Stephen King’s dark fantasies changed Hollywood forever
Stephen King is a cinematic source like no writer before him. A new BFI Southbank season of his work ranges from four boys coming of age in Stand By Me to the girl who apocalyptically ends her adolescence in Carrie. The Shawshank Redemption is pure concentrated storytelling in a prison’s confines, The Mist a dismantling of human nature in a besieged hardware store. Misery and The Dark Half investigate authorial identity, while The Dead Zone’s premonition of a dangerous populist President crashes into Christine’s killer car. The most prestigious adaptation to be screened, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, is an ice sculpture of a film which freezes its source novel’s heart.
The season finds room for less than half of the 44 King films (excluding sequels and remakes), or the swelling number of TV adaptations (at least 28, some several series long). Between them, they have helped define King’s reputation as a writer, while often baulking at his bleakest qualities. They’re a sub-genre all their own, rooted, like King himself, in small-town America, and provincial, private horrors.
“Apart from Shakespeare, there aren’t any writers who have every bit of their work adapted to the screen, and he’s well on the way to that,” Gabriella Apicella, a screen- writer who will discuss King’s work during the season, argues. “The 20 stories in the season have all come from the same brain, and been turned into successful films, and it almost demands a genre.
“There are conventions and stylistic choices that he makes in his work that tap into a very core sense of the human psyche,” Apicella explains. “You’re willing to go into this crazy paranormal stuff, because at the heart of it is something we’ve all experienced, whether it’s coming of age, or financial hardship. He’s brave enough to unpack what frightens us in the most extensive and imaginative way.” For Apicella, Pet Sematary, a notorious 1983 King novel directed by Mary Lambert from his screenplay in 1989, in which a family cat is horribly resurrected, and then a child, sums up his extreme strengths. “Pet Sematary really got me,” she shudders, “because it’s that primal thing of the death of a loved one, and all the horrible guilt associated with that. And it makes sense. Of course you would be tempted to try this resurrection thing, if it’s there in your back garden. It’s hideous and disgusting, but of course you would. King doesn’t shy away from that. He delves into it.”
King’s co-producer on the recent TV adaptation of his novel Under the Dome, Steven Spielberg, makes for an instructive comparison. While Spielberg was dubbed the new Disney in the 1980s, King has matched him as America’s great storyteller of the baby-boom era, and the two are more similar than is generally realised. Spielberg made his reputation with two ruthless monster movies, Duel (1971) and Jaws (1975), with a TV movie about a possessed child, Something Evil, in between. In his 1981 book Danse Macabre, King found Duel “almost painfully suspenseful”, also approving “the little kid’s torn and bloodstained rubber float nudging against the shoreline in Jaws”.
Both men are 70 this year, and grew up far from America’s hip cultural centres: King in small-town Maine, Spielberg in the suburbs of New Jersey, Ohio and Ari- zona, and small-town Saratoga. Both connected to vast Middle American audiences long before the coastal intelligentsia acknowledged them (in 1982, Time named King “The Master of PostLiterate Prose”; in 2003, the National Book Foundation gave him its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters). Both became full-blown phenomena when they dominated 1980s cinema screens, even if King had no say in adaptations which often languished in B-movie slots, such as 1984’s atmospheric, puffed-up short story The Children of the Corn. “This thing could be made for a quarter,” that film’s producer recalled of the low-rent MO which stopped Sam Raimi directing it, “and shot in a week in a cornfield.”
Spielberg struggled for longer than King to convincingly portray adult emotions. But both found an emotional wellspring in the long hot summers of American childhood and adolescence. King’s deeply autobiographical novella The Body was adapted by Rob Reiner as Stand By Me (1986), but both could be by Spielberg. So could The Shawshank Redemption. There’s a slug-filled corpse in The Body, while King’s IT has not just a clown-faced murderer of children, but a child who makes another child eat dogshit. Still, it’s all Americana. If Spielberg is one new Disney, King has been his dark twin.
Apicella believes King’s individual scenes are intensely cinematic. “You can see camera movements, and almost the hear music,” she says. “There is a real visual world-building that he does.” She concedes that the scale of King’s often capacious work is a daunting challenge for directors, and that director Andy Muschietti should get “a massive badge of bravery” for his upcoming IT adaptation. “IT is 1,000 pages. It’s so much more than the pop culture thing of scary clowns. But they’re making it in two films, with the characters as kids and then as adults, which makes much more sense.”
Apicella thinks the secret to successfully adapting King anyway lies in heart, not horror. “King’s a traditionalist, in that story and character is everything. I don’t blame him for not being a fan of the Kubrick film of The Shining, because the book is so much more complex and nuanced, about someone you can really root for in his distress and pain as he unravels, and becomes this brutalised monster who terrorises his family. And in Misery, when Annie Wilkes makes the author burn his manuscript, the real psychological torture isn’t depicted as much in the film, because that stuff takes time, like reading does. If a film takes character and narrative at its core, it succeeds. That’s not necessarily so attractive to producers who expect big scares and action, where King’s perceived success is. But his real success is in the human side.” THE INDEPENDENT
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