Monday, October 7, 2019

Rachel Eve Moulton's "Tinfoil Butterfly"

Rachel Eve Moulton earned her BA at Antioch College and her MFA in fiction from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in The Beacon Street Review, Bellowing Ark, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Bryant Literary Review, among others.

Here Moulton shares some thoughts on an adaptation of Tinfoil Butterfly, her first novel:
Tinfoil Butterfly began in a playwriting class. We were asked by the professor to pick three characters—images torn from magazines—and write a scene in which they meet. I picked Earl, a little boy in a butterfly mask made from tinfoil; Emma, a woman smoking a cigar with dark makeup around her eyes and long dark hair; and finally, George, a man sitting in a lawn chair that was facing away from the camera. In this early version of the novel, Earl is introducing Emma to a comatose George and asking if perhaps she will help him bury the man. The characters leapt into a sort of evil action that gained its own momentum.

The nature of the assignment meant that the piece was driven by dialogue and enhanced by the glossy images I’d been handed. From that moment on it has been easy to imagine the piece making it to the screen. While I am a huge horror movie fan and would love to see Emma make it to the big screen, I am enthralled by the television out there in 2019. I’d love to see Emma and Earl find a new audience through television, hooking viewers over a longer period.

I won’t name favorite actors for the role, but I’d love to see Emma played by an actress who gets the power and vulnerability of a woman. Think Toni Collette in Hereditary.
Follow Rachel Eve Moulton on Twitter.

Learn about her ten "favorite literary thrillers, the ones that will wake up your brain and your heart."

--Marshal Zeringue