But along with telling a story of man versus nature, Giraldi’s story deals with the deep emotional conflict within human nature itself. “It is a place that fosters imagination, and I think of myself as imaginative novelist, not an autobiographical one.”Ĭlassic American literature is embedded with stories about wolves, creatures that symbolize both strength and fear, and which Giraldi calls “our most mythologized animals.” He says that stories like Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and Whitefang have stayed with him since he was a child, and he drew on their influence when writing Hold the Dark. “The locale needed to become a character of its own.” So Giraldi set his novel in Alaska, a place he calls the “last great untamed American landscape,” citing its mystery and remote expanse. “Of course it had to be an American story, but set in a place of frigid mystery, a perilous place of secrets, but a locale of tremendous beauty, too,” he explains. Giraldi says that he knew he wanted to write a story about a wolf attack on a village and explore how things would unfold after it, but he preferred to tell it as an American tale. “I was so drawn that story, to the otherworldly and mythic quality of it, that I knew I had to craft my own story from it.”

How impossible that sounded to my sensibility,” explains Giraldi. “I remembered reading a newspaper story somewhere about an isolated, mountain village in Pakistan that had experienced wolf attacks, wolves that stole children. He tells Romper that his inspiration for the story came from a news article that left him astounded. The 2014 novel, Hold the Dark was written by William Giraldi, author and editor for Boston University’s AGNI journal.

The premise is chilling yet plausible, so people are wondering, is Hold the Dark based on a true story? The movie is based on a purely fictional novel of the same name, but its premise was loosely inspired by a real event. In Netflix’s new film, Hold the Dark, after a little boy is killed by wolves in his Alaska town, his mother Medora Sloane (Riley Keough) asks Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) to track the wolves and bring home her son’s remains. Dark stories can be thrilling, especially when they are inspired by real events.

Netflix mystery wolf movie