Darren Lynn Bousman: The horror director who went from plagiarism to franchise mainstay
On April 21st, 2023, a young aspiring director received an ultimatum from his father: find a job in the movies within a year, or he’d stop sending him money. At this point, the director had made a few short films and a couple of music videos but hadn’t got a feature film off the ground. He now had a deadline, though, after which his dream would be dead. So, he feverishly polished one of his horror scripts and sent it to everyone in Hollywood – and soon found himself on a phone call with a studio executive, terrified he was about to be accused of plagiarism. Instead, he was hired to make the second entry in what would become a billion-dollar franchise.
In order to get his script into the hands of people who could actually help it become a reality, Darren Lynn Bousman knew he needed to get creative. He had no connections in Hollywood at that point, no agent, and no manager. All he had was a ticking clock and a last chance at forging the career he’d worked so long and hard to attain. So, he created a fictional management company out of thin air, complete with fake letterheaded paper and a voicemail box, and sent The Desperate to everyone he could think of.
For a long time, Bousman’s script—a “claustrophobic blood bath set inside a house where people were killing each other off one by one”—failed to generate any buzz. However, 11 months after he sent it out, he was woken up by a phone call from Gregg Hoffman of Twisted Pictures.
His heart sank because he knew Twisted was the company behind a recent low-budget horror hit, which he only heard about when another executive read his script and said, “I saw a film like this at Sundance. It was called Saw.”
Bousman admitted, “They are just so similar, bleak and disgusting, and The Desperate has a twist ending.”
So, when Bousman began talking to Hoffman, he was terrified that the executive was about to accuse him of ripping off Saw. He was preparing himself to go into a spiel about how he’d been writing The Desperate for years and didn’t even know what James Wan’s movie was until a week before it hit cinemas. Therefore, he couldn’t have plagiarised it. To his surprise, though, Hoffman didn’t accuse him of anything. Instead, he said he loved The Desperate and wanted to make it with Bousman as the director.
There would be a further twist to Bousman’s Twisted story, though. After speaking with Hoffman and excitedly agreeing to direct The Desperate, Bousman got a call the next day that altered the entire trajectory of his career. “Overnight, Gregg’s partners, Oren Koules and Mark Burg, read the script,” Bousman revealed on his official website. “Oren calls Gregg up and says, ‘Wait, let’s turn The Desperate into Saw II. Next thing I know, I am meeting at Lionsgate Films in a room full of executives.”
Just weeks before this meeting, Bousman was “penniless, sleeping on couches, and working as a tape room operator dubbing videotapes.” Now, he had a choice to make: stick with his original vision and insist on directing The Desperate as is, or accept it being retrofitted into a Saw sequel. He knew there was no guarantee that Twisted would still want to make The Desperate if he disappointed them by saying no to Saw II, though, not to mention making a sequel to a huge horror hit was potentially the basis of a viable career in Hollywood.
Ultimately, Bousman bought into what Twisted was selling, even though he couldn’t help thinking, “How the fuck did I get this job?” He wound up making three blood-soaked Saw movies in three years before returning for Spiral: From the Book of Saw in 2021. Best of all, though, his father was able to stop sending him money – with a perfectly clean conscience.
