The Thinning: Characters Remove Pounds on their Way from Novel to Screen

This is a transcript of a video that I posted to my YouTube channel in February.  

Fat outsiders have been the central characters in a number of classic horror novels.  Norman Bates was a fat outsider.  Robert Bloch introduced Norman in a scene in which a young woman registers for a room at The Bates Motel.  Bloch wrote:

Mary made up her mind very quickly, once she saw the fat, bespectacled face and heard the soft, hesitant voice.  There wouldn’t be any trouble.

But this is Norman Bates in the film version.

Carrie White was a fat outsider in Stephen King's novel "Carrie."  This is the way that King describes Carrie:

She was a slightly chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, no one would call her attractive.  Her wet, mousey hair, dirty blonde yet completely without colour.

 

 
 This is Carrie in the film.

Oskar, the little boy in the novel "Let the Right One In," was a fat outsider.    John Ajvide Lindqvist wrote:

[His classmates] could give a number of reasons for why they had to torment him; he was too fat, too ugly, too disgusting.

The classmates call him "Piggy." 

This is Oskar in the film.

 
The lead character in the novel version of "The Girl on the Train" is overweight.  Dellany Peace of "Ms. in the Biz" blog wrote, "In the best-selling novel, 'The Girl' on the train is Rachel Watson. She is the lead character and has clearly been written by the author as overweight. With descriptors such as 'heavyset', 'fat' and 'fat arsed' (among others), Rachel is without a doubt a plus-size woman. . .'"

This is Rachel in the film.

Strangely, Hollywood producers think that a fat protagonist is more repulsive to a horror fan than a bloody severed head.