English and I draw on that background a lot, the few years of acting class that I had. And so what I do is I imagine that I’m Pearl, I imagine that I’m her husband, or I imagine that I’m Maxine: What would I be seeing in this moment? What would I be thinking or feeling in this moment?
What can be added to a film and TV novelization that isn’t in a movie?
If you’re lucky, the script is going to have extra scenes in it that people are not going to get [in the movie/TV show]. And if those scenes were never filmed, they’re never going to show up on special features on a Blu-ray. It’s really cool because something that a writer created will live for an audience where it may have never been dramatized. One of the things that surprised me when I first started doing novelizations was, and this isn’t true for the Terrifier movie or for the X trilogy, but for other movies that I’ve done, people will complain, “Oh, there’s just a bunch of action. There’s no characterization.” But those scripts had tons of characterization in them. Those are the moments that got cut because the action ate up so much screentime. And so it’s wonderful to be able to bring that to people.
Have you noticed the market change for film and TV novelizations over time? Have they waxed and waned in popularity?
They really did kind of go away once the videocassettes showed up, and especially when there were special features on [home video]. And then for some reason, novelizations, especially in horror, have really exploded in popularity in the last few years. There’s a small press publisher called Encyclopocalypse, and one of the things they do is novelizations of older horror movies. So they might find a script from the ’80s and go to whoever owns the IP and say, “We would like the contract to do this.” And so they’ve been bringing out all kinds of fun and interesting [books]. I think the one they’re working on right now is Chopping Mall from the ’80s with Barbara Crampton.
Does it mean anything to you that A24, which is such a contemporary film brand, is working on film novelizations at this point?
I really think so. One of the things I’ve noticed with the Terrifier book and the X books, and this is anecdotal, is that people are saying, “I haven’t picked up a book in X amount of years and I just love this book and I can’t wait to read another book. I’m just going to grab another book to read.” So that makes me really happy, especially because people who actually do surveys [find that] men in America tend not to read as much as women do. A number of the people that I’ve seen make these comments have been men so I’m like, “Well, this is good. This is something.” Because one of the things fiction can do, and they’ve done studies on this, is it increases empathy, it increases the use of your own imagination. If you think of it as a technology, it does things that other types of media cannot do for us. It has its own place and it can have a really profound impact. And so if the fact that a book is marketed as a Terrifier or an X trilogy novel or whatever gets people in the door and then it gets some reading, I think that’s a wonderful thing. It’s a wonderful bonus to just enjoying the story.
What would be a dream film or TV novelization for you to write, if you could choose any to work on?
When I was a kid, I really loved the Kolchak: The Night Stalker series with Darren McGavin. I did get to do a short comic script for an anthology [about it], but doing a full novel would be really good. I grew up loving superheroes, and I’ve never done any kind of superhero stuff, so if there were any novelizations of the new DC movies that James Gunn’s going to be putting out, I would love to do those. I haven’t done Friday the 13th yet. I did a Freddie Krueger book years and years ago, and I did Michael Myers, so if I could get Jason, that would be the trifecta for ’80s horror. But really, any of them are interesting because they’re all different. They’re different challenges and they stretch me in different ways — that’s what I like about it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.