OH, THE HORROR!
The joys (and challenges) of adapting Stephen King’s work for the screen
Most Stephen King fans know his work exists in two worlds. First, there’s the page, where images of psychotic clowns, reanimated pet corpses, the ghosts of murdered young girls and haunted cars are injected into our imaginations. Then there’s the screen, where we actually see them.
To say it’s possible to adapt his work in a manner that satisfies everyone would be an exercise in absurdity. But what is it exactly that makes him so difficult to translate, and why do so many people try?
Richard Price, the crime novelist and screenwriter known for his work on The Wire, The Deuce and
The Night Of, is the latest to take a crack at the horror king with his series The Outsider. The successful show, which just wrapped its first season, follows an officer who makes a murder arrest — only to discover there’s far more to the case than rational science can explain.
One of King’s gifts, Price said, is “he’ll always give you a really good story, a story to hang your hat on.” The key is that his horror stories aren’t scary without reason, but that they’re “grounded in humanity . ... You can take every monster that he creates and make it into sort of an avatar for whatever neuroses or anxieties people have in the world.”
The Outsider exemplifies this tightrope. Price particularly liked the character of Ralph Anderson, the cop whose “life and profession is based on hard facts.” As he wrote the screenplay, he focused on one central question: “What would it take for a guy like that to be convinced to let go?” With a mandate from HBO to create 10 episodes, Price had to stretch the source material, so he imagined himself in Ralph’s position, trying to figure out what would convince him to believe in something otherworldly.
Therein lies one of the challenges in adapting King’s work: taking something so interior (in this case, doubt) and making it visual.
“You have to be aware that you’re speaking in a different language,” said Andy Muschietti, who directed the latest iteration of It and its sequel It Chapter Two.
Price believes a similar philosophy: “The worst thing in the world you can do when adapting something is being too respectful of it, because the things that you’re being respectful of are things that are irrelevant (to the screen): the beauty of the writing, the narrative voice, the sequences of events.”
King has seen a bit of a boon lately onscreen. After It came out in 2017 and made US$700 million at the global box office, “suddenly everyone was green-lighting and fast-tracking their Stephen King properties,” said Kevin Kölsch, who directed 2019’s Pet Sematary with Dennis Widmyer. Kölsch and Widmyer’s movie is about the ability to bring creatures back from the dead. The family at the story’s centre begins by bringing back a cat. Then, a daughter. What makes it so frightening, Kölsch said, is that “this is about death. It’s not a werewolf or something that none of us will probably run into. But we’re all going to have to deal with death.”
Making it work onscreen, though, required some significant alterations. “You have to find that sweet spot between honouring fans of the book and also doing something fresh and new for people who have no idea what the book is,” Widmyer said.
Sometimes, the challenges are a bit more practical. King’s books tend to be behemoths. It clocks in at more than 1,000 pages and covers a long time span.
That can mean rewriting the timeline and choosing an area of focus — in this case, “the big emotional journey for the characters.” More than the terror, it was the sweet childhood romance at the heart of It that struck Muschietti.
Screenwriter Gary Dauberman’s first step in working on the screenplays for the It movies was to go through the book and ask, “What can we get away with not having?”. So he wrote a longer screenplay, then rewrote and rewrote, whittling it down each time, remaining true to the spirit of King’s work.
That’s also true for filmmakers who face the opposite problem. King’s also a prolific short story writer, and some of the most famous screen adaptations of his work, such as Stand by Me, Hearts in Atlantis, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, began as short fiction. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who co-wrote A Quiet Place with John Krasinski, are facing that issue now as they adapt The Boogeyman into a feature film.
Said Beck: “On one hand, it’s intimidating because you want to make sure it remains a homage to the intricacies he puts into his work, but on the other hand, it’s exciting because it’s a launching pad ... You can expand this (short story) by making it a brief scene in the movie and building everything from that.”
Which adaptations work for you probably depend on your relationship to King ’s work. Luckily, there are an awful lot to choose from. And there will no doubt be more.