As Halloween draws near, many participate in the tradition of watching horror movies and reading scary books. Whose books are better to read during Halloween than the Queen of Mystery, Agatha Christie. 

Agatha Christie’s “Halloween Party” follows the detective, Hercule Poirot, as he works to solve the case of the murder of Joyce Reynolds who had been drowned in an apple bobbing bucket during the Halloween party. Throughout the book he interviews a wide cast of characters and investigates past murders that eventually lead him to the culprit. 

“Halloween Party” was recently adapted into a movie titled “A Haunting in Venice”, and there are many similarities between the two stories. Both stories have a similar cast of characters including the first murder of the case, Joyce Reynolds. Poirot was brought into the investigation by a reoccurring Agatha Christie character, Ariadne Oliver.  

The motive of the murderer was similar. They killed multiple people in hopes of covering up a past murder. However, the movie’s storyline itself strayed pretty far from the original. Instead of being drowned, Joyce is pushed to her death and Poirot is the one who the murderer attempts to drown in the apple bobbing tank.  

Another difference was in location and time. Throughout the book, Poirot investigates multiple houses and a garden over the course of a few days. In the adaptation, the characters are all mainly confined to one house and all of the events take place over the course of one night.  

The movie also changed some of the characters. In the book, Joyce was 13-years-old, and in the movie she is an adult who claimed to be a medium. 

This also brings up the point that in the adaptation, there is a focus on ghosts and the characters even participate in a séance to talk to Rowena Drake’s late daughter. In the book there were no such references to any ghosts. 

This caused the tone of the movie to be very different than the book. The movie was spookier than the book because of the ghosts and a couple of jump scares. 

Both the book and the movie were easy to follow along with and fun to try to predict the murderer before the reveal at the end. Overall, reading “Halloween Party” and watching “A Haunting in Venice” are fun ways to spend the Halloween season.