“The book is better than the movie,” the saying goes. And then there are some books so unique even trying to adapt them to the screen seems like a fool’s errand. Better to leave well enough alone.
But perceptions can change over time. Take the book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which came out in 2000. Even if you’ve never heard of it, the book has had a big influence on modern horror, but has never been adapted itself. Some think that’s because the book too unique, unusual, and offbeat. If that were ever true, it isn’t anymore.
What is House of Leaves about?
And why is it so challenging to adapt?
House of Leaves is told from a variety of perspectives. There’s Zampanò, a dead academic who wrote an incomplete manuscript about a documentary called The Navidson Record, which may or may not actually exist. Zampanò’s manuscript is found by Johnny Truant, a tattoo artist who finds the manuscript and edits it in hopes of getting it published posthumously. His footnotes, fact checks, and other musings are peppered throughout the book.
As for The Navidson Record itself, it tells the story of the Navidson family, who move into a house in the suburbs and discover something strange about it: the house is, somehow, slightly bigger on the inside than on the outside. Then, a strange hallway appears where there wasn’t one before. It leads to an impossibly large, maze-like complex that the Navidsons hire a professional explorer to map. To say more would be to spoil things, but it suffices to say that it would have been in everyone’s best interest to just leave the house when they could.
So we have The Navidson Record, which Zampanò watches and then writes about, but since Zampanò is dead, we don’t have any confirmation that what he records is true. And then we Johnny Truant’s notes on Zampanò’s manuscript. Johnny goes on a journey of his own, eventually succumbing to madness and paranoia.
Beyond the multi-layered story, House of Leaves makes creative use of the novel format. Certain words appear in color. There are different typefaces depending on whose account we’re reading. Sometimes pages have very few words on them, or the words make designs, or they’re formatted in such a way that the reader has to tilt the book to read the page. Translating the book to the screen would be tricky, but not even close to impossible.
Adapting the unadaptable
It’s been done before
First of all, it is wrong to assume that a book can’t be adapted to the screen just because it’s stylistically inventive. All it takes is a director with vision. Once upon a time, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess was thought to be unadaptable, but Stanley Kubrick turned it into a 1971 classic. James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses completely deconstructed 19th century narrative conventions at the time, but it still got a movie in 1967. William Burroughs’ book Naked Lunch is very challenging — Burroughs cut up printed pages and rearranged them at random, which is about as bold as what Mark Z. Danielewski does with House of Leaves — but David Cronenberg still adapted it as a movie in 1991.
Nothing is “unadaptable” if you’re willing to get weird enough. Maybe a House of Leaves movie would divide its time between a found footage-style horror movie that covers the events of The Navidson Record and a more traditional movie that follows Johnny Truant as he looks into the story and starts cracking up. As for the formatting creativity, it could be replicated with any number of surrealist touches.
In fact, House of Leaves was already on track for adaptation in the late 2010s, with Danielewski even writing screenplays he later shared online. His version would have both adapted the original story and extended it.
For whatever reason, that adaptation fell apart. But now is the perfect time to have another go.
Hollywood has been preparing to adapt House of Leaves for years
Even if no one realized it
Since getting published, House of Leaves has influenced works of art in a variety of mediums. You can see its impact in video games like Alan Wake and Control. The 2020 movie You Should Have Left clearly takes some cues from it, and it had an influence on internet creepypastas like the Slender Man and the Backrooms.
That last one is particular, since 20-year-old director Kane Parsons turned his Backrooms web series into a very successful movie earlier this year. The movie is about a man who finds a passageway to a maze-like network of rooms in the basement of his furniture store, which is hard to hear without thinking of House of Leaves.
Thanks to movies like Backrooms, horror stories that began on the internet are going to be a bigger trend going forward, and House of Leaves had a lot of influence on that world. Directors out there have always had the talent to adapt this book; Kane Parsons would be an obvious choice to do it. What’s changed is that Hollywood now has more interest in adapting novels like this one.
Viva horror
As a genre, horror has been having a great run in general, with movies like Weapons, Sinners, and Obsession all blowing up in the recent past. There’s a hunger for new kinds of horror stories, which means it’s finally time for House of Leaves to shine. And if that doesn’t happen, the book will always be there, creeping people out and sending them off to sleep with one eye open.
- Release Date
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May 27, 2026
- Runtime
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110 minutes
- Director
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Kane Parsons