Vincenzo Natali’s ‘Splice’ Getting a “Perverse” Official Novelization This Summer

Fans of the 2009 sci-fi/horror movie Splice from director Vincenzo Natali will be happy to hear than an official novelization is on the way, with Fangoria first reporting the news this week.

Based on the screenplay by Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant, and Doug Taylor, Splice: The Novelization is written by Claire Donner and published by Encyclopocalypse Publications.

Encyclopocalypse previews, “Experience Vincenzo Natali’s Splice like never before in this new official novelization by Claire Donner!”

Vincenzo Natali tweets in praise of the upcoming book this week, “Claire Donner has written a deeply psychological and perverse novelization of Splice. I loved it.”

Donner tells Fangoria, “I did not add anything new to the course of events in Splice, but the film provides so much room to explore psychology and memory that I’d like to think the novelization will feel fresh and provocative for fans. Vincenzo flatters his audience by never saying too much, allowing for some amount of collaboration between the viewer’s imagination and the nuanced performances of the cast. My challenge was to engage with the story’s tantalizing mysteries without totally violating them; in a lot of ways, Splice is about privacy and the emotional boundaries that its characters cannot or will not cross. Some of what I have fleshed out was derived from unfilmed scenes in a preliminary version of the script, but this was really in the service of creating convincing inner worlds for the characters.”

“Geneticists Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast are on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough when they are forced underground by a closed-minded world, fearful of tampering in God’s domain. There in the shadows they create Dren, a hybrid born of beast and man whose potential exceeds their wildest dreams…but Dren becomes their worst nightmare when she grows too strong to contain, too smart to control, and too seductive to resist.

“From the subversive imagination of Vincenzo Natali, Splice is a story about human nature: the universal qualities that bind us, and the aberrations that set us apart. This Frankensteinian fable of freak science and found family explores the pain of difference, while revealing our surprising kinship with the uncanny.”

The novelization is up for pre-order now, and it’ll be available on August 20, 2024.

Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, and Delphine Chanéac starred in the 2009 movie.