The Influence of Film in Contemporary Literature
In my 2018 novel, Then Came Darkness, I was greatly influenced by The Night of the Hunter – not the novel, but the classic film, which I previously wrote about on Wonders in the Dark. I attempted to create that same sense of dread and menace hanging over a plot that put kids in similar jeopardy with my Depression-era historical thriller. The influence was indirect, though the novel featured other direct references to film when the children go to see a matinee of King Kong.
In my new novel, West Falls Revisited, the setting is more recent and contemporary, and film again haunts the pages in more ways than one. The novel pieces together a mosaic of the residents of a small town outside of Philadelphia and the various traumas (including a brutal murder and the global pandemic) they endure over the years.
In a pivotal flashback, twelve-year-old Robbie Elms sneaks away to the local Rialto Theater to see the original Jurassic Park instead of the July 4th fireworks with his friends in the summer of 1993. The local movie house, with its iconic neon marquee, holds a special place in Robbie’s heart, as it was where his father took him to see his first movie, The Flight of the Navigator, whose theme of a boy disappearing takes on extra significance in the context of the novel.
The real-life model for the fictional Rialto Theater is the famous Westmont Theater, where Steven Spielberg frequented as a child when he briefly lived in New Jersey.
In a chilling funeral scene, a grieving woman flashes back to meeting her husband in film class and watching Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet. The indelible climax of that transcendent film leads the woman to imagine her own beloved rising up out of the coffin during the viewing.
Other direct references are made to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which shares similar themes with the novel and is watched fervently by some characters as teenagers in the early 1990s. At a high school dance, one character does her hair to look like “Shelly the waitress.”
I also can’t help but think about the influence of other cinematic limited television/streaming series. The novel shares similar themes with the Olivia Coleman series Broadchurch, and there’s no denying that I was watching the Kate Winslet stunner Mare of Easttown while crafting the early chapters. Like The Night of the Hunter did for Then Came Darkness, these murder mysteries influenced the mood and tone of West Falls Revisited, and in terms of location, the fictional town of Easttown is a stone’s throw from the fictional town West Falls. Of course, they didn’t have the global pandemic to deal with, and this event reshaped the whole direction of later parts of the novel as they took place in “real-time” during the historic lockdown.
There are more film references and allusions to be found in West Falls Revisited, but it stands as an example of art influencing art and common themes being interwoven across different forms and modes of expression. The films referenced add color to the characters watching them and additional layers of context to the novel’s recurring themes. It wouldn’t be the same novel without the films & series I watched that left their indelible marks on my creative mind.
West Falls Revisited is currently available as a paperback anywhere fine books are sold, or exclusively as an ebook through Amazon or Kindle Unlimited. – David H. Schleicher
Purchase link: https://mybook.to/westfallsrevisited