I recently was fortunate enough to send Richard Hatem, the screenwriter of "The Mothman Prophecies," some questions regarding the movie, which I found to be very interesting. I myself have always been a fan of the paranormal. As I explained to Richard, I believe that even at this stage, humans don't have things figured out completely. The human race is very early in the evolution process, and there is much to be learned about ourselves and our world. Thus, I have never been too quick to snap judgment on something that may seem incredibly unbelievable. The cavemen, for example, thought they had things figured out. And thus, the paranormal has, and always will, include things that humans will simply never understand. Below are some questions regarding Mothman and the movie that I asked Richard. I caution that the last two questions are spoiler-ish if you haven't seen the movie.

1) How or why did you get involved with adapting John Keel's book?

At the time that I found John Keel's book I had already been wrestling with finding a way to tell a story about the supernatural. But I knew I didn't want to write a "ghost story", where the ghost helps solve a mystery or pin-point a murderer or find buried treasure. I wanted to tell a story about how people really, truly experience the paranormal.

After a lifetime of interest in these subjects, what I had found is that people who live in haunted houses, or see UFOs, or have precognitive dreams rarely feel any sense of closure or "greater understanding of our universe." They simply feel confused. There's a book called "Phone Calls From The Dead" by Raymond Bayless and D. Scott Rogo, and it examines this strange phenomenon. What is fascinating is that while some people (typically somewhat religious or spiritual to begin with) are comforted by these seeming confirmations of an afterlife, most people, though they think they've spoken to a dead relative on the phone, come away with no great change in their pre-existing beliefs.

So all this stuff was swirling around in my head. I wanted to tell a story about a man who encounters some sort of paranormal phenomenon, investigates it rationally in every possible way, and in the end knows nothing more than he did when he started.

About a month later I found Keel's book.

It had everything I wanted and more. Because his book, and his experience, said even more: the harder you look for answers in these areas, the more dangerous ground you tread--and it can lead to big problems, insanity not the least among them.

I read the book in March of 1997. I immediately got in touch with John Keel himself and personally optioned the book with my own money. I then wrote a spec script and my agent sent it out in January of 1998. In February of 1998 it sold to Lakeshore Entertainment.

2) What is it about the Mothman legend that fascinates you?

What hooked me on the Mothman legend was that it had everything: UFOs, MIBs, poltergeists, precognitive dreams, telepathic communication, EVP/ITC (electronic voice phenomenon/instrumental transcommunication, i.e. electronic communication with discarnate entities) and of course, Mothman. The entire story seemed to suggest that these phenomenon are not as separate as we've always thought. UFOs are ghosts are MIBs, etc. This theory makes sense to me. The universe just keep throwing out its weird energy and that energy manifests and makes itself known to different people in different ways based on natural laws we do not understand.

The story was also true and I like the idea that I could get people to pay more attention to my theme by nudging them on the shoulder and saying, "Hey man, this shit really happened!"

I knew that the kind of story I wanted to tell, where questions are left unanswered, was going to be a tough sell. What was great about Keel's book is that it does have a very definitive ending--the bridge disaster--but it's still enigmatic.

Dramatically, it had everything. Big city man in a small town (fish out of water--in more ways than one), a structure that allowed for romance (this was purely invented), an on-going, far-reaching mystery with life-or-death stakes... It was perfect.

I should probably clear something up which has been somewhat misunderstood until now. I didn't write the movie to popularize the legend of Mothman. I'm no more intrigued with Mothman than I am with Bigfoot or UFOs. Again, it's that Keel's book provided a structure and platform upon which I could discuss ideas, theories and themes about the paranormal in general, and about the natural human craving for answers where there are none.

3) Are you a skeptic? If so, what's your own explanation for the eyewitness accounts? If you're not a skeptic, what do you think the Mothman is?

Am I skeptic? Sure. Am I a "debunker"? Not at all. Am I a believer? I'd say I'm a hoper.

I think people do see strange things. And I think there are a lot of mysteries on our planet that will never be explained. I don't think we'll ever catch a Bigfoot. I hope not, because for me the mystery and that margin for weirdness must always hold. I want the circumstantial evidence to be disturbing, almost overwhelming, but never go all the way. I'm all for the paranormal cock-tease.

