If you were a regular on Twitter back in 2017, you probably came across the viral ghost story thread dubbed “Dear David.” Former BuzzFeed cartoonist Adam Ellis began his tale with the simple but potent promise: “So, my apartment is currently being haunted by the ghost of a dead child and he’s trying to kill me.”
From there, he unfolded the tale through hundreds of tweets — with photographs and hand-drawn images — over a series of weeks, his followers rapt with each update. So naturally, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling.
Five years later, the “Dear David” movie is here, directed by John McPhail (“Anna and the Apocalypse”), who told TheWrap he was drawn to the horror story’s creator as much as he was Ellis’ chilling tale.
“It was the character of Adam Ellis himself. That’s what drew me in,” McPhail said. “Because when it was happening… You know what it’s like, everybody’s a little bit cynical. Like, ‘Alright, you’re being haunted are you, mate?; So you start stalking him a wee bit, and it just didn’t seem like the type of guy that would tell that story… Like, it was just this funny, satirical, in-your-face comic book artist.”
McPhail is right. The Twitter thread drew a lot of disbelief at the time, but as Ellis clarified to TheWrap back when the film deal was signed, he says “Dear David” is a true story. “I’ve never been interested in convincing anyone that ghosts are real,” Ellis said at the time. “I just wanted to tell my story.” Adding, “If it was all fiction, I probably would’ve updated more than once every couple weeks!”
With that in mind, McPhail took extra steps to bring veracity to the film’s depiction of Ellis’ experiences, and asked the film’s co-producers at Buzzfeed to connect them directly in order to nail down some of the details.
“This is an existing IP, there’s a fan base,” McPhail said. “We’ve taken dramatic license with the story, and then what I wanted to do was sort of give those fans some things that they would [recognize].”
A lot of those details turn up in the set design, McPhail said, including “furniture, color, and what the walls were like,” recreating the sets to align with what fans would have seen in Ellis’ images “so that they could feel transported again.”
“We’ve taken a little bit of license with the apartments to sort of make it a little bit more cinematic,” McPhail admitted, “but there are areas and parts to that that are really, really heavily based on those original apartments.”
That attention to detail also included making sure there was not one, but two cats. “It would’ve been easy just to have one,” McPhail said with a laugh.
So did the experience of making the film turn McPhail into a believer?
“I did ask him, ‘So, did it happen?’ And he said, ‘Yes. Yes, it did,” McPhail recalled. “He’s committed this much. So, you know, regardless of if it is or isn’t [true], I’m gonna take my hat off to him.”
Dear David is now available in select theaters, On Demand and Digital.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch TheWrap’s full interview with McPhail in the video above.
The Scariest Horror Movies on Netflix