Cult classic indie horror Spookies is getting the full novelization treatment from the one and only Michael Gingold, and we're excited to bring you all the details exclusively today.
From Echo On Publications, the new book, officially titled Spookies: Twisted Souls, will be published in time for Halloween 2026 in hardcover, paperback, and eBook formats, and is an adapted version of the film’s original screenplay, Twisted Souls which conceived and shot by the movie’s creative team, rather than the re-edited, producer-assembled cut that reached audiences in 1986.
Originally shot in 1984 under the title Twisted Souls by Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran with producer/co-writer Frank Farel, the film became Spookies after creative and legal disputes led the financier to commission newly shot material and a radical re-edit by Eugenie “Genie” Joseph… a production saga that has fueled the film’s legend for decades.
Spookies had an impressive theatrical/video life in the late ’80s, where it developed a devoted cult following, bolstered by its menagerie of practical-effects creatures and a widely discussed “two-films-stitched-together” structure. Gingold’s adaptation will faithfully adapt the original Twisted Souls screenplay, with an official press release describing the book as “a haunted-house story with a monster gauntlet that was devised by the creators, bringing all the characters, lore, and story back to what it always should have been.”
Gingold, who goes way back with Spookies, having chronicled the movie’s tortured history as writer and co-director of the Rondo Award-winning documentary Twisted Tale: The Unmaking of “Spookies”, has the following to say of his new book:
“I’ve known the original Spookies team since they first shot it as Twisted Souls […] Writing the novelization, and bringing their complete vision to the movie’s many fans, is a wonderful way to bring this saga full circle. Readers will experience scenes, character moments and creatures they didn’t get to see in the movie—with no inappropriate noises from the Muckmen!”
Farel adds his appreciation:
“The checkered history of our movie, Spookies, has been redeemed since its rediscovery by fans, and this unexpected novelization of our screenplay now allows me to refer to it as ‘literature’—which is somehow something I never imagined.”
Check out the official cover art for Spookies: Twisted Souls below, and for future novelization announcements and the full release schedule, visit echohorror.com.
