Stephen King has written practically everything that a writer can write - trim little horror novels with words and images seared into our collective nightmare memory (Carrie covered in pig's blood, Cujo frothing at the mouth, "All work and No Play make Jack a Dull Boy); Epic fantasy-horror treatises that meander through time and space, question the existence of God, and take big ensemble casts and kill them off slowly in magnificent ways ("Desperation," "It," "The Stand"); dozens upon hundreds of short stories and novellas - King might be the last author to turn short form fiction into such an addictive treat. Gasbags like Harold Bloom whine that King has his flaws, but King's managed to remain remarkably unpretentious about his work, an impressive achievement for someone who wrote himself into his own fantasy epic. He writes the way Howard Hawks directed - he makes it easy to kick back and get absorbed.
That's probably why there have been over 100 adaptations of King's books into film and TV. The list is rife with dross and low-budge video franchises that keep going until they had to invent more numerals (who knew "Children of the Corn" could stretch so far?) Too often, the people behind the camera seemed to just miss the point completely. "Cujo" turned the horrifically unhappy ending into a boringly happy fadeout; "Apt Pupil" pruned all the darker elements out of King's prose (like the protagonist's concentration camp wet dream). It's not that you have to be completely honorable to the book's story - Stanley Kubrick pissed King off to high heaven with "The Shining," but even if the movie departs from the original narrative, it absolutely captures the perfect King mixture of terror and humor.
"1408" rolled into theaters over the summer; next up is "The Mist," a film by Frank Darabont, who turned a near-forgotten King novella into "The Shawshank Redemption," one of the true singular films of the 90s, and also gave us the adaptation of "The Green Mile," a long and lazy tall tale with lots of heart (if not much tension). So there are reasons to be hopeful. This trailer is not one of those reasions. Besides giving away half the plot points, it indicates that Darabont has decided to replace the main fright aesthetic of the story - the image of silent, endless mist, and the horror that there might be strange things in there - with a bunch of poorly animated giant evil moths. Why, Darabont, why?
In honor of (or perhaps horror at) "The Mist," here's a list of the 10 best King stories that haven't seen the moviehouse yet, and how to make sure they don't suck:
10: Gerald's Game - In the mid-90s, the author wrote a trio of books that centered on women in perilous domestic situations who take extraordinary steps to deal with their abusive husbands. There was "Dolores Claiborne," "Rose Madder," and the best of the bunch was this little ditty about a bit of married role-play gone way, way wrong. Jessie Burlingame is in the bedroom with her husband Gerald, in a cabin in the forest far from prying eyes or helpful hands. Gerald likes to play games, but tonight, Jessie decides she's not that into the handcuffs. Gerald decides to take her any way. Jessie kicks him, so hard that Gerald has a fatal heart attack and leaves her all by herself, naked, handcuffed to a bed. The book has a few flashbacks and throws in a necrophiliac serial killer late in the game, but mostly, the set-up is the story: Jessie's handcuffed to a bed, and she has to get out.
Unfilmable, you say? I say, in a year when everyone is complaining there are no more good roles for actresses, here's a portrait of a married woman taking charge of her relationship, trapping herself in an impossible situation and forced to confront her demons form the past to escape. It's empowering, it's dramatic, it's sexy, it's fearless. You talk about De Niro gaining weight for "Raging Bull"? Psh. How about being naked in a bed onscreen for 90 minutes? Done wrong, this could be horrible; done right, honoring King's minute attention to detail (the steady decomposition of Gerald's corpse, Jessie's ultimate gruesome solution for escaping), this could be stellar.
9: Beachworld - In the future, a spaceship crashlands on a desert planet. Two crewmen survive. While they wait for rescue, cabin fever sets in. The sand might be alive. You could take the story any number of ways - make one of the survivors a woman and add a sexual element, send the characters off exploring. But King's central visual - the endless swaying sand - is haunting, and makes Tatooine look warm and cozy by comparison.
8: Insomnia - King has said that this is his least favorite book. Unfortunate, since in Ralph Roberts, the elderly widowed insomniac who starts to see strange things in the early morning moonlight, King created his most idiosyncratic protagonist. A likable old guy from a boring little town who suddenly finds himself embarking on a grand adventure in the winter of his life, complete with an age-appropriate love interest? How many great actors over 70 have been dying for a role like this? Get Nicholson, or Newman, or throw some digital wrinkles on Ed Harris if you have to.
