Why Do Characters Speak Incoherently In Horror Novels?

There’s a mess of practical and creative reasons why adaptations sometimes feel like they’re tripping over themselves, and I’ve gotten oddly obsessed with spotting them whenever I watch something made from a book or manga. The biggest technical culprit is compression: when a 10–20 hour story has to fit into a two-hour movie or a single season, whole arcs and motivations get trimmed. That isn’t just cutting scenes — it often removes the connective tissue that makes characters act believably. I once rewatched a film after reading the novel and realized a character’s turnaround made sense only because three motivational scenes were gone. Beyond time, shifts in perspective wreck coherence. A novel’s internal monologue, unreliable narrator, or layered exposition doesn’t always translate to a visual medium. When creators try to replace thoughts with clumsy dialogue or awkward voiceover, it sounds like plot for the sake of plot. Sometimes the adaptor misreads the core theme and rearranges beats, which makes the story arrive at the wrong destination: technical fidelity doesn’t equal thematic fidelity. The 2009 movie 'The Last Airbender' is a textbook example of cutting and reinterpreting so much that the emotional logic collapsed. Then there’s the ugly industrial stuff — network notes, budget limits, casting availability, and last-minute rewrites. I’ve seen shows where mid-season writer changes or reshoots force plot shortcuts that feel like plot holes. If you want a fix: prioritize preserving core relationships and cause-effect chains, allow space for exposition to breathe (even if it’s in a short prologue), and resist the temptation to mash too many source arcs into one installment. I still enjoy many imperfect adaptations, but the ones that stick are those that respect why the original moved me, not just what happened in it.

Some directors lean into messy dialogue because chaos can feel more honest than tidy speeches. I love movies that treat language like texture instead of pure information — when characters are grieving, dreaming, or losing their grip, their sentences fragment, collide, or trail off. That’s when incoherence becomes a tool: it puts you inside confusion instead of narrating it from a safe distance. Films like 'Mulholland Drive' or 'Inland Empire' use jumbled talk to make the world slippery; you stop trying to decode every line and start feeling the emotional weather instead. I’ve sat in enough late-night screenings where the crowd murmured through the first fifteen minutes and then surrendered to the mood. Incoherent dialogue also signals unreliable perspectives: memories in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' feel patchy because the speech itself is patched. Directors also do it for rhythm — to create poetic, stream-of-consciousness moments that work more like jazz than a lecture. On a practical level, it can hide exposition, replicate language barriers, or intentionally alienate the audience (a tiny Brechtian poke). For me, the best uses are when words become part of the soundscape: distorted, overlapping, and emotionally precise even if logically shredded. It’s messy, but when it clicks it feels like eavesdropping on a truth that language usually refuses to admit.

When I'm in the mood for books that feel like a mind being unpacked in real time, a few authors immediately come to mind. William Faulkner is the classic shout — his opening section of 'The Sound and the Fury', narrated by Benjy, is famously disjointed: time collapses, sensory impressions leap, and the result is a first-person (or near-first-person, in effect) consciousness that reads like memory scrabbling over itself. Reading it on a late-night train once, I kept having to flip back because the chronology refuses to behave. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are siblings in technique: both use stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse to let memory arrive in fragments. Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse' move in associative bursts, while Molly Bloom's soliloquy in 'Ulysses' pours out in breathless, unpunctuated waves. Samuel Beckett pushes this even further — 'Molloy' and 'The Unnamable' are relentless first-person interior monologues where identity and recollection tangle into near nonsense on purpose. For a different flavor, Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' treats memory as involuntary and obsessive, not exactly incoherent but famously digressive; Patrick Modiano and Clarice Lispector offer laconic, fragmented first-person work that feels like searching for clues in fog. If you want to dive in, start with short sections, read aloud sometimes, and accept associative leaps as the point — it makes the strange clarity of these books feel earned.

Sometimes music feels like a cheat code—one note and the whole scene turns into something I didn’t know I signed up for. I’ve sat through scenes where the score swells like a wave and all I can think is, ‘Wait, why am I crying at this commercial?’ That sudden emotional inflation usually comes from a mismatch: tempo, key, or instrumentation pulling the viewer in a different direction than the visuals or dialogue. A triumphant brass fanfare pasted over a quiet breakup will feel insincere; a melancholic piano undercutting a goofy punchline can feel tone-deaf. It’s not just about loudness—mixing and placement matter. If a melody competes with a line of dialogue, the emotional cues get scrambled and you end up with incoherent feelings instead of clarity. That said, sometimes incoherence is the point. Directors and composers purposely use dissonant or out-of-place music to unsettle you—think of moments in 'Mulholland Drive' or odd, eerie scoring in 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' where the music generates ambiguity on purpose. And then there are films and games like 'Interstellar' or 'The Last of Us' where the score leans into subtext and actually guides you through complex emotions without spelling them out. A well-done leitmotif can make a character’s small glance feel monumental; a lazy temp-track swap can make it manipulative. Ultimately, whether a soundtrack feels incoherently emotional depends on intention and craft. I try to notice whether the music is supporting the scene’s core truth or just pressing an emotion button—if it’s the latter, I get a little annoyed, but if it’s the former, I’m willing to have my heartstrings tugged, even if I don’t expect it.

