Screening Stephen King

Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television

Simon Brown

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781477314920
• eBook ISBN: 9781477314944
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

"Gathers together the unruly mess of King adaptations . . . And places it within the sociocultural and industrial context of four decades of horror." — Philip L. Simpson, author of Psycho Paths
 
Starting from the premise that Stephen King has transcended ideas of authorship to become his own literary, cinematic, and televisual brand, Screening Stephen King explores the impact and legacy of over forty years of King film and television adaptations.
 
Simon Brown first examines the reasons for King's literary success and then, starting with Brian De Palma's Carrie, explores how King's themes and style have been adapted for the big and small screens. He looks at mainstream multiplex horror adaptations from Cujo to Cell, low-budget DVD horror films such as The Mangler and Children of the Corn franchises, non-horror films, including Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, and TV works from Salem's Lot to Under the Dome. Through this discussion, Brown identifies what a Stephen King film or series is or has been, how these works have influenced film and TV horror, and what these influences reveal about the shifting preoccupations and industrial contexts of the post-1960s horror genre in film and TV.
 
"Well-written . . . It really is the most exhaustive analysis of Stephen King on the screen that has ever been written." — Cinepunx
 
"This book is not only essential as a study of Stephen King and his works adapted to the big and small screen; it is also an exemplary study of the evolution of the horror genre in its ebb and flow from literary adaptation to gore-laden saturation and beyond since the mid-1970s." —Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, author of Postmodern Vampires

1

MAINSTREAM HORROR AND BRAND STEPHEN KING

Book buyers want a good story. . . . This happens, I think, when readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviors, their surroundings, and their talk.

STEPHEN KING, ON WRITING

PART OF THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK IS TO CONSIDER King’s literary works, and the films deriving from them, as a particularly mainstream form of horror. In order to do so, it is first necessary to try to define the mainstream, and the starting point for this must be King’s phenomenal success. After all, from the early to mid-1980s, King was the most commercially successful living writer. In 1987, Michael Collings published a survey of King’s appearances on three key US weekly best-seller lists, the New York Times Book Review, LA Times Book Review, and Publishers Weekly. He noted that, across these three lists, “during the 520 weeks from August 1976 through July 1986, King’s name appears at least 545 times” and further, that “for 141 weeks . . . King was represented by at least two titles.” In 1981, King became the first American author to have three titles on the list simultaneously, a record he broke in October 1985 with four titles, and then again in November 1985 with five (1987, 37–38). Collings also surveyed the steadily increasing print runs of each book during this period. After King’s first novel Carrie sold, as Douglas Winter points out, “a modest thirteen thousand copies” and Salem’s Lot “a respectable twenty-six thousand,” The Dead Zone, published in August 1979, had an initial hardcover print run of 110,000 copies (1989, 41, 43). A year later, Firestarter was in its fifth reprinting, with 275,000 copies, after only seventeen weeks. Cujo was in its third reprinting, totaling 300,000 copies, by the time it was officially released in September 1981. And the list goes on: Christine had an initial printing of 325,000 copies in hardcover; Pet Sematary, 350,000; and IT reached an initial US run of 860,000. Furthermore, while King was breaking records in hardcover, his paperbacks were selling in the millions. By July 1980, The Shining, for example, was in its twenty-first printing for a total paperback circulation of 4.4 million copies (Collings 1987, 40–42).

KING AS MAINSTREAM HORROR

Who was buying all these books? Anyone and everyone it appears, giving King a broad-based appeal. In 1985, Gary William Crawford suggested that “King is read by construction workers, railroad men, college coeds, housewives, doctors and lawyers” (1985, 42). Mark Jancovich similarly notes that King “is accessible to both the poorly and the highly educated. He has been able to engage young readers and old, popular readers and academics” (1992, 98). His status as a writer with mainstream success therefore derives first from the fact that he sold substantially more books than any writer in the horror genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and second, that for a time he sold more books than any other author alive, regardless of genre. The argument as to how he was able to sell in such huge numbers seems to be, according to Crawford and Jancovich, that his writing crossed boundaries of class, gender, age, and intellect.

