Stephen King books are basically impossible to nail as movies—here’s why

1996 Halloween Little China: Big Trouble director John Carpenter told SFX Magazine that he’d only really made one film he didn’t love: 1983’s Christine. He was the only Stephen King author to adapt it. Universal Studios had hired Carpenter to direct an adaptation of King’s FirestarterAfter his movie, he was able to speak. The Thing They fired Carpenter because he was underperforming and hired Mark L. Lester. Carpenter also directed the project. Christine Columbia Pictures

“It just wasn’t very frightening,” he says in the interview. “But it was something I needed to do at that time for my career.”

Still, Carpenter can console himself: He’s in good company. Only a few directors have been able to successfully translate Stephen King onto the screen. As Carpenter put it to SFX, “Nope, no one has ever done it very well.”

He’s hardly alone in saying so. Everyone has their explanations as to why one of the world’s bestselling authors has inspired so many duds and disasters. Nearly everyone can agree that Stephen King’s adaptation is difficult. There are a couple of agreed-upon classic King movies, like Stanley Kubrick’s Shining King is one of the film’s critics. And King’s handful of hit adaptations are the exception to the norm: His work has been turned into theatrical feature-length movies more than 50 times, and only a dozen of those movies got consensus good reviews.

One of the problems with making a King movie is his level of character-building and detail. Of the 60-plus novels he’s written or co-authored, only 15 of them are less than 300 pages long. The majority of his novels are between 600 and more than 1,000 pages. His longest works and most enormous casts can’t be enunciated without many hours of screen time.

His new novel, Fairy Tale September 6th It is an interesting window into the difficult but exciting process of translating his work to a visual medium. Fairy Tale’s plot revolves around “a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher — for that world or ours.” In that single sentence, it’s easy to imagine the money it would take to try and bring such a broad story to life on screen with any integrity. King’s books create and destroy communities, or even entire worlds, in order to show how precariously so much of American civilization is balanced. American TV and film has made it their trademark to attempt and fail in respecting King’s book adaptations.

Stephen King isn’t bound by conventional structures or audience expectations. He’s made his imagination into a dependable brand. Studios understandably cannot seem to get their fill of trying to capture some of what makes him so popular, though it must be said that the ratio of well-liked to despised takes on King on film means they’re also gluttons for punishment.

Making a single movie out of a book about all of American life (or even two, in the case of Andy Muschietti’s hugely profitable adaptation of King’s ItThis means slicing out plot points and characters. And it means adopting a style very different from King’s writing, which frequently spends entire chapters on characters or events that don’t move the plot forward, but are essential to the theme and tone of the work. Adapting his work means making choices — and usually sacrificing everything uniquely essential about his work.

King’s first movies and the miniseries boom

Photo by United Artists

Brian De Palma was the first director to release a movie based on King’s writing. He directed the 1976 horror film. Carrie He was a star, and the film made him famous just as his adaptation of the book became an instant sensation. It grossed $33 Million against a $2 million budget. So it wasn’t surprising when, in the mid-’70s, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to King’s Salem’s LotWith the intent of making it a feature movie. The film was finally handed to the television division. Two nights of broadcasting allowed for two dozen characters to have space to breath.

CBS still took risks with the book by merging characters, and making the vampire villainous from a daddy to a sub-human rodent. Thanks to Tobe Hooper’s direction and a game cast, it got great reviews and ratings. It is still truly terrifying. And it opened up the door to the idea that the best approach to King wasn’t on film, where flop after flop — Firestarter,Sleepwalkers, Cat’s Eye,Silver Bullet,Graveyard Shift — tarnished the stories that inspired them. According to King, the real future of King adaptations is uncertain. Salem’s LotThe TV was showing a live broadcast of.

Television has often proved to be unsuitable for King. Longer run times gave creators the freedom to explore more of the nuance of King’s work, but there was still a tough hurdle in making great art on television at a time when the medium was the province of writers, and good directors wouldn’t go near it. Capital-A Artists’ work had to be adapted to small screens when they made it.Twin Peaks) or outright cancellation (Fishing with John, Dana Carvey’s ShowWhen it was unsuccessful in finding an audience, That meant a much safer class of director would have to tackle King’s work, in order to please TV studio bosses as concerned with ratings and censorship as with the relative quality of the product.

