10 Films Whose Novelisations Took On A Life Of Their Own

By Kenny Hedges / July 22, 2020

Novelisations can best be likened to the English candy bar Flake, which came about when a factory worker noticed chocolate shavings on a production line forming a product of their own.

Much like Flake, a film is bound to have some runoff, but that runoff need not be discarded. Initially, though, it's easy to dismiss them as cynical cash-ins.

But something strange happens once you actually sit down to read them. As they are slated to coincide with the release of the film, novelisations are often based on earlier drafts of the script. As a result, some hold descriptions of lost and rumoured scenes that never made the final cut of a picture.

It's always a pleasure to stumble on an Easter Egg such as Marty McFly witnessing his mother cheating on a test in Back to the Future, but it gets even wackier when the writers take artistic license. This is especially true of killer animal films or aliens - their need to anthropomorphise a non-speaking creature to fill pages leads to some interesting interludes.

There are other occasions where the texts somehow take a life of their own. Perhaps the novels began following a franchise faithfully, but the author suddenly took the characters his own route.

There's no shortage of examples on ebay, homeless now after years of harbouring the little known plot twists and deleted scenes some movies just opted to excise from the finished product. Here are some worth tracking down.

10. The Creature From The Black Lagoon

Unfortunately, now that The Shape of Water was a success, we'll never see Guillermo Del Toro's actual remake of The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

But there was a time when the Pan's Labyrinth director, among others, were considering a straight reboot of the last of Universal's monsters.

The Creature From the Black Lagoon received a straight novelisation in 1954 by John Russell Fearn, primarily there for children too scared to see it on the big screen. In 1977, however, Walter Harris (under the name Carl Dreadstone) wrote an updated version that wildly rebooted the creature.

It was one in a series of books intent on recreating the classic Universal Monsters, which were seeing a bit of a revival thanks to Hammer Studios and several recent Dracula adaptations.

Dreadstone's monster was considerably larger than the film's human-sized Gill Man; about ten times the size. The creature was as large as the boat that's hunting it, weighing in at 30 tons.

In addition, we learn a lot more about the Gill Man's biology, including the fact that he's warm and cold-blooded and a hermaphrodite, which can be seen to partially sabotage the film's King Kong-esque ending.

The novelisation is also much more violent, with the creature eating, stepping on and impaling humans with a tree branch (a death that was deleted from the film sequel Revenge of the Creature).

We'll likely never see an adaptation of Harris' roided out Creature, but it's certainly strange enough to warrant curiosity.