Regular Episode
#158 – AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD HATEM (PART II)
June 6, 2018

#158 – AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD HATEM (PART II)

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow wrap up their two-part conversation with screenwriter Richard Hatem, who adapted John Keel‘s 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 into the 🎬 2002 film 💵. Richard is perhaps best known to TV audiences as the writer-producer behind the supernatural drama series Miracles and The Gates, but as this conversation makes clear, he has spent decades thinking seriously — and skeptically — about the paranormal landscape that produced Keel’s work.

If you haven’t heard Part I, go back and start there. This second half ranges freely from the Chicago Mothman sightings to the philosophy of materialism, precognitive dreams, EVP methodology, and — in Richard’s signature move — the scriptwriter’s art of finding an emotional through-line inside an utterly uncontainable body of source material.

🦋 Chicago Mothman & the Limits of Witness Reports

Blake asks Richard about the wave of Chicago Mothman sightings that had been circulating at the time of recording. Richard’s take is measured: the early reports felt genuinely varied and strange — many sounded less like the classic Mothman and more like sightings of a “winged person” — but a wave that drags on for weeks rather than days starts to strain his credulity. Blake recommends the MonsterTalk episode featuring researcher Alison Jornland, who did on-the-ground fact-checking and found that pushback from within the community made critical inquiry unwelcome.

Both agree that the ideal is an environment where witnesses feel comfortable giving detailed, calm accounts — and that reflexive ridicule is counterproductive to ever understanding what people actually experienced.

📺 Adapting the Unadaptable: The Screenplay’s Emotional Through-Line

Richard revisits what made turning Keel’s book into a film so difficult. The Mothman Prophecies (book) is, he notes, less a narrative than an episodic collection of bizarre incidents — UFOs, Indrid Cold, the enigmatic Woody Derenberger, Men in Black encounters, and cryptic warnings leading up to the Silver Bridge collapse. The challenge was to find a human spine for the story.

His solution: the protagonist John Klein would be a man who keeps trying to nail down the phenomenon, only to have it escape him every time — “Charlie Brown, and Indrid Cold was Lucy and the football.” The climax mirrors advice Keel’s own UFO-investigator colleagues gave him in real life: burn your notes, throw the books away, and stop thinking about it. In the film, it’s Laura Linney‘s character who delivers that message, and Klein’s recovery only begins when he chooses a human relationship over one more trip down the rabbit hole.

Richard also flags a Lovecraftian reading of the film: whatever intelligence is operating in The Mothman Prophecies doesn’t care about the protagonist the way a villain would. It’s simply beyond human understanding — the more Klein thinks he comprehends it, the more he’s probably just writing his own story onto the noise.

🔬 Materialism, Parapsychology, and the Filter Problem

A rich digression covers what Richard calls “the filter problem.” Scientific methodology demands repeatability and testable hypotheses — but experiential phenomena, almost by definition, resist that. He floats the idea (credited to George Hansen of 📚 The Trickster and the Paranormal 💵, heard on Greg Bishop‘s Radio Misterioso) that vigorous skepticism may itself have a survival-instinct basis — a deep human drive to stop engaging with things that historically produce madness rather than answers.

Blake introduces the “ghetto within a ghetto” framing: MonsterTalk occupies the odd position of caring deeply about monsters and the people who experience them, while also insisting on evidence. The show’s justification, Blake argues, is twofold: cryptozoology is a relatively low-stakes arena for practicing critical thinking, and the experiences themselves — regardless of their ultimate cause — are part of the human narrative and deserve empathetic attention.

Richard mentions that he once seriously considered studying parapsychology under William Roll at West Georgia College — one of the few accredited programs of its kind in the US at the time.

👻 EVP, Ted Serios, and the “Is There a Sound?” Question

The conversation pivots to electronic voice phenomenon (EVP). Richard’s methodological instinct: before debating what an anomalous recording means, first isolate whether there is genuinely an anomalous sound. Put the recorder in a Faraday cage, eliminate stray radio interference, and then — without rushing to interpretation — see what remains. The Laurel/Yanny audio illusion (topical at the time of recording) is invoked as a vivid reminder of how two people can extract completely different data from the same signal.

Ted Serios — the Chicago bellhop who claimed to project mental images onto film, documented by parapsychologist Jule Eisenbud — gets a sympathetic but clear-eyed reading. Richard notes the tragicomic bind Eisenbud found himself in: the images that did appear on the film weren’t what Serios had been asked to produce, yet Eisenbud kept pointing at the unexplained anomaly rather than the failed target-matching.

💤 Precognitive Dreams, Memory, and the “Dead Friend” Anecdote

Richard shares a personal story that neatly illustrates confirmation bias and memory malleability. For roughly thirty years he had believed a high-school acquaintance had died in a car accident. A vivid dream in which the acquaintance appeared — alive but “shouldn’t be here, you’re dead” — struck Richard as so uncanny that he mentioned it to his wife and then his sister. His sister informed him: the death had been a rumor. The man had never died at all.

As Richard dissects it himself, the dream only seemed precognitive because it was vivid enough to prompt follow-up conversation. The hundreds of ordinary dreams that don’t lead anywhere simply vanish. Blake adds the standard skeptical toolkit — subconscious pattern recognition, selective memory, the base rate of “thinking about a friend right before they call” — and the two agree that dreams present an interesting parallel to paranormal testimony: purely subjective, entirely unverifiable by third parties, and yet experienced as absolutely real by virtually every human being alive.

🐺 The Beast of Gévaudan and the Silver Bullet Retroinjection

Blake shares a research finding from MonsterTalk’s three-part series on the Beast of Gévaudan — the 18th-century French animal (or animals) that killed hundreds of people in the Margeride region. The popular legend involves hunter Jean Chastel slaying the beast with a silver bullet, but Blake’s research found no mention of silver bullets in the Gévaudan accounts until the 1960s–70s. The two earliest traceable sources: a 1950s historical novel by fiction writer Joan Grant (who claimed her novels were memories from past lives) and — far more influentially — the writings of John Keel himself, whose readership among the right audiences appears to have cemented the detail into the legend. In a sense, Keel fired the silver bullet that killed the werewolf retroactively.


📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 by John A. Keel
– 🎬 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 (2002 film, screenplay by Richard Hatem)
– 📚 The Trickster and the Paranormal 💵 by George Hansen
– 📚 JADOO 💵 by John Keel
– 📚 Gef!: The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose 💵 by Christopher Josiffe
– 📚 Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown 💵 by Mike Dash
– 📚 Would You Believe It? 💵 (referenced in show notes)

🔗 Related Links

– John Keel – Wikipedia
– Mothman – Wikipedia
– Silver Bridge Collapse – Wikipedia
– Beast of Gévaudan – Wikipedia
– Ted Serios (thoughtography) – Wikipedia
– Electronic Voice Phenomenon – Wikipedia
– George P. Hansen – Wikipedia
– William Roll (parapsychologist) – Wikipedia
– Indrid Cold – Wikipedia
– Sleep Paralysis / Old Hag Phenomenon – Wikipedia

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

In this episode of MonsterTalk, we present part two of Blake’s interview with screenwriter Richard Hatem about his work adapting John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies for the 2002 motion picture. If you missed Part I last week, listen to it first.

Of Interest

Music

  • Intro music: Scary Boat Ride by The Lothars
  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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