Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King (Laurent Bouzereau, 2011), an hour-long documentary with the iconic best-selling author, premiered three years ago on TCM and is being brought back this Saturday. The topics covered include the early horrors that both scared and inspired him as a kid, moving on to films like Dementia 13, Night of the Living Dead, both versions of The Thing, his love of B-movies, ghosts, vampires, religion, slashers, and a section I’m especially looking forward to seeing where he discusses the movies that were made from his books. With the latter in mind, I’m here to provide a few highlights from a 600+ page paperback released five years ago that I stumbled across while attending the last Telluride Film Festival titled Stephen King Goes to the Movies.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
When I saw Stephen King Goes to the Movies on display in the window of the Between the Covers bookshop, I was immediately attracted to the cover art, done in the style of E.C. comic graphics, spooky fonts, and exclamatory bylines (Chilling! Thrilling! You’ll Shriek! You’ll Scream!). When I found out that the display copy was the only edition in the store, I bought it without reading the fine-print, and thus walked away with the false impression that what I had in hand was over 600 pages of writing by King going behind the scenes of every movie adaptation made from his literary creations. It was only months later when I settled down with it that I realized the book was bundling “five of his most popular short stories” with very brief new introductions and only nominal “behind-the-scenes” observations. S’alright, I’ll take what I can get.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
1408 (Mikael Håfström, 2007)
I remember seeing this one when it first came out and finding it a pleasant surprise – something I mention only because I often find PG-13 horror films disappointingly watered down. As it turns out, it was King himself who pushed for the PG-13 rating “because there’s almost no blood or gore. Like one of the great old Val Lewton films, this baby works on your nerves, not your gag reflex.” John Cusack is cast as a writer who investigates paranormal sites and checks in to room 1408 at an infamous New York hotel. King first wrote the story long-hand while hunkered down in a living room on a Sanibel Island rental while afternoon thunderstorms kept him and his family from enjoying the beach. King was happy with the cinematic adaptation:
I knew this was going to be a good movie when producer Bob Weinstein sent me an advance trailer. It had a claustrophobic perfection that exactly reflected the tone of the story. I imagined a haunting that would literally drive the occupants of room 1408 to insanity by exposing them to the sort of alien sensations and mental input people only experience in fever dreams or while under the influence of LSD or mescaline. The moviemakers “got” this, and as a result produced a rarity: a horror movie that actually horrifies.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Mangler (Tobe Hooper, 1995)
Another one I saw when it first came out. But I can’t claim to remember much, other than that it was predictably silly and had Robert Englund and Ted Levine (who, just a few years earlier, had made a big splash as the creepy kidnapper from Silence of the Lambs). It’s not uncommon for autobiographical elements to find themselves into King’s work, no matter how preposterous the premise. In this case, King’s mother worked “on the speed-ironer at the Stratford Laundry,” where the dangerous machine in question was actually dubbed “the mangler” by the crew. King then recalls his own experience at his first job after graduation working at a laundry and specializing on motel sheets that let him “see the mangler close up every day,” and mentions how the floor foremen “had hooks instead of hands to prove it.” King obviously has great respect for Hooper, calling him “something of a genius” who “did wonders with Salem’s Lot” – but…
But when genius goes wrong, brother, watch out. The film version of The Mangler is energetic and colorful, but it’s also a mess with Robert (Freddy Kreuger) England stalking through it for reasons which remain unclear to me even now. I think he had one eye and a limp, but I could be wrong about that.
The movie’s visuals are surreal and the sets are eye-popping, but somewhere along the way (maybe in the copious amounts of steam generated by the film’s mechanical star) the story got lost.
… but I maintain it’s still the best short story you will ever read in which a laundry machine escapes on pressing business.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Hearts in Atlantis (Scott Hicks, 2001)
Based on the short story by King titled Low Men in Yellow Coats, here we have a script by William Goldman with a director whose previous film, Snow Falling on the Cedars (1999) scored much acclaim and an Oscar nomination. The films stars Anthony Hopkins, and does a great job of evoking nostalgia, unease, and the bittersweet. Roger Ebert was a fan, but steers other enthusiasts of the film to the audiobook rather than King’s source material, adding “William Hurt’s reading is one of the best audio performances I have ever heard.” (Let me here plug another one: Jeremy Irons audio performance for Lolita.) Curiously, while King writes that the semi-autobiographical setting “almost cried out to be a movie,” he immediately follows that statement by saying “Would that it had been a better one, especially in light of Anthony Hopkins’s excellent performance as a kind of anti-Hannibal Lecter.” King is quick to take the blame, adding that the story “is only the first part of a loosely constructed novel, which still isn’t really done.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)
Here we have King at his most effusive, with kind words for everyone who worked on the film; the director, the costume designer, the set decorator, Rob Reiner’s production company (Castle Rock – which had success with Stand By Me), and he even singles out the “Foley guys.” Clearly the film benefited from not having any “producer-types in the way, handing out dollars with strings attached.” King optioned the rights to Darabont, who then wrote the script himself (“it was over a hundred and thirty pages long – an epic length – and incredibly faithful to my story. I finished it with a sad laugh, thinking, ‘it’s wonderful… but nobody’s going to make it. Why nothing even blows up.’ ” Indeed, King recalls how the film was not much of a success at the box office “at first,” and he blames part of this on the title itself: “which conveyed no information and called up no image in the potential moviegoer’s mind. Unfortunately, nobody could think of a better one, and that included me; I never liked the title of my own story, and don’t to this day. The Rita Hayworth part helps a little, but it’s still clunky… and I flatter myself that I’m ordinarily pretty good with titles (and never mind the wiseass critic who pointed out that ‘It rhymes with shit for a reason’).” The final assessment is beyond rosy. “Nonetheless, the movie eventually found its audience. Did it ever! It now commonly appears on lists of the best loved movies of all time. Do I love it, too? Yes. The story had heart; the movie has more.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984)
Stephen King Goes to the Movies ends with Children of the Corn. Was there a rhyme or reason to this particular order? Hard to tell, especially as King’s brief intro to Children of the Corn ends on a bit of a whimper, with King writing:
But, awww, c’mon… it’s not s’bad. To me it had a Wicker Man-ish feel (the first Wicker Man, the good one), and Linda Hamilton, who would go on to Terminator glory, certainly gives her all.
Yet sometimes giving one’s all is not enough. Sometimes the story is better simply because one’s imagination is never on a budget. I think the written version is spookier, because the corn is spookier. On film, it just looks like… corn. On film, corn is never going to give Dracula a run for his money.
One other note: Children of the Corn has generated more awful sequels than any other story in my oeuvre.
Perhaps that is why King put Children of the Corn at the end of this book. He wants to remind readers of stories that can only truly work on the printed page, and maybe to apologize for all those awful sequels. The final page is devoted to his “10 Favorite Adaptations in alphabetical order.” They are: Apt Pupil, Cujo, Dolores Claiborne, 1408, The Green Mile, Misery, The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and Storm of the Century.
