Doctor Sleep, It, The Dark Tower: is there too much Stephen King on screen?
Stephen King rules modern horror – but how much of his reign can we take? In 2019, his stories seem to be everywhere. On Halloween comes Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining. It is the fourth King-derived movie this year, following Pet Sematary, In the Tall Grass (Netflix’s third King adaptation in three years) and, still on release, It: Chapter Two. Meanwhile, coming to the small screen we have HBO’s The Outsider, Amazon’s The Dark Tower, a Julianne Moore-led Lisey’s Story, The Stand, season three of Mr Mercedes and season two of Castle Rock. His 61st novel, The Institute, was also released last month. A TV adaptation is already in the works.
You do not have to look far for explanations for King’s ubiquity. For one thing, It: Chapters One and Two are two of the highest-grossing horror movies ever. For another, King movies have an illustrious pedigree: Carrie, The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, Misery, The Dead Zone, etc. In a content-hungry but risk-averse age, he is a recognisable seal of quality. And where so many current titles are built on elaborate mythologies, political allegory or genre-savvy trickery, King is a master at inserting supernatural elements into familiar settings: a hotel, a car, high school, suburbia. He makes horror for people who wouldn’t say they liked horror.
King has also used his brand identity for good, though, via his “dollar babies”. In 1977, he decided to let aspiring film-makers option any of his short stories for one dollar, on the condition they didn’t exhibit them commercially. As a result, many King stories have been filmed several times over; there are at least 18 different versions of Mute, for example. One dollar-baby beneficiary was Frank Darabont, whose adaptation of The Woman in the Room paved the way for The Shawshank Redemption.
Not everything King touches turns to gold. Darabont’s Shawshank followup The Green Mile was textbook “magical negro” shmaltz. And the 2017 film version of The Dark Tower, led by Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, bombed. The Shining can hardly count as a King triumph, given Stanley Kubrick added his own elements (the twins, the blood elevator, the maze, “Here’s Johnny”). Doctor Sleep is based on King’s 2013 sequel, catching up with tricycling Danny Torrance as a grownup (Ewan McGregor), but for continuity’s sake, the movie has to incorporate “the cinematic universe” of Kubrick’s Shining.
The difference between the two Shinings is illuminating: Kubrick reshaped it as a psychological horror, more interested in the demons within; King’s stories, by contrast, avoid ambiguity. Rather, King’s tales often reassure us that the horror is not within ourselves. For some reason, we can’t get enough of hearing that.