King got his first taste of TV writing on 1991’s limited CBS series Golden Years, in which Keith Szarabajka plays a janitor who’s exposed to toxic chemicals and starts getting younger. Over the next few years, six adaptations of King’s work hit the small screen (ABC, specifically) in two- to four-episode installments. Tommy Lee Wallace’s It, John Power’s Tommyknockers, Tom Holland’s Langoliers Mick Garris’ The Stand all tried to capture as much of the novels’ enormity as possible. King himself wrote a terrible remake. Shining Garris directed this production as well. Original 1999 production. Storm of the CenturyCraig R. Baxley directed the production, King personally selected for this task.

What was the problem? Choices. None of the filmmakers who got a crack at King’s writing brought any significant style to the task. The goals of these early adaptations were just replicating King’s ideas and story beats as faithfully as possible. These projects were mostly shot on 35mm film. However, these were photographed using small spherical lenses at 1.33:1 aspect ratio. This was the preferred standard for TV shooting. These miniseries felt intimate despite the long running times and dramatic apocalyptic scenes. The actors seemed to be encouraged to use a wide performance style and to convey every emotion clearly. And none of these stories gain anything specific in the translation to visual media: They’re all visually lifeless, dramatically inert, and far too literal attempts to get the story basics on the screen without shaping those stories for a different medium.

Then there was the matter of special effects. Though some of these early adaptations have interesting practical effects (the best are found in Wallace’s It, in which Tim Curry as Pennywise the clown takes on monstrous shapes and sizes, thanks to the effects team), they’re mostly marred by early CGI that wasn’t ready for primetime. King was happy to have another shot at the project. ShiningBut effects like those living topiary beasts from that series showed signs of age just seconds after their debut. It is only The St and ItBlu-ray now has Blu-ray.

This was all in stark contrast to the lessons being learned by people adapting King’s work for the movies. Dramas that are serious and geared towards adults Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne,The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis all took the opposite tack, showing what happens when directors adapt the horror writer’s gentler stories with an eye toward winning awards. Even some of the horror films from this ’90s era — Misery, The Dark Half,Important Things — adopt much more controlled, hushed atmospheres than the likes of The StandThis video ends with an animated computer hand sucking a nuclear bomb to detonate, killing a demonic evil who looks too much like Jay Leno.

Prestige TV has arrived

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King, like Will Rogers or Mark Twain in America was becoming a Mark Twain/Will Rogers-style fixture. He even had an Entertainment Weekly column at the heights of the Iraq War. The found-footage and torture-porn trends were altering the presentation of horror movies in America. Frank Darabont, a director of the horrifyingly graphic and brutal 2007 movie “The Bellwether”, was the true bellwether. The Mist, based on King’s novella. The film industry could embrace unapologetic sadness and earn great reviews. Mass media were also experiencing something.

You can watch shows such as “Happy Hour” on HBO Oz,The Sopranos, The Wire, DeadwoodThey were changing the definition of television. Television’s cinematic feel was made possible by the use of literary writing and patient direction. As a result, television looked better than the films, according to a multitude of trend articles. Soon, every network had its own “prestige” show: Mad Men Breaking Bad AMC The Shield, Americans, Nip/Tuck FXThe West Wing, Hannibal, Friday Night Lights on NBC; David Mamet’s The UnitCBS. The streamers followed.

Netflix and Hulu paid a large sum for shows such as “The Crown” to be able to compete with broadcast stations. House of Cards The Handmaid’s Tale. With Oscar-winning actors appearing on television every day, Censorship began to loosen. The only thing that was not allowed (colorful language and graphic sexual assault), were now open to everyone. It was limitless. So what better time to give Stephen King’s unbeatable name recognition another outing for the small screen?

In the 2000s there were very few King products on TV, and most of them directed by Mikael Salomon or Baxley. Salem’s LotTNT 2004. That series got away with a fair bit of violence, but still basically told King’s story as it was written, with little style to get in the way. It shouldn’t, again in theory, have been such a Herculean task to replace King’s pre-SopranosThe public is aware of TV adaptations. Though they’d provided audiences with some good scares, those earlier adaptations weren’t so beloved that they’d spawned a vocal fandom who might complain that their favorite shows had been “ruined” by some new interpretation.

King also had a lot of works that deserved the prestige treatment. However, the new writing process was not without its challenges. Five seasons were funded by Syfy, which was then Sci-Fi. Haven, a 2010 series based on King’s short 2005 mystery novel The Colorado Kid. The show looked and felt much the same as any other network television shows. It featured cheap synth music and minimal special effects. Flatly handsome cinematography and quirky characters. There was not much ambition.

