10 Movies That Completely Reinvent The Books They’re Based On

Michel Faber's 2000 book Under the Skin is an odd enough piece of storytelling. It is also a far more conventional work of science fiction than the dark arthouse hit that director Jonathan Glazer transformed it into over the course of ten years.

The book and the film have the same basic plot: a carnivorous alien disguised as a human woman picks up hitchhikers and consumes them. But where the film lets men seduced by Scarlet Johansson's beauty fall into a mysterious pool of blackness, the book focuses in much more detail on a brutal and degrading farming process in which humans are reduced to cattle. There are darkly lurid scenes which would require a huge range of special effects to bring to the screen, including, for instance, the several nightmarish scenes set inside human slaughterhouses.

Rather than realise all the gory details, though, Jonathan Glazer pared the story down to a much sleeker, bleaker, and more intimately creepy beast. There's a touch of genius in this approach. It would be tough, after all, to really scare a modern audience with a new sci-fi monster, as we've seen so many of them and generally find them so enjoyable (even if they do frighten us).

Under the Skin focuses on the strangeness and the loneliness of an alien's experience of Earth, giving its audience a much eerier insight into the book's main themes of seduction, isolation, and mortality.