Clay McLeod Chapman's "The Remaking"

Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of the storytelling session “The Pumpkin Pie Show” and the author of rest area, nothing untoward, and the Tribe trilogy.

He is co-author of the middle grade novel Wendell and Wild, with Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick.

In the world of comics, Chapman’s work includes Lazaretto, Iron Fist: Phantom Limb, and Edge of Spiderverse, among others.

He also writes for the screen, including The Boy (SXSW 2015), Henley (Sundance 2012), and Late Bloomer (Sundance 2005).

Here Chapman dreamcasts one of the leads for an adaptation of his new novel, The Remaking:

What’s funny about The Remaking is… well, it’s a book about movies. Among other things, for sure. Lots of things. But film plays a major part of the story. Particularly horror movies.

Which is all to say, when I was writing the novel, I had a lot of different actresses running around the wilderness of my imagination. I kept thinking of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Jamie Lee Curtis in both Halloween (1978) and Halloween (2018). Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Their on-set experiences and everything that happened to them afterward, positive, negative, or otherwise, is baked into the very genetic fabric of the novel itself…

I had the good fortune to meet Milly Shapiro, who starred in Hereditary, while I started writing the book… so I feel like her presence was a part of the book as well.

One of the main protagonists of the novel is this character named Amber Pendleton. We come upon her when she’s nine, thirty-something, and fifty-something… So I’m cheating a bit, but I’d have to cast Dakota Fanning (circa 2003), Dakota Fanning (circa now), and Jamie Lee Curtis (circa now) to play Amber at the various stages of her life.

Visit Clay McLeod Chapman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue