Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the first novel by Jeff Lindsay, was reviewed positively when it was released in 2004. As happens with such well-received and bestselling novels with high concepts, it was immediately optioned for the screen except at first, Dexter was planned to be a movie star, not the lead in a long-running TV show. Yes, that first book could have become a straight film adaptation. The only reason that producers shifted gears and envisioned it better as a TV series was because they thought that audiences would automatically assume it was just another slasher movie, and they had trouble finding financing as a result. There's another intrinsic movie connection to Dexter - the theme song composed by Daniel Licht was originally written as a part of the score for the film Necronomicon: Book Of Dead. So it looks like, even though they wanted to avoid such associations, Dexter wound up having some horror movie DNA in him after all.