Sometimes, the most terrifying ideas hail from the most innocent sources.
Such was the case for bestselling writer Alex North, who began to formulate a dark serial killer tale shortly after moving into a new house with his family. As he stood in the kitchen one day, North heard his 4-year-old son talking to himself in another room.
“I put my head around the door and said, ‘What are you doing?’” the author recalled over a recent Zoom call. “And he said, ‘Oh, I’m just playing with The Boy in the Floor.’ Having just moved into a new house, was kind of creepy. But at that point, I thought, ‘Yeah, I like that. I’m going to use that for something.’”
And use it he did.
“The Boy in the Floor” became a central plot point of his 2019 novel, The Whisper Man, a star-studded film adaptation of which is now streaming on Netflix.
***The following contains certain spoilers for the book and film***
The title refers to twisted serial killer Frank Carter, who targeted lonely young boys from broken homes. He’d whisper outside their windows at night (hence the monicker) before kidnapping and killing them. Carter’s sickening spree ultimately came to an end when he was caught by Detective Pete Willis.
But when similar slayings begin to occur years later, Pete and his ambitious young colleague, Detective Amanda Beck, must figure out whether Carter had an accomplice that got away, or if the murders are merely the work of a copycat.
Loath as he is to visit Carter in prison, Pete reluctantly sits down with the sadistic convict, à la Silence of the Lambs’ Clarice Starling—”Thomas Harris obviously casts a huge shadow over the genre for everybody,” conceded North—in the hopes of getting some kind of break in the case.
The one thing he won’t do, however, is use man’s infamous nickname.
“He doesn’t like the way it mythologizes the killer,” North explained. “In the book, Frank Carter is just a fairly disgusting man who’s had a horrible effect on the world that’s still having repercussions in the present day. Pete’s very, very much against that.”
In that aspect, The Whisper Man serves as a commentary on how serial killers are not only sensationalized in pop culture, but given borderline celebrity status. “People can name serial killers—Green River Killer, BTK, all this kind of stuff without necessarily knowing any of their victims’ names,” North added, “which is a bit screwed up when you think about it.”
At its core, the book is about universal themes generational trauma and the relationship between fathers and sons. “You could take versions of these characters and do it in any country on Earth,” mused North, “and the story would still work.”
A great deal of emotional weight rests on the shoulders of novelist Tom Kennedy as he and his young son, Jake, move to a new town after losing the family matriarch. Tom struggles to find common ground with his grieving child, who has retreated into himself more than ever, preferring the company of imaginary friends (like the aforementioned Boy in the Floor) over other kids his age.
The more Tom tries to pick up the parental slack left by his wife’s sudden death, the more Jake seems to pull away, which allows the new Whisper Man to gain a toehold in their lives.
“Once I knew I was going to be writing about fathers and sons, it was kind of inevitable that you need a killer that’s going to threaten that relationship between Tom and Jake,” North said. “You need an external threat to bring out the internalized tension in the relationship between them.”
As they become further entangled in the Whisper Man web, Tom must rely on his own estranged father, none other than Pete Willis, to arrest the killer.
“I wouldn’t just write a straightforward serial killer thriller, which sounds demeaning to all the [serial killer thriller] books out there, and I don’t mean it that way,” North continued. “But that in itself would not be enough to make me sit down and write a story. The thing that interests me when I sit down at the keyboard and start to work are these themes: fathers and sons, generational trauma; you want the emotion at the heart of the book to work.”
North decided to keep a bit of distance between himself and the movie adaptation, produced via the Russo brothers’ AGBO banner.
In particular, he wanted screenwriters Ben Jacoby (The First Omen) and Chase Palmer (IT: Chapter One), director James Ashcroft (Coming Home in the Dark) to have the freedom to move beyond the source material if they so wished.
Changes from book to film are always inevitable, of course, but The Whisper Man film is generally faithful to its inspiration, maintaining much of North’s foundation while making small tweaks here and there. The movie version of Pete, for example, has been retired for many years when he’s asked to help with the new investigation. A second addition not found in the novel is the killer’s habit of taunting police, Zodiac-style, with ominous cassette tapes of his victims’ last words.
“You want to see them do their cover version of it almost,” said the author. “There’s no point just repeating the book on film because it’s there on the shelf. So, I was very much interested to see what these fantastic artists made of the story. They’ve made changes, they’ve made it their own, and I think it really works.”
Having Ashcroft on as director really excited him because, “he’s not afraid to take it to dark places, but he also doesn’t over-egg them,” stated North. “It’s all just presented for the viewer to make what they want out of out of it. It’s beautifully shot as well. Every frame looks really really nice. It kind of looks…old-fashioned is not quite the right word, but it feels like one of older-style thrillers that you used to see in the ‘80s and ‘90s; [also] stuff like Zodiac, Prisoners. It has that kind of that feel to it.”
What’s more, the project couldn’t have asked for a better cast: Adam Scott (Tom), Michelle Monaghan (Amanda), Robert De Niro (Pete), and Michael Keaton (Frank). Owen Teague (The Stand) and Hamish Linklater (Midnight Mass) co-star as two characters from the book that shan’t be spoiled here.
“I don’t want to single out a single performance because it’s very much an ensemble piece,” North concluded. It was more the overall experience. This started out as a story in my head, I wrote my version of it in the book, and that’s still there. “This [film] is how these people have interpreted it, and that is joyful and enjoyable in and of itself.”
The Whisper Man is now streaming on Netflix