movies
Philip French
Stephen King’s movie career got off to a strong start in 1976 when his first novel, Carrie, provided Brian de Palma with his first hit and brought Sissy Spacek an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a gawky teenager who uses her telekinetic powers to revenge herself on schoolmates and neighbours.
Blood began to flow in the first minutes and it was evident that we were in the presence of a bizarre new talent, obsessed with the weirdness underlying everyday American life.
Since then there have been a couple of dozen King pictures for the cinema and television. Some have been written by King, most have been adapted by others. In a couple of them he makes brief appearances, and he directed one himself – Maximum Overdrive (1986), about a community’s machinery turning homicidal. Most have been schlock horror flicks either turning on a single sharp idea (for example, mad dog terrorises family in Cojo, Fifties car takes on malevolent identity in Christine), or they are about people with strange powers, or middle-American townships that fall victim to some evil power.
Despite B-feature plots, they’ve invariably had decent budgets, and while the majority have been run of the mill, a few King books have attracted major directors. The Dead Zone (1983), starring Christopher Walken, is David Cronenberg at his most restrained, while Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is the most expensive horror movie ever made.
There is however, another side to King’s work. Rob Reiner is responsible for two movies about the literary life adapted from King. Based on the short story The Body, Stand By Me (1986) is an affecting memoir of a boyhood outing in the Fifties that helps explain how King became a writer. Misery (1990) is a Grand Guignol thriller that examines with cruel wit the relationship between author and reader.
Possibly the best film to date that derives from King is Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994) starring Tim Robbins as a wrongly convicted murderer and Morgan Freeman as an old lag, both hanging on to hope and dignity in a brutal state prison.