The Creepy Thing Alex North’s Young Son Said That Inspired ‘The Whisper Man’ | Just Jared
Netflix’s new thriller film The Whisper Man is what everyone is talking about online right now.
It is not based on a true story and instead adapts Alex North‘s fictional 2019 novel of the same name. The film stars Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, and Michelle Monaghan.
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But while the story isn’t based on something that happened in real life, one unsettling element started with something the author’s son said.
The Whisper Man is about a widowed writer who seeks assistance from his estranged father, a retired detective, after his young son disappears. Their search connects the new case to a convicted killer known as the Whisper Man.
Alex North’s son inspired one of its creepiest ideas
North said his family had recently moved when his son, about 4 years old, mentioned playing with “the boy in the floor.” The comment stayed with the writer and helped shape Jake’s frightening imaginary friends.
“That stuck with me, and I eventually decided that Jake in the book would have imaginary friends and some of them would be quite frightening. The story developed from there,” North shared during an interview with Celadon Books.
That story inspired the overall atmosphere and supernatural ambiguity, though nothing about the actual crimes.
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How the novel became a Netflix movie
Director James Ashcroft and the filmmakers worked to retain the novel’s father-and-son foundations when adapting the story. It was that core relationship that attracted the filmmaker.
“Despite the genre and the trappings of a crime serial killer thriller, it was the characters and that father and son relationship that’s mirrored throughout the story that really made me sink down into both novel and script,” he said Tudum.
North was also okay with some of the changes made to the film, such as moving Jake’s kidnapping to much earlier in the story.
“It made sense to me that they would move that,” North said. “It’s the kind of story you can approach in different ways, I think, and that was the way that they chose to do it.”
Watch the trailer below, and stream The Whisper Man on Netflix now.
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