CBS came next and created an interest that quickly lost its value. Unter dem Dome. That 2013 series abandoned the story in King’s massive novel and got down to the business of keeping a weekly show going by packing the narrative with dramatic cul-de-sacs and rudimentary plotting. The show was cancelled after only three seasons. King told The New York Times that he wasn’t sad to see it go.

Locating a footing

Photo: Apple TV Plus

The prestige-ification of King-based television didn’t start in earnest until Hulu’s handsome 2016 adaptation of 11/22/63, About James Franco, a man who goes back in time and stops the Kennedy assassination. 2018 also saw the launch of the amazing streamer. Castle RockA fanfiction, open-world Stephen King tribute that is stuffed full of references to King’s work.

Spike TV has launched an expensive Season of 2017 on its website. The Mist. In the same year Ally McBealDavid E. Kelley, creator of the adaptation of Herr Mercedes For the defunct Audience Network. HBO Max got 2020’s The Outsider. 2020’s new version of The Stand CBS All Access. Adrien Brody starred in a 2021 adaptation of “Jerusalem’s Lot” So called ChapelwaiteEpix aired the documentary entitled “The Secret Life of Pablo Larrain”. And Oscar-nominated producer and director Pablo Larraín directed 2021’s Lisey’s Story Apple TV Plus.

Each show is unique and great. Castle Rock leads André Holland and Melanie Lynskey both do marvelous work making harried skepticism and resigned acceptance seem achingly real as impossible things befall them. Herr MercedesFearless curiosity in the sexual and social lives retired persons, as well as their protagonist Brendan Gleeson and Holland Taylor, was what drove them. Chapelwaite It is beautiful designed and beautifully photographed. The cast adds a brooding touch to the story of outcasts fighting for survival. Lisey’s Story was one more addition to Larraín’s collection of time-jumping decadent and dreamy tragedies.

They all share one thing in common: Even though none of them ever ran on regular old network TV, they’re all off the air, in their differing ways. They get poor reviews Lisey’s Story, The St, and The Mist. The Mist.,The Outsider, Castle Rock They were cancelled despite a huge response. One of the series fared reasonably well was 11.22.63, but even that has stayed out of conversations about “great TV,” however you may define that. It could be due to sexual misconduct accusations against James Franco. And all that happened even though the shows’ creators took a wide variety of approaches and methods.

Castle Rock was plainly greenlit on the success of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story It takes an entirely different approach than the series, however. It’s quiet, brooding, and unsettling, marked by long silences and attempts to rationalize the irrational. Lisey’s Story unfolds like one of Larraín’s movies (Spencer, JackieCo-leads Julianne Moor, Dane DeHaan Jennifer Jason Leigh Joan Allen and Michael Pitt make this a dazzling mix of postmodern cool as well as real, burning pain. Chapelwaite, It is similar to its counterparts in the horror period. Salem, Penny Dreadful, The Terror, All in on the handsome era recreation Herr Mercedes’ cranky procedural elements You could have slotted in any weeknight on any major network at any point in the last 50-years, except for the swearing or the incest.

The StandIf anything was, it was You can also conventional. It technically “modernizes” the novel and the preceding miniseries with a more diverse cast, culturally relevant dialogue, and accidental COVID echoes, but it’s still just a rough translation of King’s words, with too little personality added. It’s one of those exercises that raises the question “Did the creators have any personal or artistic reason for wanting to do this in the first place?” It’s tough to imagine that someone looked at King’s foundational epic story — in his own words, his version of The Lord of the Rings — In the role of the savers of humanity or Eddie Murphy, Greg Kinnear and James Marsden were seen.Klumps-style makeup to cover the heads of plague victims. The old makeup was enough. Stand, It was a slight departure from the norm, but it wasn’t enough to please everyone.

With all of this diversity and all that talent, it is surprising so few shows have succeeded. Modern creators have thrown every trick they can think of at the problem of rethinking Stephen King: longer run times, beautiful production design, prestigious and well-established actors, million-dollar soundtracks, gory violence you couldn’t show on TV a few years ago. Nobody has been able to produce an adaptation of Stephen King’s book that can be called a classic or rival in quality.

How do you get started?

Warner Bros.

