Which novella inspired Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut?

Dream Story inspired Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Dream Story is the English title of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle. The story follows a married couple whose fantasies, jealousy, and nighttime encounters unsettle their sense of reality. Kubrick and Frederic Raphael adapted these ideas for Eyes Wide Shut, relocating the action from early twentieth-century Vienna to contemporary New York City.

The film was released in 1999 and stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Bill Harford and Alice Harford. Kubrick had been interested in adapting Schnitzler’s work for many years before production began. The novella is sometimes confused with another major European literary source because Eyes Wide Shut includes dreamlike episodes and masked rituals, but its direct source is Dream Story. The original German title, Traumnovelle, literally refers to a dream novella or dream story.