Gay Cartoonist's Ghost Story Haunts: He Didn't Get Paid for the Movie Version

A gay cartoonist who turned his real-life nightmare into a successful Twitter tale about a haunting says he got R.I.P.'d off: A movie version of his work brought him zero payment.

Adam Ellis was working at BuzzFeed when a series of strange dreams involving a ghostly child inspired his 2017 series of Twitter posts relating the otherworldly encounters he experienced during episodes of sleep paralysis – a state in which a half-awake person is unable to move while experiencing vivid dreams.

Or are they dreams? In his story, told through text and drawings in a Twitter thread, Ellis said he believed that the apparition was real and worried that the spirit meant him harm.

The thread was published at BuzzFeed in August of 2017 under the title "My Apartment Is Being Haunted By The Ghost Of A Dead Child And I'm Not Sure What To Do."

The Twitter thread became a viral sensation, and New Line expressed interest in making the story into a film. That deal went nowhere, but Lionsgate eventually acquired the rights and in 2023 a poorly received adaptation came to the big screen.

But the movie being a bomb wasn't the worst of it... not for Ellis, anyway. "As it turns out, despite the film being based on his art and his story – and literally featuring a protagonist named Adam who worked at BuzzFeed – Ellis had little to nothing to do with the actual film," AV Club related, and, Ellis said, he got exactly bupkis in remuneration for the use of his work.

"It's legal," Ellis told his Twitter followers. "BuzzFeed owns everything you make there."

Ellis went on to say, "I had a contract for the New Line project, but they eventually dropped it and I assumed it was dead. I had long quit my job at BuzzFeed. A couple years later I was informed they had regained rights and sold the movie to Lionsgate and it was going into production in a week."

But he didn't have a contract with Lionsgate. As it turned out, it wasn't necessary.

"I was never consulted or paid for this new project, which again is legal because BuzzFeed owns everything you do," Ellis detailed. "It sucks but it's all technically above board."

Above board, but below audience expectations. The movie scored at a bottom-of-the-barrel low at Rotten Tomatoes, and Ellis – who has never seen it – commemorated that with a T-shirt he showed off in a subsequent tweet.

The experience has not killed the cartoonist's creative spirit, however.

"Ellis has long maintained that the events in his "Dear David" thread actually did happen," AV Club noted, "but he's moved on to telling other scary stories, like this year's illustrated anthology 'Bad Dreams In The Night.'"