MAKING A murder

Knives Out was inspired by one of my earliest memories, of seeing Agatha Christie novels on my parents’ bookshelves. It’s kind of a deep, primal memory, because those covers always looked vaguely scary, and that’s something that always stuck with me. When I was older, I moved on to the movie adaptations, and the ones that I watched the most were those with Peter Ustinov as the detective Hercule Poirot, like the original Death On The Nile, or Evil Under The Sun. Those were on cable TV over and over, in the days when I would just sit and watch cable TV all day. If there’s an example of anything that Knives Out most tries to emulate, it’s the tone and the feel and the fun of those movies specifically.

By that I mean there’s a seductive combination of two things. First, there’s the puzzle box element of it: the fact that when you sit down to watch one of these movies, you’re sitting down to a game – a game with well-defined rules and a game where you know the author’s going to try to trick you, and you’re probably going to get tricked, and that’s part of the deal. It’s like watching close magic. But then you combine that with the fact that, despite all the elaborate plot machinations, the whodunnit is essentially a character-based genre, and the