Onur Tukel is a writer, director and illustrator. Some of his films include Catfight, The Misogynists, Scenes From An Empty Church and Summer of Blood. He co-wrote the children’s books Let’s Make a Movie! and The Legend of Halloween with David Gordon Green, and his latest book, the illustrated novel Run Werewolf Run, is out now.
In the summer of 2013, I wrote and directed a cheap little vampire comedy called Summer of Blood. We made it with a tiny crew and spent about $35,000 on the production. It didn’t take much to create a convincing vampire. Thirty bucks for a pair of fangs, a hundred bucks for a pair of trippy contact lenses, a few thousand for some buckets of blood was all that was needed to transform me into a slacker version of Bela Lugosi, traipsing around Bushwick looking for necks to puncture. We had a blast making the movie and it ended up having a decent amount of success.
I like vampires, but when it comes to movie monsters, my real passion is for werewolves. I love them. So. Fucking. Much. If you’re a werewolf fan, you’ve surely seen An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. No other cinematic werewolves compare in my opinion. When I was young, I had such a heterosexual crush on David Naughton. Rick Baker’s make-up FX in both those movies catapult him into film God territory. Robert Picardo’s portrayal of Eddie in The Howling is still the SCARIEST performance in any horror movie. Period. Werewolves rule! They’re more badass than Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dracula and all the limp-dicked slasher icons combined. I’ve always wanted to make a werewolf film, but it’s not something you can pull off convincingly with a tiny budget.
After Summer of Blood, I directed a movie called Catfight that was extremely successful (for my modest career, at least). It premiered at a big festival, sold for a profit and streamed on Netflix for several years. For a little while, I got it in my head that I could make bigger budget movies, something in the $10 to $20 million range! I don’t normally write big budget scripts, but for a brief period, I felt the door had opened ever so slightly into the studio system, so I banged out a handful of more ambitious screenplays.
One of those scripts was a lycanthropic horror comedy called Run Werewolf Run. It was a celebration of a handful of things that I love, including werewolf mythology, roadtrip adventures and the suburban novels of Richard Yates and John Updike. I loved it so much. I tried to get it made and got a little traction, but not enough. So, like most scripts, the project faded away.
Most serious screenwriters have a glut of unproduced scripts. Those screenplays sit in the proverbial drawer, dormant and dead, with characters who will never come to life on the silver screen (or any lesser device). What’s a frustrated screenwriter to do? How will their stories ever find an audience? Please don’t say, “Artificial intelligence.” I’m too much of a Luddite to go down that grotesque rabbit hole. I don’t want a computer making my film. I want to be in the trenches, on a set, with people, making decisions. And you need money for that.
I think the answer for the frustrated screenwriter with an unproduced screenplay is to adapt it into a novel. That’s what I did. During Covid, trapped inside with nothing but my dread, I took my script of Run Werewolf Run and started rewriting it as prose. To my surprise, it worked. The words came. And came. And came. And I couldn’t stop. It was as if the characters were beckoning me to continue, like they knew their only chance to find an audience (albeit a very small one) was through a novel.
When I write scripts, the words flow out of me like lava. I’m confident and cocksure, because the script is just a blueprint for the movie I’m going to make. No one outside of the cast and crew is going to read it. But with the novel, the words dripped out like a leaking faucet. I felt like a hack. I measured every word, every sentence, every paragraph. Then I revised. And revised. And revised. It was a maddening slog! I developed a somewhat bitter relationship with my thesaurus. I didn’t want to use it, but at times, I had no choice. And the commitment – ugh! This thing took me five years to complete! Had I known it was going to take this long, I would have never done it. Now that it’s finished, though, I just want to do it again. God, the liberation. To not be hamstrung by the limitations of a tiny budget. To not be beholden to investors and film festival programmers. To be unhinged. To let my imagination go wild. What a rush! Who the fuck would want to give up that kind of creative sovereignty? To a machine, no less?
When I made Summer of Blood, I cast myself in the movie, and this taught me a great deal about directing. I learned that actors are vulnerable. I realized that the number one job for a director is to protect the actors, to make them feel as comfortable as possible on set. Now that I’ve written a novel, my relationship to authors has changed. They really do sacrifice themselves for their craft. It’s a shame that the culture doesn’t appreciate them more. They should be on every talk show, talking about their work, plugging their newest books, encouraging people to read, celebrating the miracle of the written word.
Adapting screenplays into prose feels like an obvious solution for screenwriters. Hundreds of thousands of screenplays are sitting in creative limbo. It’s such a great way to get those stories out there. And seriously, shouldn’t we all be reading novels these days, as an act of protest against the corporate technocrats who want to turn our minds to mush. Every time I finish reading a book, it feels like a small victory. I often feel defeated by the smothering dread that the robots are going to win, that the singularity is going to swallow us up and turn us into hollow versions of our prior selves. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to werewolves. They can’t be tamed by algorithms and predictability. They’re governed by rage and randomness. They can’t be controlled. I like that. I love it, actually. Long live the fucking werewolf! If you love werewolves as much as I do, I think you’ll dig Run Werewolf Run. It’s funny and sexy and bloody as hell. And it’s illustrated!
All images courtesy Onur Tukel.
