A 2017 survey reported that 47 percent of Americans believe in aliens, which is about 150 million people.2
The novel was turned into a movie in 2003 and although Stephen King didn’t write the screenplay adaptation for it, he has adapted many of his stories for the big screen. In order to understand this process, we spoke to writer Kara Lee Corthron about her experience working on the television series You (2018–).
Meg: “How do you approach adapting a novel for a television show? How does it differ in pacing compared to other writing you’ve done?”
Kara Lee Corthron: “This is more a question for Sera Gamble, the series creator. I’m on a team of multiple writers and at the beginning of our work on season two, when I joined the staff, our task was to adapt Caroline Kepnes’s second book, Hidden Bodies (2016), while holding on to all of the organic work that came out of season one. As a result, we used a lot from the book, but also changed a lot. It’s tricky because once the book becomes a show, it’s its own entity separate from the book. So, while respecting the original text, we have to write what serves the story best in the TV genre.”
Kelly: “Many of Stephen King’s characters are dark and sinister. How do you write for a character like Joe Goldberg and balance his humanity and his monstrous nature in order for the audience to still connect with him?”
Kara Lee Corthron: “Joe Goldberg is such a fun character to write. It’s not as hard to write for him as you might think. The trick is to understand how Joe sees himself and let that be our guide. Joe sees himself as a feminist and one of the last true romantics willing to do anything for the woman he loves. All of his behavior stems from that place. He’s delusional and his reality is warped, which is an interesting (and often disturbing) POV to put ourselves in. But a consistently compelling creative challenge.”
Meg: “You wrote our favorite episode in season two of You, “Fear and Loathing in Beverly Hills.” To us, it felt like it had some influence from The Shining. Can you talk about the process for writing that episode in particular?”
Kara Lee Corthron: “Thank you! And you are absolutely correct. We knew early on that Forty was going to give Joe some kind of hallucinogen in this episode, but all The Shining references came during the writing process. Full disclosure: the 1980 movie is one of my all-time faves; long before I was on the You staff, I had a T-shirt with the Grady twins on it and I also got another tee as a gift featuring the carpet from the Overlook Hotel (my Gmail profile pic is a still from the film and has been for a few years). When we realized the episode was going to take place in a hotel during the acid trip, we thought about how horrific that experience would be for Joe—a person more likely to murder the one he loves than to give up his sense of control over her. That coupled with the fact that Forty has them imprisoned in order to write a screenplay—not unlike Jack Torrance moving his family to a remote outpost in order to write a novel—sent us in the direction of The Shining.”
Meg: “We’re Shining fangirls too and have the Grady girls as tattoos!”
Kelly: “How do you navigate changing some key plot points when adapting a novel to the screen like the writers did for the series You?”
Kara Lee Corthron: “There are just different considerations. For the show, we have to think about increasing tension and suspense over a set amount of time. For You, it’s ten episodes a season. We’re essentially telling the story in increments as though it were one long novel whereas Caroline has more control when she writes a book, deciding when and where to pick up in her Joe Goldberg story and adding or subtracting characters according to what feels right for the book version of Joe. We have other considerations like casting. For instance, if Caroline decided she wanted to write a book that begins with Joe at age sixty, we wouldn’t be able to do that because our lead actor is a crucial part of the show’s success and he’s a thirty-three-year-old man. Sometimes it also comes down to elements that make good TV that might not be the case for fiction. For example, the Joe/Paco storyline in season one was very popular with some of the higher-ups in our studio and network, which led us to create a similar, but different dynamic in season two with the Joe/Ellie storyline. Neither of those arcs exist in the books, but they worked really well on TV.”
Meg: “Do you have a favorite Stephen King novel or movie/television adaptation? What is it about the work that you like?”
Kara Lee Corthron: “As mentioned before, The Shining. There is a lot that I love about that movie so I’ll just name a few things. I love the messiness. I’ve seen it more times than I’d like to admit. I’ve seen Room 237 (2013) a few times and there are still parts of that movie that make no sense to me and I’m totally okay with that. Was Jack Torrance a guest at the Overlook in 1921? Was it Delbert Grady? Does Delbert Grady sometimes look like Jack Nicholson? I have no idea. (You may be an expert with answers to these questions, but I respectfully ask that you don’t provide them.) How does Jack get freed from the freezer? Did he and Danny’s combined shining powers bring the ghosts to life? Well … probably. Regardless, the images, the performances, the score, the humor, and the terror of that film make it a masterpiece in my eyes.”
Meg: “It’s really interesting to learn about the differences between fiction writing and screenwriting and to think about how calculated adaptations really are!”
Ninety-two percent of mutual dreams were between two people. Twenty-seven percent of these were between friends, 42 percent relatives, 27 percent significant others, and 4 percent non-familiar people. Dreamers did not typically speak together during the dream and 48 percent had the dream while in different locations.3
Dreamcatchers originated in the Ojibwe culture and are traditionally hung over a baby’s crib to offer protection.
One theme in Dreamcatcher is the idea of shared dreams. Although no scientific studies have been conducted on this phenomenon, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of people having the same dream. It tends to be more prominent in twins and longtime married couples but is even reported by people who are strangers and recognize each other from their dream. While shared dreams haven’t been properly researched, there exists a lot of science around dreams. According to Antti Revonsuo, a psychologist at the University of Turku in Finland, dreams may play a role in helping us deal with possible threats. “His threat simulation theory proposes that nightmares about attacks by saber-toothed cats gave our early ancestors an opportunity to practice how to survive a real-world encounter.”4 Maybe this is why we, as horror fans, like the genre so much! We may be practicing how to handle these seemingly impossible obstacles. Our dreams act as a reservoir of ideas and allow us to process and work through personal feelings, subconscious opinions, and memories.