What makes a great Stephen King movie?
There are some connections among the best adaptations, but no single formula for hits
Since the second half of 1983, when Cujo, The Dead Zone and Christine rolled into theatres, one after another, it’s been unofficial Hollywood writ that no Stephen King novel, novella or short story shall go unadapted for film or television.
And it’s been King’s habit to keep turning out work at an astonishing clip, as though he were the medium through which some malevolent, supernatural voice flowed.
To say there have been countless films and TV movies associated with King isn’t merely an expression but a genuine conundrum: Do the seven sequels to Children of the Corn count or just the one based on his short story? How about The Lawnmower Man, which bears so little resemblance to King’s story that he successfully sued to have his name removed from the title? And what of his original screenplays?
When It, the first in a planned twopart adaptation of his 1986 magnum opus, arrives in theatres Friday, it will be one of six King films or TV series to be released in 2017. (And that’s not counting another Children of the Corn movie.) The Mist and Mr. Mercedes have already premiered on TV, and The Dark Tower swept through theatres only a month ago. Gerald’s Gameand1922 are both feature films premiering on Netflix in the fall.
The King brand has always been licensed liberally — the man behind Maximum Overdrive, a lark with a killer vending machine, can’t be too precious about his work — but it’s never lost its commercial cachet, even in fallow stretches.
Coming up with a grand unifying theory on what separates the great Stephen King adaptations from the flotsam and jetsam that have washed onto shore the past three-plus decades isn’t easy. There’s no single formula for success: The Shining and The Mist have been adapted multiple times at widely varied lengths for both film and TV. Last year’s solid Hulu series 11.22.63, which aired in Canada on Super Channel, allowed King’s sprawling alternative history to stretch over an eight-episode limited series, while The Dark Tower, a tortured first go at King’s The Gunslinger books, barely cracked the 90minute mark.
Some have stuck to the page, letter by letter, and others have only a casual relationship to the text; neither approach is a guaranteed winner.
But there are some connections to be made among the strongest King adaptations. The first is counterintuitive: King characters are best un- derstood from the inside out. That goes against conventional wisdom, because the most adaptable books tend to be short on interior monologue and long on external action, which is why a sledgehammer narrative such as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice has been adapted multiple times in English, in Italian ( Obsessione), in German ( Jerichow) and in Chinese ( Ju Dou), and the novel’s murderous love triangle has been resonant every single time. Finding some visual analogue for a character’s thoughts is a trickier proposition.
Yet the true horror of films such as Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone and Christine has to do with transformation, of ordinary stresses escalating into supernatural possession. In Brian De Palma’s hands, Carrie turns a teenage girl’s coming of age into a tale of profound isolation and sexual repression, with her desire for womanhood thwarted by her cackling peers on one side and the shame of her fanatically religious mother on the other.
In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and John Carpenter’s Christine, there’s a chicken-and-the-egg quality to the relationship between the lead character and the sinister object of their obsession.
We might fear the goings-on in room 237 or the animal roar of a sentient muscle car, but the source of each fear is so deeply connected to one man’s ravaged psyche, we can’t get a distance from it. David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone makes a curse out of a gift, martyring a man who can see the future at the price of his life.
The other common thread is filmmakers who refuse to act as stenographers, and invent or embellish beyond the page. Despite all the misbegotten adaptations of his works, King is most famous for detesting what Kubrick did with The Shining, a film many would rank among the scariest of all time. But at the centre of that animus is King’s perception of creative disrespect: he wrote a deeply personal horror novel about alcoholism and authorship, only to have Kubrick strip it for parts with the ruthlessness of a chop-shop mechanic. Yet it was Kubrick’s prerogative as an artist to reimagine the novel and make the film a separate entity.
Although other filmmakers haven’t been as dismissive of the source material, they’ve benefited from their own invention. Frank Darabont had to expand on novellas to turn The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist into full-bodied features, but the former now trades places with The Godfather as the top user-rated movie on IMDb, and the latter concocts an ending of astonishing darkness.
Alittle creativity was also necessary to turn King’s novella The Body into Stand By Me, but director Rob Reiner honours the nostalgia and ache at the heart of King’s coming-of-age story, even as it was impossible to write to the letter.
When Reiner later took on King’s Misery, about an author held captive by his biggest fan, he favoured psychological violence over the physical brutality of the novel, but he makes one thwack to the ankles count.
As for It, King’s novel concerns a supernatural being that terrorizes seven children, often in the form of a clown. It also evokes a community in two distinct time periods, the late ’50s and the mid-’80s, and the psychological burdens that carry over from childhood to middle age.
The promotion of It has gone heavy on the clown imagery. But if the pattern holds, and a great screen adaptation is to be made out of It, scary clowns alone won’t do the trick.