Well, friends, it’s been… quite some time, but there’s finally some Dear David movie news — and it’s big news, too: The Dear David movie trailer and release date have arrived. Adam Ellis’ iconic Twitter haunting will be coming to screens big and small on Oct. 13, 2023, just a few short months from now.
Ellis announced the release date himself, tweeting on Wednesday, “Dear David in theaters and on demand October 13.” He also attached the trailer, which simultaneously dropped on the BuzzFeed Video and Lionsgate YouTube channels. (Dear David is a co-production between BuzzFeed Studios and Lionsgate Films; Lionsgate is also handling distribution.)
In the trailer, we see Ellis as depicted by August Prew as he falls prey to the malevolent ghost child he comes to know as “Dear David.” Things, uh… escalate rather quickly, moving from sleep paralysis to full-body apparition to what looks like Ellis’ apartment going up in flames in about two minutes — a fitting story beat, given that the trailer begins with the fictionalized Ellis telling an online troll to “die in a fire.”
The official synopsis for the film is as follows:
“Shortly after comic artist Adam (Augustus Prew) responds to Internet trolls, he begins experiencing sleep paralysis — while an empty rocking chair moves in the corner of his apartment. As he chronicles increasingly malevolent occurrences in a series of tweets, Adam begins to believe he is being haunted by the ghost of a dead child named David. Encouraged by his boss to continue the ‘Dear David’ thread, Adam starts to lose his grip on what is online… and what is real. Based on the viral Twitter thread by BuzzFeed comic artist Adam Ellis.”
It’s frequently difficult to tell what a film will actually be based on its trailer; sometimes — more often than you’d think, really — trailers are dramatically different from the films they’re advertising. Sometimes, they even include footage or story elements that don’t end up making it into the final cut of the film itself.
But from what I can see in the Dear David trailer, it looks like there’s going to be a much more concrete backstory regarding who David truly is and how he ended up as a ghost than the original Twitter thread revealed. Everything also looks much more high-octane; as far as I know, the real Ellis’ old apartment did not, in fact, light on fire. (He has also moved several times since posting the original thread, per a variety of Twitter updates he posted in the years following the 2018 conclusion of the haunting).
Not going to lie: I’m not sure how into this particular storytelling direction I am. One of the things I liked so much about the way Ellis told the tale in its original format was its restraint — and of the many words I could use to describe what the trailer depicts, “restrained” is not one of them. Personally, I almost always find less-is-more storytelling to be much more effective; what we don’t see is, to me, often scarier than what we do see, and I like open-ended stories that don’t answer every question we might have about it. That’s what we got from the Twitter thread, and what it looks like we’re not going to get from the feature film.
Then again, I’ve also often said that if you’re going to adapt a story from one medium to another, you’d better have a VERY good reason for doing it — that is, what can this new medium do with the story that the original medium couldn’t? And, well, high-octane scares are much better suited to the big screen than they are to Twitter. I am at least pleased to see that the film looks like it’s aiming to do something very different from the original Twitter thread.
Ellis maintains that the whole story was real, even if the Dear David feature looks to be telling a significantly more punched-up version of it. And although I have have some misgivings at the moment, I look forward to seeing the film; if anything, this whole thing has been a super interesting exercise in storytelling and the evolution thereof, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot to discuss beyond whether the feature is simply “good” or “bad.” (Whether something is “good” and “bad” is rarely the most interesting part of a conversation about a particular piece of storytelling, anyway!)
Dear David arrives in cinemas and VOD on Oct. 13, 2023. The original Dear David Twitter thread, which ran from 2017 to 2018, can be found here; for TGIMM’s previous Dear David coverage, including deep dives and analysis of all major installments, head here.
[Photos via BuzzFeedVideo/YouTube (3)]
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*Full disclosure: I write for BuzzFeed’s market department and have been doing so since late 2020, but I have no involvement whatsoever with the Dear David saga; I’ve just been following and analyzing this story for a very, very long time and am looking forward to seeing how it all shakes out!
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