Rian Johnson on the Gothic Horror Mystery Influences Behind ‘Wake Up Dead Man’
Whipsmart detective Benoit Blanc embarks on his darkest case yet when Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery arrives in theaters later next week. The locked room murder-mystery, which opens in select theaters on November 26 before streaming on Netflix December 12, draws inspiration from the darker literary corners of the mystery world. “[Edgar Allan] […]
Whipsmart detective Benoit Blanc embarks on his darkest case yet when Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery arrives in theaters later next week.
The locked room murder-mystery, which opens in select theaters on November 26 before streaming on Netflix December 12, draws inspiration from the darker literary corners of the mystery world.
“[Edgar Allan] Poe is actually widely regarded as being one of the real originators of the classic mystery with Murders in the Rue Morgue,” writer/director Rian Johnson says of his key influences at a press conference. “But then, more than that, tonally, John Dickson Carr. I mean, we’ve mentioned him like 38 times in the movies. He’s a big influence in the movie, and he tonally used Poe as a launching pad.”
Johnson expands on why he dialed in on Carr’s works specifically. “He writes these kinds of puzzle-like impossible crimes. More than that, he always veers to the edge of the supernatural in terms of you thinking how they could’ve been done. He plays with horror. He plays with tone. He has just a delicious, just richness to his writing that is very evocative of Poe.”
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Josh O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
The filmmaker emphasizes that while Wake Up Dead Man is dark for a Benoit Blanc film, don’t expect full horror despite Johnon’s influences. “But also, I mean, there’s elements of it in Agatha Christie, too,” Johnson points out. “I think Christie’s best book for me is And Then There Were None, which is basically a horror novel, and takes place on this incredibly atmospheric, craggy island. It’s really a slasher film, where everyone is just getting killed off one by one, and that’s a very, very creepy book. So I think that tone is something that has been in the roots of the genre since the very start, so it felt like it’d be fun to play with.”
“It doesn’t usually even really start with the mechanics of the murder,” Johnson says of Wake Up Dead Man‘s origins. “It starts, usually, more with tone, with theme. In this case, it really got started because I wanted to write something about religion. When I started getting into John Dickson Carr and reading more impossible crime novels and lock-door mysteries, the notion of those two things fitting together like two gears and working in tandem, that is kind of what got me started on it.”
Daniel Craig is back on the case as Benoit Blanc, investigating an upstate New York parish when one of their own inexplicably dies before their eyes.
Josh O’Connor (Challengers), Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction), Josh Brolin (Avengers: Endgame), Mila Kunis (Black Swan), Jeremy Renner (The Avengers), Kerry Washington (Django Unchained), Andrew Scott (“Sherlock”), Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus), Daryl McCormack (Twisters), and Thomas Haden Church (Spider-Man 3) also star.
In case you missed it: Catch up on the trailer here.
