Editorials
From Book to Screen: A Guide to Joe Hill’s “NOS4A2”
The road to bringing Joe Hill’s sprawling bestselling novel NOS4A2 to life has been as long and winding as Charlie Manx’s travels to and from Christmasland, his distorted hellish world where Christmas is never-ending. The television series adaptation of the more than 700-page novel was first announced in 2015, and is set to premiere on Sunday, June 2, 2019, on AMC.
Hill serves as executive producer on the inaugural 10-episode season, alongside creator/showrunner Jami O’Brien (Fear the Walking Dead) and Tornante Television co-president Lauren Corrao. With just weeks to go before the series premiere, we revisit the novel that started it all to help prepare you for the emotionally devastating journey ahead; the novel that Hill has referred to as his “Master’s Thesis in Horror Writing.”
Who is Joe Hill?
Born Joseph Hillstrom King, author Joe Hill was raised in a literary family full of celebrated authors- his parents are Stephen and Tabitha King. He’d been writing on a steady basis since the age of 12 and knew he wanted to pursue a career in writing, but he didn’t want to be published simply based on his father’s name. He wanted to get published based only on the quality of his work. Thus, his pen name Joe Hill was born. That pen name gave him freedom to dabble in the genre he loved but one so synonymous with his father’s work.
The road to getting published wasn’t easy, but Hill found some success in the world of comic books. Still he was persistent in his goal, and eventually, his short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, sold and was released in 2005. Then came comic series Locke & Key with illustrator Gabriel Rodriguez, haunted Heart-Shaped Box, and romantic dark fantasy Horns, which received its own film adaptation in 2013. That year also brought the release of his largest novel yet in NOS4A2, an expansive story spanning years with numerous characters and subplots, something he’s said that, in some ways, is his conversation and rewrite of his dad’s epic novel It.
What is NOS4A2?
Set from 1986 to 2012, NOS4A2 weaves two core stories; the immortal Charlie Manx who feeds off the souls of kidnapped children to retain his youth via his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith (the license plate, of course, is NOS4A2), and the reluctant heroine Vic McQueen, an artist with the unique power to locate missing things by riding her bike through the Shorter Way Bridge. It’s because of Vic’s gift that she discovers Manx’s penchant for kidnapping kids as well as his lair as a teen, and barely escapes with her life when she confronts him; though not before setting his house on fire. He’s captured by the police, and Vic attempts to get her life back on track.
Years later as an adult, Vic is a successful children’s book series creator and mother to son Bruce Wayne Carmody. Yet, she still receives ominous phone calls from the creepy children of Christmasland, causing those around her to question her sanity- including her son’s father Lou. When her son is kidnapped, it’s Vic who becomes the main suspect. Yet only she can save her son from the evil clutches of Manx, and stop the immortal once and for all.
Heartbreak, familial strife, gripping action, and a surprisingly touching story drenched in terrifying nightmares makes NOS4A2 a modern horror classic.
Inscapes: The Shorter Way Bridge and Christmasland
Christmasland, Manx’s special, hellish vision of a Christmas world to keep and feed from his kidnapped children exists in a place only accessible to people with unique abilities like him. Just as Vic’s Shorter Way Bridge only exists for those with unique abilities- the actual bridge it’s modeled after collapsed long ago. These places are referred to as “inscapes” or inner worlds created by the minds of gifted people, and the world of NOS4A2 is filled with them.
Because these inscapes are creations of the mind, the toll it takes on persons able to navigate these inscapes can be physically catastrophic. Every time Vic uses the Shorter Way Bridge, it causes devastating migraines -beginning with stabbing pain behind her left eye- and leaves her extremely sick for days. For Vic’s ally Maggie Leigh, a quirky librarian with an inscape inside her scrabble bag, which provides answers to any question asked via scrabble tiles, her ability comes with the price of slowly losing her speech with every use of her inscape.
Late in the novel, the police come upon a unique map, “United Inscapes of America,” that looks like a skewed view of the U.S. and doesn’t list cities but other locations of inscapes. A place north of Boston called Lovecraft Keyhole (Locke & Key), a place called Pennywise Circus near Derry, Maine (It), the Treehouse of the Mind (Horns), and more connect Manx and McQueen’s world with other literary characters from King and Hill’s works. Though this is more for fun than an intent to crossover stories.
The connections to other King works don’t stop at the inscapes either.
The Key Players
Vic McQueen is the reluctant heroine with a personal stake in her ongoing battle with the over-a-century old soul-sucking vampire Charlie Manx, and her fight is compounded by her own troubled relationships. She has a volatile relationship with her mother, Linda McQueen, and blames her for her father Chris McQueen’s abandonment of them. Though harsh truths eventually place a strain on her relationship with her father as well. Her deep-seated family issues translate well into adulthood, placing emotional strains on her relationships with her lover Lou and son Wayne.
Then there’s Maggie Leigh, the aforementioned librarian that Vic meets in her childhood on a trip through the Shorter Way. Maggie remembers the evils of Charlie Manx long after Vic has grown up and blocked it out of her memory.
Charlie Manx also has help in the form of Bing Partridge, Manx’s right-hand man who plays a cruel role in the kidnapping of Manx’s child victims; Bing rapes the mother before brutally murdering her and any other adult. Bing’s sole desire in life is to get to live in Manx’s Christmasland, not quite aware of the truth behind its existence.
The Television Series
The 10-episode inaugural season will only cover a fraction of the novel; the rest will be covered in future seasons (assuming viewership allows for more, so be sure to tune in!). Based on casting news, and the premiere episode we caught at SXSW (Review), we can expect that this season will only cover Vic’s story through her high school years building up to her first major confrontation with Charlie Manx.
The world of NOS4A2 is rich, complex, and real; Vic is a grounded character full of heartbreak and fortitude. Charlie Manx, Christmasland, his sidekick Bing, and what happens to the kidnapped children all make for some truly creepy characters and moments that will bring the horror. Christmas has never looked so ominous before.
If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Joe Hill, this series is about to change that. Tune in Sunday, June 2, 2019 on AMC for the start of an epic journey.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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