Horror Month: Strangler

For an author, few things—except, perhaps, that first story or novel acceptance, or the first time you pluck your bright shiny first-published book from the box—can compare to having one’s words, one’s imagination, translated into pictures or onto film. A bit back, I was lucky enough to experience both with one of my short stories, Strangler.

Strangler was originally written as kind of a throw-away piece, designed to entertain with an O. Henryish type twist ending with a side of Poe. It appears in my horror short story anthology, Dark Harbors, one amongst 29, and had seen previous publication in a supernatural literally magazine back in the ‘80s before revision for its present inclusion. I thought that was the end of it until one Wednesday when I made my weekly trek to the comic book store to pick up my latest pulls.

While there, the owner approached me about the possibility of collaborating with a local artist looking to work with a writer on a project for an independent comic book company, Three Boys Productions, who published, among other books, Students of the Unusual, a horror anthology comic book. I arranged to meet with the artist, Joel Rivers, a couple weeks later and we batted around a few ideas, originally considering an entire graphic novel, for which I translated my novella, Nino del Mar (also in Dark Harbors), into script form.

Joel found the story a bit too graphic and, at 72 pages, too large a commitment in time and work with his myriad other projects. So we set about looking for something that would fit neatly into Students’ six-page-per-story format. Since Strangler was one of my shorter stories, it turned out to be a perfect match. I came up with a script, which we then reworked at a meeting, and Joel rendered the story in full-color comic book panels. It was quite a thrill seeing the finished product, let me tell you.

Again, I thought that was the end of it. But Students had other ideas. Their promotional methods are extremely innovative, slick and creatively without boundaries. Before I knew it, Strangler became a rap song by singer Ty Bru and a direct to DVD movie included with the comic book.

I was thrilled seeing the actual comic art visualization of my story, but even more blown away by viewing the live-action version. My story was picked, along with couple others in the issue and few from pervious issues, to promote the magazine and different tales were assigned to different producers. The woman who filmed Strangler—as well as starred in it—did a superb job of catching the mood and characters, while blending pieces of the comic book into the live-action.

Without further ado, here’s the blog premiere of the mini-movie. I hope Dark Bits readers will enjoy it as much as I do.