Keel has very interesting theories about what Mothman might be. It ties into his theory of the "ultra-terrestrials." Basically, it's what the Alan Bates character talks about in the movie. Energy forms that burst in and out of our dimension. (This "energy flash" is represented in the movie by the burn marks on the car and the tree, and the swollen red eyes people get after seeing things). The people who experience them see them in different ways. It's as if our brain is seeing something it's never seen, so it flips through it's card file looking for a match, and it comes up with, "Well, it's sort of a bird, sort of a man, and those red things might be eyes..." And we get this weird composite. Where do you think mythological creatures came from? The Griffin, the Sphinx, the Centaur? Probably just people like those in Point Pleasant, trying to use humans brains to understand and translate non-human manifestations.

4) We only see the Mothman in its physical form once in the movie, and it's a one second glimpse. The rest of the movie seems to be more so about the psychological impact that the sightings had on the characters and the town, rather than a monster horror movie. Why did you choose to that route?

In my original draft you saw a little more of the monster. I felt that as long as we understood that every time we see it, we're seeing only a particular character's point of view it was acceptable. For instance, during the bridge collapse, when John Klein runs up to the guy in the car and tells him to get off the bridge... In the original script, the guy looks up into the bridge towers and sees a gigantic bird, like a pteradactyl. It's obscured by fog, but it's really kind of there. When John looks up, he sees nothing. But meanwhile, the guy is going nuts, "What the hell IS that thing?!" and John keeps looking, getting more and more scared, because there's just nothing there. Then the bird lifts up and flies right down at the guy--okay, so the GUY sees Mothman flying at him--but John sees the metal cable dislodging and flying at him. The result is the same, the guy is killed.

Mark Pellington made the decision to keep the Mothman element even more theoretical than that, and I think it was a great choice. He focused on the mystery. Smart move.

5) A lot of the eyewitness accounts from Point Pleasant included bizarre descriptions of UFOs and men in black. Why did you choose not to mention them?

Because of the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones movie, MIBs were out of the question from the start. There was so much in Keel's book, you couldn't include it all, so that seemed the best place to start cutting. In the original script, there were UFO encounters, but the producers at Lakeshore--rightly, I believe--felt we had already seen UFOs done to death in movies and wanted to distinguish this story as something truly different.

6) For those of us who have not read the book, what events in the movie were based on true events, and which ones were made up from your imagination?

The phenomenon is what I took from the book. I do not believe there are any one-to-one relationships in the movie to exact events. Mostly it was, "Okay, someone's getting weird calls, someone's seeing Mothman..." etc. The dream of the Christmas presents in the water really happened. People getting calls from John Keel that he never placed is real. Indrid Cold is real; a guy really did meet him on the road... So the kind of paranormal phenomenon in the movie is all "real". The stuff that was made up was the story: the happy marriage, the wife dying, Klein's grief, the stuff with the Governor, the relationship with Connie (Laura Linney). I basically invented the character-context around which the phenomenon takes place.

(SPOILER WARNING: PLEASE STOP HERE IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE.)

7) History shows that 46 people died at the collapse of the Silver Bridge. Why was the number changed to 36?

Lakeshore was concerned that 46 was just way too many people to die; audiences would be too depressed. At one point it was suggested that John Klein saves EVERYONE, and that even though the bridge does collapse, he manages to get everyone off just in the nick of time. Eventually the idea was dropped. Somehow the number became 36. Exactly how, I'm not sure.

8) At the end, when Connie cheats death, was that your way of saying that the future is never concrete, and can be defied?

I do believe the future is not concrete, but is rather composed of several likely paths of varying degrees of probability. For instance, let's say that when any given plane takes off it has a 96% probability of landing safely, a 3% chance of encountering trouble and landing with a few people injured, and a 1% chance of crashing. Certain things happen during the flight to nudge the actual future into one of those 100 possible slots.

When John saves Connie ("Wake up number 37") we can believe one of two things--that John has cheated pre-destination and has somehow outwitted the forces of fate (Mothman, Indrid Cold). Or we can believe that this was the future he has been chosen to fulfill, going back as far as his car accident with his wife two years earlier. Mothman made himself known to John in order that two years later he'd be drawn to Point Pleasant and would experience events exactly as he does in the movie that ultimately lead him to save Connie. Could be either. Both work. Choose your favorite.