"Do Not Enter" Looks to Add Supernatural Element to David Morrell's Thriller "Creepers"
David Morrell recently announced that the film adapted from his book Creepers is finally coming to the theaters as a supernatural horror film from Lionsgate films. The trailer looks interesting and since it hints at evil rituals, human sacrifice, and more, I’m looking forward to watching it. I do however have one pretty big reservation. It looks like they are completely shifting the film away from the book thematically. The book Creepers is an action thriller that has elements of loss and trauma and almost all of those elements seem absent from the film. The new film has been in development for a long time and is entitled Do Not Enter in order to avoid confusion with the Jeepers Creepers franchise.
Given that the film has been in development Hell since 2005, I’m glad Morrell is finally going to see some residuals but I also think that the changes might go beyond what was necessary for an adaptation to work in the modern era. Before I move on to my larger point, I do want to say that a film need not be a good adaptation to be a good film. The new Foundation television series is a terrible adaptation of the Foundation stories and it’s one of my favorite science fiction shows ever.
For film viewers of a certain age, Gen X and older Millennials, the name David Morrell is associated with First Blood because his book inspired one of Sylvester Stallone’s best films. Morrell based the complex novel of a soldier’s return home and the emotional and social struggles associated with it on the experience of Audie Murphy (a subject covered briefly in the book The Rambo Report). As a society Americans often seem to act as if post traumatic stress is something that has only been experienced by soldiers since Vietnam, but any reading of earlier literature that includes W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, or Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit quickly disabuses one of that assumption.
As touching as Maugham and Wilson’s books are, and as deeply tragic as Owen’s poetry is, there is something about society at the time of their release that allowed their message of trauma to fade or to be thought of as a personal account, rather than a phenomenon that affected every soldier. That social denial was one of the points that The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was trying to make, but somehow it failed to connect with the zeitgeist and it was only after Vietnam that America truly began to grapple with the subject.
Though the Rambo series contains a number of pure action or jingoistic films, First Blood stands among those entries in the film series that really dives into the veteran’s experience and the challenges of integrating into larger society. The novel is even better in this regard and stands with David Drake’s excellent science fiction novel Redliners as a deep exploration of the topic. In both First Blood and Redliners, it’s not just the soldier who needs to deal with the trauma of war. Members of society also have to deal with their own trauma and find a way to connect with people they’ve asked to do terrible things.
The lead character of the book Creepers is himself a veteran of the Iraq War, a veteran who is looking for answers regarding a wife who disappeared. To find those answers, he joins a local group of “creepers” to explore an abandoned hotel that is rumored to have hidden treasure. While some of the creepers are motivated by greed, most of them are motivated by a spirit of exploration. They just want to explore, creep around, and leave the place as they found it. Circumstances in the novel, very MUNDANE circumstances, prevent that from happening and things escalate brutally. The novel is dark, and can be disturbing to read, but it is very intense. There are movies I could compare the book to, but depending on the film it would reveal too many details about the twist towards the end and I don’t like spoilers.
The new film looks like they’ve abandoned the veteran angle. This makes a certain amount of sense given the modern film audience, but that does mean that there is less opportunity to explore some powerful themes. Then again, this trailer featured clips that reminded me that I need to watch Event Horizon again and since that is one of the few films that ever actually scared me as a viewer, I’m still eager to see what is happening. Will the addition of supernatural elements change the tale too much, or will it make it “different but good?” I hope it’s the latter.