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.”