7: The Regulators - Open on a quiet little street in suburban nowhere. Kids walk down the street slurping ice cream cones; fathers drive home from work, mothers drive home from their lovers; lawnmowers mow. A paper boy bikes down the street. A car rides up next to him. The window rolls down. A shotgun opens a hole in the paper boy's midsection. Bedlam - absolute and bloody - ensues. Think "Desperate Housewives" meets "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." This supernatural genre mash-up has all the fixings of vintage King - big ensemble cast of eccentrics, shadowy unstoppable villains, a devil child with powers beyond the ken of mere mortals.
6: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Like "Gerald's Game," the story of a woman alone in the wilderness, except here, it's a teenaged girl with a radio who listens to the Red Sox and takes inspiration from the titular closer. This practically wordless story could be a Terrence Malicky swoonfest - the beauty of nature, etc - but the tone is more reminiscent of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," with the frightening presence of what could be a bear or the devil hovering just offscreen until the spellbinding conclusion. Paging Dakota Fanning.
5: The Drawing of the Three - King's "Dark Tower" epic is big and messy. It contains some of his best writing, but you don't write something for over 30 years without some fits and starts. King usually steers readers to his later books, but it's this one, Part 2, that encapsulates everything great about the series. In the first few pages, Roland - think Clint Eastwood crossed with King Arthur - wakes up on a beach and gets two fingers and a big toe chopped off by a mutant lobster; his luck goes downhill from there, as he hops back and forth across the decades to New York City. Under the guise of a fantasy novel, King digs into the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, the Drug trade of the 80s, and everything great and awful about pre-Giuliani Big Apple. You might think it sounds crazy, but if ever the words "Scorcese" and "Fantasy" could be uttered in the same sentence, this would be the movie.
4: Roadwork - Like "Regulators," a book from King's altar ego, Richard Bachman - the pseudonymic personality that produced a line of particularly dour and hopeless books. "Roadwork" is easily King's most straightforward story ever, which makes it all the more frightening. A guy has just lost his son, his marriage is on the rocks, and a new interstate highway is being built right over his home and his business. Urban insanity like you could only find in the 70s follows. This is not a happy story, and at times it reads like the sort of fuck-the-man manifesto that seems outdated today. But King tells the story with passion and verve. David Fincher, who made urban life look like all kinds of hell in "Seven," would love this juicy little pulp story about a guy who's mad, and sad, as hell.
3: I Am The Doorway - Astronaut goes to space, gets infected with virus, yadda yadda yadda. But this is a Stephen King story, so it's not just a virus. In what might be the most horrifying visual King has ever conceived, little eyes start to cover his hands. The man can sense the alien intelligence; soon, it begins to take him over. There are so many crappy special effects today - give the boys at ILM the chance to put some crazy eyes on hands, you've got, if nothing else, the best trailer of the year.
2: The Talisman - Co-written by Peter Straub, this is a genuine picaresque story of one boy's travel across the country to save his mother. With the occasional skip into an alternate dimension. And with werewolves, and alot of other supernatural beasties. "The Talisman" has almost been filmed several times, but each time, the deal fell through - perhaps because the protagonist is a young boy who has to go through all kinds of hard-R experiences before he can find what he's looking for. Here's a wild idea - make it animated. Seriously, 2-D animation is a few years away from experiencing a comeback (for one thing, it's alot cheaper). Get those "Samurai Jack" boys off of Star Wars and onto something worthy of their talent. (Note - just after I wrote this, I discovered that Genndy Tartovski, the creator of "Samurai Jack," was in talks to develop a cartoon version of "The Dark Tower." Use this as a warm-up, Genndy).
1: The Long Walk - Another Bachman book, another dark tale with tragedy written in its code. In a near-flung future, every year, one hundred teenaged boys start walking. That's all. It's not a race, though you do have to maintain a steady pace. Except that when you stop walking, you die. Last one left alive gets everything he ever wants. This is a story about mental and physical exhaustion, and as the hours and days tick by, the relationship among the boys takes on a number of different faces - they're all in it together, like soldiers in a trench, and yet they're also competing against each other for nothing less than their lives. Gus Van Sant would shit himself for a movie like this, and for once, it could actually turn out good.
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