Audiences Observed the hokier version of King brought on by the early-’90s TV miniseries boom, but there hasn’t been much demand to keep those shows in rotation. There was also not enough demand for the more serious, artistic version. Each year, an artist or producer looks back at previous adaptations to see if they can find the right solution. But in trying to fix something through negative example, they’ve only figured out how not to do what’s been done before. The question is how to adapt Stephen King so that it appeals to a broad audience.

Certainly we’re going to be given a number of opportunities to see if anyone has found the secret to bringing King’s voice to TV. Owen King, his son is now turning Beauty Sleeping BeautiesHe turned the book, which he wrote with his father, into an AMC series. Jack Bender (who directed and produced much of) Herr Mercedes Unter dem Dome) is working on a series based on King’s 2019 novel The Institute. Steven Spielberg Stranger Things Creators The Duffer brothers produce The Talisman Netflix. Even after the last round of cancellations, even after decades of poorly reviewed TV, producers still think there’s money to be made, and writers and directors still think there are artistic roads not yet taken, in making King work on the small screen.

What’s become clear is that it takes more than a commanding tone and modern optics to replace people’s memories of the first versions of these stories, or to draw in a new audience that almost certainly knows King’s name, but may not have read his work. Replacing King’s prose with prestige-TV texture just takes out the compelling writing style that still draws readers to King, and tries out new voices to deliver his plot points.

But replacing King’s voice with someone else’s will surely disappoint fans. And those who haven’t read his work and don’t already have positive associations with a given title may largely avoid these ubiquitous adaptations. For all his reputation as a reliable, enjoyable author, he’s built an equal reputation as a creator whose work results in unmemorable or downright bad media. And when there’s so much of it, and none of it (saving the It movies) has achieved breakout success, it’s easier than ever to ignore the latest title rolling by.

More than that, though, TV has become a medium where other familiar names dominate — people like David Simon, Vince Gilligan, or Shonda Rhimes, known for producing successful, idiosyncratic, fresh work. These kinds of auteur showrunners, who’ve built their own brands and audiences, have less interest in adapting someone else’s work — especially when almost no one has a great record of producing a truly breakout King TV show or miniseries.

We’re in an age where familiarity and novelty are the two biggest competing media draws. Big franchises dominate the box office; 10 Dick Wolf TV series are the top-watched. Game of ThroSoon-to-be-three different nes spinoffs YellowstoneVariety, Every branch of CSI, NCIS and Star Trek franchise installments, You can find as many variations of the popular reality programs as television has to offer. It is rare to take a risk in such an unstable TV industry. Now that the prestige-TV machinery has tried every angle in giving people King’s prose, and nothing has risen up out of the fray, it increasingly looks this just isn’t the right time to adapt King.

And part of that is that we’re also in a stressful age where audiences are visibly seeking out comfort entertainment. The latest batch of King series really hammer home the cruelty of his worlds, in ways the softer TV visions of the ’90s couldn’t match. King-inspired stories can make people feel or kill. Hurts. Child torture and murder Doctor SleepThe pain and suffering of the extended family after the death of a child The OutsiderThe first massacre in Herr Mercedes, Many innocent people were killed The Mist, a vampiric daughter’s pleas to her crestfallen father in Chapelwaite — these things are played with such vivid dramatic weight that they’re almost intolerable. There will always be an audience for horror, but horror is most popular when it’s cathartic rather than nihilistic — or when it cuts too close to home.

Spending time in King’s worlds at all can be tough, let alone tuning in once a week for months, or for 10 hours at a clip if you’re bingeing. His stories of communities ruled by sociopaths, the bullies out to traumatize the weak, parents ruining their kids for adulthood, the sacrificing of kind people to prove that some things are worth saving — it’s all a lot. Many of these movies and TV shows show that the worlds of pain never get better. The psychopaths create scars in people’s lives. Or worse, they make it harder for each other. King stories often end on a note of hope or relief, but they aren’t comfort food.

His books are still so beloved because they take his readers on such tense and well-researched journeys into the dark. And today’s TV productions seem better suited than ever to the demands of his long and winding tales. Nearly everyone who tried failed. Are the market and audience fickle enough to prevent a Stephen King TV series from making the type of sales that producers had hoped for since 1979? Salem’s Lot miniseries? This is the time to experiment with new things, and TV and film have a wider toolbox than ever before. Perhaps the next Stephen King adaptation will end the curse. This mystery is as complex and as thorny for media as it was for King himself.