“It’s the genre that allows you to take the biggest swings,” says writer and publisher Mark Alan Miller about the appeal of horror fiction. “I’m a sucker for a good metaphor, and horror opens the door for some wonderful, bloody, savage metaphors that can be used to really say what you want to say.”
Miller spent a decade as vice president of horror writer and filmmaker Clive Barker‘s production company, Seraphin Film Productions. Barker, for the uninitiated, wrote dozens of perverse horror and dark fantasy novels, but is best known today as the force behind the “Hellraiser” film franchise.
Miller produced the “Nightbreed” director’s cut, wrote a couple dozen comic books, and got the “Hellraiser” reboot and “Books of Blood” film mounted. Now his own publishing house, Encyclopocalypse Publications, is bringing back one of the horror film industry’s most loathed footnotes: movie novelizations, the once-ubiquitous prose adaptations of popular movies that were killed off and forgotten four decades ago.
During his time at Seraphin, Miller was tasked with digitizing and bringing back into circulation a number of Barker’s books that had gone out of print. In the process, he learned the ins and outs of indie publishing. In 2018, two years after leaving Barker’s production company, he launched Encyclopocalypse, a small horror-centric publishing house based in Whittier, California.
Encyclopocalypse releases an average of 50 or 60 titles a year.
Miller had maintained the audio rights to his book, “Hellraiser: The Toll,” and produced a full-cast audiobook as a test of his business idea. When it sold surprisingly well, he started reaching out to the authors he had come to know through Seraphin. “I asked them if they would be interested in letting me bring their books back into print,” he says. “Everyone said yes.”
Between audiobooks, original novels, reissues and horror-related nonfiction, Encyclopocalypse releases an average of 50 or 60 titles a year, a remarkable output for a small indie press. Rooted in both the film and literary worlds, its roster of authors boasts contemporary genre novelists, as well as filmmakers and screenwriters, including Peter Atkins (“Hellraiser”), Brian Yuzna (“Re-Animator”), Rachel Talalay (“Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare”) and Mick Garris (“Masters of Horror”) and loads of Stephen King adaptations.
For Miller, novelizations hold unique importance. “Who wouldn’t want to know more about a film they love?” he says.
During their heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s, movie novelizations were the new pulp novels. Like the crime, Western and science fiction pulps of earlier decades, novelizations were cheap paperbacks churned out for a flat fee by desperate hacks on the skids. Unlike those earlier pulps, however, novelizations were, at heart, marketing gimmicks, joining soundtrack albums, games, lunch boxes, trading cards and other ephemera as one more essential tool studios used to promote a new movie. By the late ’70s you could find novelizations of everything from the “Star Wars” and “Alien” franchises to “Taxi Driver.”
The novelization as a form, even as an idea, has long been denigrated by literary critics and the general reading public alike as a disposable gutter genre. Even the term “novelization” implies they weren’t real novels. They were simulacra at best, empty consumer products, the result of a crude mechanical operation inflicted upon a legitimate art form.
There’s certainly a good deal of truth in that assessment. Most novelizations from the time could not be held to the same standards as “real” novels. Their prose and dialogue, deliberately written at a sixth- grade level, tended to be stilted and pretentious. The characters stretched to reach two dimensions with emotions that were broad and simplistic. But the target audience wasn’t looking for literary subtlety or poetic flourishes. To readers, the form served an important and singular function.
During their heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s, movie novelizations were the new pulp novels.
In those distant pre-cable, pre-home-video, pre-streaming days, fans wanting to see a beloved film after it left theaters had three choices. Those who were lucky enough to live near a revival house could pray a screening popped up on its schedule. Others could wait even more hopelessly for one of the networks to broadcast it as a movie of the week, trimmed and interrupted as it was by censors and commercials. The most obsessive and frustrated of fans had little other recourse than to head down to the local drugstore and pick the novelization off the paperback carousel.
Novelizations, bad as they were, allowed people to re-experience a favorite film whenever they liked, imagining the faces, voices and settings they had seen in the theater. As a bonus, authors often bulked up a skeletal script to book length by introducing their own detailed character backgrounds, inner monologues and subplots — as well as sex and gore — that didn’t, or couldn’t, make it to the screen.
“Long ago, I found that getting to spend time in those worlds through prose was not only exciting,” Miller says of his love for the genre, “it was also encouraged by my mom, because it meant I was reading more. I firmly believe if someone is motivated to read more, that’s rarely a bad thing.”
Unfortunately for Miller and the hundred or so of us who were likewise obsessed with novelizations when we were kids, the introduction of commercially available VCRs in the early ’80s quickly and effectively killed off the form. A paperback reimagining was no longer necessary. Who would want to re-experience a favorite film by proxy when they could pop into a corner video store for the real thing?
Encyclopocalypse is breathing new life into this most maligned of literary genres, but with a twist that puts art above commerce. Instead of new Hollywood blockbusters, it focuses on low-budget cult horror films. Some are newly commissioned; some are reissues of long out-of-print favorites from back in the day. And instead of cheap hacks, Encyclopocalypse is bringing in enthusiastic professional writers to produce these books, not for the sake of generating publicity, but because, well, it likes them.
“Our target audience is anyone who is as in love with movies and books as we are,” Miller says. A novelization of a film that’s already 30 years old doesn’t have to be a marketing tool anymore. “That frees us up to have fun.”
To date, Encyclopocalypse has released more than 30 new and reissued movie novelizations, including Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” the 1985 vampire movie “Fright Night,” the killer-earthworm film “Squirm,” the over-the-top Italian “Jaws” knock-off “Cruel Jaws,” and 1989’s self-explanatory “Robot Ninja.” Upcoming releases include the notorious gut-muncher “Hell of the Living Dead,” “Rats: Night of Terror,” Roger Corman’s “Chopping Mall” and, just in time for the holidays, two Christmas-themed horror films: “All Through the House” and “Christmas With the Dead.”
Encyclopocalypse is breathing new life into this most maligned of literary genres.
“For every style of writer, there is a movie out there that speaks to them, that they can put their own spin on,” Miller says. “Way back in the marketing days, it was just a matter of finding the next available author to poop out a book on a tight deadline to get it ready for the promo machine. We match the writer with the subject matter and make sure it’s something very personal for them.”
Case in point: the slasher film “Sleepaway Camp,” which featured a final shot that was shocking when it was released in 1983 and would be even more controversial today. Miller is aware of that problematic plot element. Without giving anything away, Encyclopocalypse’s novelization will be written by trans author B.R. Flynn, who promises to completely re-frame the film’s divisive legacy.
“I think we’re at a place now where novelizations are being accepted as a legitimate art form,” Miller says. “Their purpose has changed. The world has changed, and along with it, the raison d’etre of the novelization.”
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