Faulkner’s Vampires

Syntax of Things pointed out this article in the LA Times about William Faulkner’s vampire film script.

“As the exclusive representative of the William Faulkner Literary Estate, producer Lee Caplin (‘Ali’) has had access to the vaunted Mississippi writer’s letters, sketches, notes and other literary works for years. So when Jill Faulkner Summers, the novelist’s daughter, found a manuscript seven years ago in the piles of material her father left behind when he died in 1962, she passed it on to Caplin. He was stunned by what she’d found: Faulkner’s only un-produced, feature-length screenplay.

But here’s the kicker: Faulkner, the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer of As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom! Absalom! had harvested his astonishing talent to write … a vampire film.”

Faulkner’s script originally called for the film to be set in an anonymous Eastern European country. The current director aims to set it in the deep South. Regardless of the setting, Faulkner’s distate for Hollywood will almost certainly be reflected in some way or another.

Biographer and critic Joseph Blottner relfects on a short story called Golden Land that Faulkner wrote during one of his sojourns in California. “Here, as in Pylon, and in every reference he would ever make in his work, Hollywood is a symbol for corruption.” Faulkner went so far as to tell a young Shelby Foote to “Go take their money. Always take the people seriously, but never take the work seriously. Hollywood is the only place on earth where you can get stabbed in the back while you’re climbing a ladder.”

So we can only imagine what type of social skewering Faulkner might do with a blood-sucking character.