When I’m editing dialogue late and my mug has gone cold three times, the thing that saves me from vague lines is anchoring each beat to something concrete. Vague dialogue usually happens when characters are floating on abstractions—'we should do something'—so I force them into sensory or situational detail. I ask: what do they touch, look at, or interrupt? Small physical actions (rubbing a thumb, tapping a chipped mug) ground a sentence and make the subtext readable without spelling everything out. I also lean on clear stakes and goals. If one character wants the truth and the other wants to avoid it, the dialogue should show that pursuit. That can be a repeated short tag, an escalating question, or a refusal to answer. When I get stuck I read the lines aloud, or better, record a quick voice memo and listen. Hearing the rhythm reveals where a line is wishy-washy. Beta readers and table reads are huge—real voices catch vague moments faster than any checklist. Finally, trim filler words and ask whether a line moves the scene forward; if it doesn’t, either make it specific or cut it. That little discipline turns fog into texture, and suddenly the conversation feels alive.

I get a little bummed when a character who should sound like a scrappy teen ends up speaking like a stodgy professor because of sloppy slang rendering. What usually happens is translators fall into literal-translation traps or they overcorrect for readability. Slang is packed with tone, social markers, and time-stamp cues; when you translate it word-for-word, you strip away the register. For example, a line that’s meant to be snappy and dismissive in Japanese can turn into a polite, bland sentence in English if the translator avoids colloquialisms or misreads the target audience. Another big culprit is inconsistency. Manga often has multiple translators, editors, or proofreaders touching a single volume, and each person brings a different sense of what ‘sounds right.’ That’s how a recurring catchphrase can become three different things across chapters. Then there’s space and typesetting pressure: speech bubbles are tiny, so translators compress text and sometimes choose words that fit visually rather than tonally. OCR mistakes and machine-translated drafts left unpolished leave their own weird fingerprints, too. To make matters worse, cultural gaps and untranslatable slang push translators toward either foreignizing (keeps the weirdness but confuses readers) or domesticating (uses local slang that may misplace the character). I’ve seen this in fan scans and official releases: a pirate’s salty dialect in 'One Piece' getting neutered into bland nautical lingo, or a gang member’s street patter becoming awkwardly formal. It’s part craft, part workflow, and sometimes part deadline chaos — and when done right, it can make a world of difference to the character voice and my enjoyment.

Honestly, when I spot a film that cuts scenes in a way that feels incoherent, my brain goes into detective mode — it’s rarely a single villain. Sometimes it’s painfully practical: missing coverage. I’ve been on the couch with a bag of chips watching a mid-budget thriller and realized half of a conversation must have been lost because the camera never got that close-up the editor needed. Without the right shots you either have to cut awkwardly or insert reaction shots that don’t fully explain what happened, and voilà, a jarring transition. Other times it’s a creative choice that didn’t land. Quick, unexpected cuts can be a stylistic decision meant to mimic confusion, speed, or memory — think of the kinetic edits in 'Requiem for a Dream' or the jump cuts in 'Breathless' — but if the audience isn’t clued into the rhythm, those choices feel like mistakes. Then there’s the human and business side: studios demanding a shorter runtime, test audiences disliking a scene, censorship, or missing music rights can force scenes to be chopped. I’ve watched director’s cuts where deleted scenes fill those gaps and suddenly the movie breathes again. So when a film feels incoherent, it’s usually a mashup of missing footage, rushed post, deliberate stylistic choices that misfire, or outside interference — and sometimes a mix of all four. If you’re curious, check out deleted scenes, commentaries, or even the script — they often reveal the original thread that got cut.

When a scene reads like it's been stitched together from someone’s fever dream, that's usually not sloppy writing — it's deliberate. I once opened a chapter on a rain-slick night and felt my stomach drop because the sentences kept tilting into one another, time jumping without warning. Authors achieve that effect by leaning on techniques that mimic how disoriented thought actually works: stream-of-consciousness narration, tense slippage, sentence fragments, and sudden sensory intrusions. They'll throw in repeated words or images, collapse clauses, and let punctuation become erratic so the reader trips in the same way the character does. Sometimes the author will split perspective mid-sentence or swap verbs to suggest dissociation; other times they'll break the page layout, use typographical quirks, or scatter isolated lines like flashbulb memories. Think of how 'Ulysses' lets inner monologue run raw or how 'House of Leaves' restructures text physically to unsettle you — the incoherence is the method, not the mistake. The goal can be empathy (letting us feel trauma, confusion, intoxication), thematic resonance (fragmented identity), or narrative control (keeping truth slippery). I love scenes like that because they force me to slow down and puzzle them out, like decoding static. If you’re trying it yourself, experiment with rhythm more than vocabulary: short, choking clauses, then a long, breathless tumble. It’s messy deliberately — and when it works, it feels honest in a way clean prose sometimes can’t pull off.