film version

In 2012, I published a book about a suicidal teenager stuck in a high school with five other classmates during the zombie apocalypse. At the time, I was averaging the age of the cast members who would go on to play those teenagers in its movie adaptation thirteen years later, which was around five years after Adam MacDonald, the director of Back Country and Pyewacket, sent me a message on Instagram asking if film rights were available. A few months after that, I got to read the first draft of the script. About three years after that, Adam had producer Cybill Lui of Anova Pictures on board. They fought so incredibly hard to take this thing across the finish line. When I visited set earlier this year, the cast and crew were already about halfway through a breakneck 19 day shoot. “You’re making a movie faster than it takes me to write a book,” I said to them, wrong.1

It was the coldest fucking day imaginable, maybe of the year. I am not good at being cold. I had the best time. It wasn’t just the particularly surreal delight of roaming the set and seeing the book’s world realized—it was witnessing a cast and crew who genuinely seemed to like and respect each other coming together to make it happen. Independent film carries certain implications in terms of time, money, and resources available—in short, it takes more talent than ego to pull something like this off. They left it all on the mat.

A memory: Adam, on that supremely cold fucking day, jumping up and down and chanting one of the shivering cast member’s names over and over, hyping them into what the scene required.

A LIST OF THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THIS IS NOT A TEST’S ADAPTATION:

1. How fully it commits to the reality of being teens trapped in a high school during the zombie apocalypse. 2. How much it will reward viewers who also commit to it. 3. Spending time with Sloane, Rhys, Grace, Trace, and Cary as they navigate a present that’s denied them a future, through an almost diaristic perspective of a girl who never envisioned having one at all.2 4. That teenagers, constantly encouraged to think of tomorrow and their big grown-up place in it, have been stripped of that language with little else to cling to but the facsimile of the microcosm of the world inside the building they find themselves barricaded. 5. Their high school, so high school, all of it delicious and wrenching and funereal and alive. 6. The desperate choices, shortsighted choices, loving choices, petty choices that comprise the narrative. 7. “Teenagers!” I heard someone behind me exclaim as we were moved from one bad decision to its consequence, because they are all so reactive, pushing back against silence, each other, the cries of the dead. 8. “Those barricades are a real testament to teenage ingenuity,” which is one of the meanest lines you’ll ever hear someone utter onscreen, if you really hear it, and it is just one of so many moments in this movie I want viewers to really listen for and to really see. Its heaviness counter-weighted by the brightly beating heart at its center. I sat in the company of my mom and sister, amongst a crowd that cheered, and gasped and laughed and startled throughout. I will never forget the full-body flinch I witnessed at a particularly affecting kill.

Adam did a beautiful job that you’ll be able to see for yourself—IFC and Shudder are bringing it to theaters in 2026.

Luv to be a horror girlie when that Shudder logo pops.

Attending the premiere of this movie based on my book was less an out-of-body experience and more an ‘into body’ one. Adam announced my presence to the room and hearing the cheers in response was as bewildering to me as it was lovely, as was finding out just how many long-time readers were there and responsible for it3. I couldn’t believe it. It’s become awkward to admit how complicated it’s gotten for me to accept the position of my writing inside of any outcome it might yield, let alone this one—maybe especially this one. I never seem to see the roots, just the tree itself growing up, up, up and farther from me until there’s no view of myself from the top. This of-late tendency to decouple myself from my art is genuinely uncool, something I’m working on, but throughout this experience, I have been met with people who insist on my point of connection. That same feeling Saturday. I don’t really have the words.

The night before, its world premiere occurred at Brooklyn Horror Film Fest and the book was repped by its stellar publishing team. Those not in attendance (self included—but see Kathryn’s shirt!), there in spirit. Look at these good people who are so good to me! They are taking such extraordinary care of and working so hard for this book because they believe in its story too, and they have made pivots and improvised in the name of it in ways that remind me of, well, making a movie in 19 days. I’m grateful to them.

What has it been like, to see your work adapted, I was asked after the screening, for the Q&A. I think my favorite part has been being reminded of the way art animates other artists. How Adam would find the book and its story would light up the filmmaker part of his brain, and how he would write such an intensely felt adaptation of his own, how it would capture Cybill’s interest and expertise, and how their combined vision would ultimately encourage and inspire the individual talents of its extraordinary cast and crew. How those talents would result in a film with a particular scene I find so eerily and electrically choreographed it lingered in my mind for days. How I thought, as I got to work on my current manuscript, that I would love to write something that elicits the same kind of emotional response. How if I manage to do that successfully, it might compel some other artist’s expression, which in turn might electrify another artist. And not just artists, but audience too, everyone. Storytelling is a unique affliction that demands a level of vulnerability and open-heartedness you hope will invite people in, and that they will ultimately be receptive to. All you want to do is give everything you’ve got to waking them up even a little, or making them feel a lot. I can’t believe, sometimes, the privilege of what I get to share with you. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, just think I better send this letter now, so I can get back to it.