How this project came together is a long and inspiring story and now we finally have a trailer for it.

Okay, so a trailer has just been released for the Don Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep, Phantasm) directed adaptation of the fairly obscure novel John Dies at the End. There is an amazing story behind how the book got published (and the book itself is among my favorite novels of all-time) but we’ll save that for after the trailer, which is below.

So what did you think? The inspiring part is that the guy who wrote the novel upon which the movie is based on completely stumbled into this whole thing. His pen-name is David Wong and he worked at what he described as a “soul crushing” day job for many years before he decided to post a scary story on his website (www.pointlesswasteoftime.com) for Halloween.

His website doesn’t exist anymore, but I was one of the few who got the pleasure of reading the beginning of the story before the rest of the book was even created. After getting an overwhelming response from his fans (myself included)to continue the story, he went to work. He wrote a little bit of it every couple of weeks and thousands of fans hung onto every word like an old fashioned serialized short story.

You can track his whole experience on JohnDiesAtTheEnd.com although visitors should beware that not everything on the website is safe for work.

The book basically just attracted enough attention to get published by a large-scale publisher and get Don Coscarelli interested enough to make a movie. For those who haven’t read the novel, it is a spectacular read and one of the only few novels I have ever set my hands on to effectively utilize a horror/comedy genre mix. It’s silly, serious, mind-bending,fraught with R-rated humor and frankly one of the most intelligent books I’ve ever read.