How Becoming a Book Saved The Dead Friends Society

What do you do if you can't get your horror movie made?

If you're Austin filmmakers Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall, you turn it into your debut novel, which is how their long-gestating first feature, The Dead Friends Society, is slashing its way into bookstores this week.

The pair has been a creative duo for over a decade, back when they both served as producers on Austin-made teen vampire rom-com My Sucky Teen Romance, and their 2016 short "Givertaker" launched what they call their Dead Kids Club. Their original plan was for a horror anthology, which evolved into a feature script based on an idea Hall had a decade ago about opening a slasher right at the end, when the killer is in pursuit of the final girl, "but then she gets killed, and wakes up, and they're all ghosts."

This was The Dead Friends Society. Soon they had a script, and development was going well, Gandersman recalled, "and then March 2020 hit." Like every filmmaker, their project went into limbo, "but we wanted to be writing, because Peter and I are always writing something. We didn't think it would make sense to write another screenplay ..."

"Because we didn't know what movies would be made," added Hall.

"So we thought, what if we try writing a book," Gandersman continued, "because then the written word is the finished product."

Gandersman and Hall finishing each other's sentences is kind of their creative process, even though they do most of it separately. They'll work on the outline together, but then they take turns in a process Hall likened to mowing a lawn, stripe by stripe, back and forth. "Say I'll do 10 pages in a day – which is a very productive day – I'll send that to Paul, and he'll go over what I did, and then he'll move it a bit further and maybe he'll add on a few more pages, and then the next day I'll go over his edits and what he created new, so each bar we're moving that bar slightly farther and farther down the line."

"And by the time we get to the end of a draft it's pretty decently refined, because we're editing as we go," added Gandersman. Moreover, it becomes impossible for even the duo to tell who wrote what part. "I feel like we've figured out a magic to writing with one voice," Gandersman added, "and we're really lucky to have found each other."

So after years of scriptwriting, they needed a story for their novel: Looking around, they realized that they could save The Dead Friends Society from the grave. Gandersman explained, "One page of screenplay ended up ballooning into a thousand words, and all of a sudden we had a 100,000 word novel."

Of course, Hall noted, cinema is so IP-driven it will probably be easier to get the book of The Dead Friends Society made into a film than it was for the script version. "Now," he said, "as of Friday, it will be IP, even though it's essentially the same thing."

Essentially, but not completely, and Gandersman and Hall both noted that the "show, don't tell" nature of a novel made them reexamine the story. If The Dead Friends Society did head back to the screen, Gandersman said, "We'd probably want to rewrite the screenplay, because we've learned so much about the characters in the book."

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The Dead Friends Society by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall, Encyclopocalypse Publications, 422 pp., $32.99 (hard), $18.99 (paper).