There is also an otherworldly entity involved calling itself Indrid Cold (its spooky voice is actually screenwriter Richard Hatem). He lingers with the attractive town sheriff (Laura Linney), while Gordie divulges facts and figures that seem to foretell some coming disaster. Klein is one of those Tintin-style journalists who seem to have unlimited time and expense accounts and rarely is shown ever doing anything as mundane as filing a news story. Other locals have been bugged by a red-eyed, eight-foot phantom with a screechy yowl. There he learns that doppelganger-double of himself has already been seen for the last two nights, harassing a villager named Gordie (Will Patton). Two years later, Klein, on a job-related road trip, suffers time/space displacement that makes him arrive in the Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

John Klein (Richard Gere) plays a Washington Post reporter who loses his beloved wife (Debra Messing) to a brain tumour – but not before she sees a red-eyed apparition on the streets of Georgetown that makes her crash her auto. With Keel inserting himself into a bizarre what-was-it? narrative in the manner of “new journalism,” the book made a culty alternative to all the Nixon White House exposes and Watergate memoirs that were meanwhile lining all the bookshop shelves at the time.įinally, in 2002, this hit-or-miss adaptation of The Mothman Prophecies appeared in cinemas, a somewhat overproduced pupa of paranormal paranoia, not strictly a faithful version of the Keel manuscript and arguably owing a little bit more to The X-Files (although the debt The X-Files owed to John Keel speaks for itself). It was a chapter from that encyclopedia of monsters that Keel expanded into his possibly best-known book, 1975’s The Mothman Prophecies. Keel himself collected an omnibus of such odd and dubious marvels in his 1970 book Strange Creatures from Time and Space (I own the paperback with the Frank Frazetta cover hope I get a fortune when I become poor enough to have to sell). The late John Keel was a writer specializing in strange phenomena – UFOs, monster reports, all that good stuff that makes fabulous reading in every month’s Fortean Times magazine.

There is also the matter of a strange voice on the telephone of someone calling himself – or itself – “Indrid Cold.” The sense of ominous déjà vu seems tied to residents being frightened by apparitions of a large, bird-shaped humanoid with luminous eyes.

The mothman prophecies book review