Meaghan read Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House in 2024, back when everyone was talking about it, and it genuinely unsettled her. Then we saw Other Mommy in theaters, and both landed at four Digs out of 10. That gap is what this piece is about. The book and the movie tell the same basic story, but they make very different choices, and almost every change makes the movie less scary.
(And yes, Meaghan is still mad about the title. “It sounds so much creepier,” she said of the original.)
Why Incidents Around the House Is So Hard to Adapt
The whole novel is told from Bela’s point of view. She’s eight, so the book reads like her jumbled thoughts, a lot like Emma Donoghue’s Room. Bela only half understands what’s happening, and that’s where the dread comes from. You, the adult reading along, see the danger she doesn’t, and you just want to yell at her not to do the thing.
A movie can’t stay inside one kid’s head like that. Director Rob Savage tried, and Arthur read that the film was shot with two lenses, with one making the adults look taller from Bela’s point of view. Cool idea. As Arthur put it, though, it’s “a psychological thing that is very hard to translate to a film.”
How Other Mommy Changes the Entity
What Other Mommy Looks Like
This is the first big change. In the movie, Other Mommy looks like Bela’s mom, Ursula (Jessica Chastain plays both). In the book, Meaghan says;
It’s tall and boxy and weird and its eyes are like on its chin.
Arthur’s review of that description: “That’s disgusting.”
Making the entity a copy of Mom gives Chastain a great double role, and her frozen smile is creepy. The book’s version is just stranger, and stranger is scarier.
The Closet and the Slow Build
In the novel, Other Mommy has been visiting Bela for a long time, but it stays in her bedroom closet. It takes a while for it to come out into the rest of the house. That slow creep gives the book room to build.
The movie skips all of it. The kitchen scene from the trailer, with Bela under the table and everything burning, happens in the first ten minutes, and the title card comes after. The only explanation for the entity suddenly roaming the house is Bela saying she didn’t know it could leave her room. “It’s literally like seven words,” Arthur said. Meaghan’s take:
This is a film that builds from nothing and therefore takes away all of its tension.
How the Movie Changes the Family Story
Who Other Mommy Pretends to Be
This is the change that hurts the movie most. In the book, Other Mommy keeps pretending to be other people. Bela thinks she’s having a normal conversation with a parent, a grandparent, or her babysitter Kelvin, and then you realize it was the entity all along.
Two scenes stand out. Grandma Ruth sits Bela down and tells her to be careful who she lets into her heart. That’s not Ruth; it’s Other Mommy. Ursula admits the affair with Frank to Bela, and that’s not Ursula either.
The movie keeps a little of this with Kelvin, but the camera, the acting, and the music cues mostly tell you who’s who. “You knew the whole time,” Arthur said.
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Russ, Ursula and the Marriage
The book has more tension between Bela’s parents, in Meaghan’s opinion. Russ isn’t pulling his weight, Ursula is the breadwinner, and the marriage is coming apart, all seen through the eyes of a kid who doesn’t understand it.
The parents also take much longer to believe her. In the book, they write Other Mommy off as an imaginary friend for a good while. In the movie, Russ sees it in the first ten minutes. That kills a lot of the “nobody believes me” fear the book gets out of Bela.
How the Movie Changes the Séance and Frank
The film gives us a big, elaborate séance with Lois, the supernatural investigator. In the book, Meaghan says it’s “quite a bit smaller.” There’s also Brian, a paranormal investigator who comes off as a jerk. He sees Other Mommy, wants to go touch it because he’s fascinated, then leaves without helping anyone at all.
Frank’s fate changes too. In the movie, we see him die. In the book, Meaghan says;
Frank doesn’t die on the page.
You never see it happen, and you’re left to fill in the blank yourself, which is so much worse.
The Endings: Hollywood Happy vs. Much Darker
Here’s where the two really split. The movie does what Meaghan called “a Hollywood thing,” making things “much happier than they actually are.” Arthur came out confused:
It also had two endings and I was like, what the f*** is happening over here?
The book does not go easy on you. Ursula and Russ try to fight Other Mommy and kill it. Their plan fails, and the entity beats them to death. Bela hides in a closet, and that’s where she finds her grandmother’s body, locked in there with her by Other Mommy.
With her parents dead, her grandma gone, and nowhere left to go, Bela finally says yes. She lets Other Mommy inside her heart. The entity takes over her body and pulls the strings out in the real world, while Bela’s mind is stuck alone in a huge, empty void.
That’s the question the whole book has been asking (“Can I go inside your heart?”), and the answer is the worst one possible. Meaghan said on the show that the book’s ending is “much, much darker than the film,” and she wasn’t kidding.
Book or Movie: Which Is Scarier?
The book, easily. The movie looks great, with a stacked cast and some fun visuals (the ball pit is a highlight). But it gives everything away early, loses the guessing game of who Bela is really talking to, and lets the family off the hook at the end. Meaghan summed it up best: this is a story about a child being preyed on by something evil, and “I should have been more worried for her than I was.”
Arthur wondered if the book would have worked better as a TV show, with more time to build the dread. The novel needs room to breathe, and a movie that starts at full speed just doesn’t have it.
If the trailer got your attention, read Incidents Around the House. It’s the version that will actually stick with you. And if you want a full breakdown of the novel, our friends Annie and Carolyn at Drawn to Darkness are covering it.