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THE RETURN OF THE KING
The pipeline has three new films adapted from novels by Stephen King (above), including one directed by House of Sand and Fog’s Vadim Perelman (bottom left). Below, classic King moments: left, the man himself as he appeared in Creepshow and, right, Kubrick’s The Shining. Bottom: David Arquette (left), who is to star in Riding the Bullet - on of the three new adaptations - and, right, Sam Neill, after John Carpenter has lived up to his ‘you have to show it!‘ adage in In the Mouth of Madness (which is not a King adaptation, by the way).
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THE THREE KINGS You’d have thought that, as the master of modern horror, Stephen King would have a pretty solid foot in the Hollywood door. After all, novelists who have written bestsellers in other genres, like Michael Crichton and John Grisham, have seen their books adapted into big-budget hit movies. But King adaptations have tended to be more problematic.
Maybe it has something to do with Hollywood and horror, a pairing which almost always attracts a third element: limited budget. Only when film-makers have adapted non-core King creations like The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me and Misery have the films really found their way into the middle of the mainstream, with all that that implies in terms of box office success and award nominations (not to mention cult status in the case of Shawshank).
That is not to say, of course, that there haven’t been some pretty damn good King-crowned horror movies, usually directed by John Carpenter, who has given us The Fog (1980) and Christine (1983). For every Carpenter, however, there are half a dozen others who have been lured by the novelist’s name but proved unable to translate his unique brand of modern Gothic into scary screen stuff. And then there was The Shining, which is something else altogether.
I remember a conversation I once had with Carpenter about In the Mouth of Madness, a screenplay by New Line’s then head of production, Michael de Luca. It had to do with what you show and what you suggest. Carpenter argued that you can suggest all you want but, in the end, “you have to show. And,” he added, “we are going to show those beasts from beyond coming through the barrier: you have to do it.”
That, I guess, is the problem - the same one that plagued Jacques Tourneur, a horror master from an earlier generation, when he “had to show” the beast in the final sequences of one of the best horror films of all time, Night of the Demon. However good the effects, what you show is never quite as scary as what you imagine.
But enough of such musings. The point of all this is to report that, in addition to the 50-odd King novels and stories that have made it to the big screen since Carrie in 1976, a further three are currently in preparation. The first up is likely to be a Universal version of The Talisman, King’s 1984 story about a 12-year-old’s journey through a parallel universe to find the titular object. Originally planned as a miniseries (a format which brought us what is arguably the most successful King horror adaptation in The Stand), The Talisman is now scheduled to be a theatrical movie which will mark the second feature outing of Russian-born director Vadim Perelman, who made a notable Hollywood debut last year with House of Sand and Fog.
Then there is another short-story adaptation, 1408, about a sceptical writer of ghost stories who stays in a hotel room whose numbers add up to… oh go on: do it for yourself. This one is on the schedule at Miramax’s genre division, Dimension Films, and is being written by Matt Greenberg, who did the screenplay for Halloween H20, the ‘20 years on’ version of the franchise on which Carpenter made his name.
And finally, the latest in King’s literary forms, the E-book, is being adapted for the screen by producer Brad Krevoy of MPCA. Riding the Bullet is another ghost story about a young man who hitches a lift with a man who turns out to be… again, I guess you get the picture. This project already has some cast members in place, including David Arquette, Barbara Hershey and Erika Christensen, and is set to be directed by Mick Garris, who did the aforementioned miniseries The Stand.
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