A screenwriter who takes a horror premise and then quietly turns it into a story about the people trapped inside it. The Terror (2018) is the proof, and his films with Luca Guadagnino are the pattern: the monster gets him in the door, the characters keep him there.
Fi1m perspective
The Terror (2018) opens with a naval officer asking an Inuit man what happened to two ships, and tells you in its first minutes that neither came back. There is a creature out on the ice, and David Kajganich spends ten hours making sure you care about it less than about the cold, the chain of command and what is in the tins. That is the whole method in one series. He is drawn to genre and then declines to let it run the show.
He started as a fiction writer, out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and taught English at the University of Iowa before turning to screenplays in the mid-2000s. The early credits, The Invasion (2007) and Blood Creek (2009), are studio horror of the ordinary kind, and the first of them met an uneven reception. The turn came with Luca Guadagnino: A Bigger Splash (2015), a loose remake of La Piscine that locks a handful of people on an island and watches them; Suspiria (2018), which reworks the 1977 film with a political layer the original never had; and Bones and All (2022), a horror road film from Camille DeAngelis's novel. Three films in seven years is a proper partnership, and it has given him a director who trusts a slow scene.
The Terror was ten years in the making and began life as a feature before it became a limited series, which he ran with Soo Hugh. He has said he wanted genre and period never to step in front of character, and he means it as a working practice: his writers' rooms map each character's inner journey in colour before a single event is plotted. You can see the results. The series is about rank and food and the slow failure of men who thought they were in charge, and the thing on the ice is an interruption. What frightened us most, watching it, was not the creature but the tins, and the growing sense of how long these men had been eating out of them; we have not felt quite the same about a Victorian larder since.
The method has a cost. Put character first across ten episodes and the middle will sag, and ours did: we found the series slack in its centre stretch before it found its nerve again. There is no wider pattern of complaint about his work, and that is partly because there is not yet very much of it. Five features and one series, most of them adaptations of other people's novels, is a career still in its first act.
Begin with The Terror, and do not wait for the monster to earn its billing. It never does, and that is the point.
Biography
David Kajganich is an American screenwriter and producer. Born in Lorain, Ohio, he graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he also taught English.
He has written screenplays for films including The Invasion (2007), Blood Creek (2009), True Story (2015), A Bigger Splash (2015), Suspiria (2018) and Bones and All (2022). Kajganich created and wrote the first season of the AMC series The Terror (2018), serving as co-showrunner with Soo Hugh. He has collaborated on three films with director Luca Guadagnino.