Certainly large sales numbers are considered at least one of the benchmarks for defining a book, or indeed a film, as mainstream. Matt Hills has suggested that mainstream texts are “highly commercial and culturally omnipresent” (2010, 68), while Jancovich and Nathan Hunt refer to the mainstream in terms of “consumerism . . . adherence to the profit motive and interest in numbers” (2004, 31). Both Hills and Jancovich and Hunt are writing about the mainstream in relation to cult television, which exhibits very different economic criteria from that of literature. Nevertheless, the adherence to commercialism and consumerism as a definition of the mainstream is useful since they point to the concept of mainstream as being associated with large-scale financial success, or at least the desire for such. It is not my intention to suggest that the two are mutually exclusive or that King as an author has sought commercial success over artistic integrity. King flatly denies this, saying in the afterword to Full Dark, No Stars that “money was a side effect. Never the goal. Writing fiction for money is a mug’s game” (2010, 338). Rather, I wish to use this to demonstrate that, at least in part, the very fact of his commercial success, of producing something that appeals to many people, carries with it the connotations of mainstream.

But King is also a writer of horror stories, which makes his categorization as a mainstream author all the more unusual. The horror market is a traditionally niche literary genre that exists largely on the periphery of popular culture due to its “social unacceptability” (Jancovich 1992, 8). So part of King’s success involves attracting a readership from outside the genre fan base, which again ties into his wide appeal across class and gender. As Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne point out, King has been able to tap into a vast audience that “otherwise would never choose a horror novel” (1987, 5), so it is necessary to consider him as the writer and, cinematically speaking, as the creator not just of mainstream fiction but also of specifically mainstream horror tales.

Notions of niche or mainstream are, in Matt Hills’s term, “relational,” so that any labeled status depends upon the position from which it is viewed (2010, 67). To fans of a relatively graphic horror writer such as James Herbert, King may seem popularist in his avoidance of the kind of explicit depictions of violence or sex for which Herbert is known. Conversely, to readers who would never touch a horror novel, King is, as Hoppenstand and Browne put it, both niche and despised as “a critically unpopular author writing in a critically unpopular genre” (1987, 2).

If breakout financial success is straightforward evidence that King is part of the literary mainstream, it is far more challenging to determine how the author managed to achieve this, given that horror is niche and King has been labeled a horror writer throughout his career. A useful starting point for this discussion, especially given the focus of this book on adaptations, is to look at another moment in which horror broke into the mainstream. As Stacey Abbott has pointed out, in the 1990s, a number of cinematic adaptations within the horror genre—including Silence of the Lambs (1991), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)—were packaged and sold as blockbuster films. Abbott’s analysis of these films, discussed in more detail in chapter 3, demonstrates that for all that horror is niche, the genre nevertheless includes projects that are mainstream. It is, however, important to note one crucial difference, which is that, while King denies writing horror tales for financial success, Abbott points out that these blockbuster horrors of the early 1990s were specifically conceived as moneymakers through their deliberate presentation as a special type of horror picture (2010a, 29). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were sold as faithful renditions of the literary source texts, a fact embedded in the titles themselves. This isn’t Dracula, it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Significantly, these source texts have themselves transcended their generic connections to become, as Abbott notes, classic tales that “extend well beyond the traditional audiences for horror” (29). For the adaptations to “extend well beyond” horror audiences, the films embrace conventions outside the genre, meaning they are horror movies but also, in Abbott’s words, “so much more” (30). In the case of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this involved reframing the narrative as an epic gothic love story with the tagline, “Love Never Dies.” In addition, it meant casting actors such as Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins, who brought with them “the respectability of a tradition of classical acting,” and the foregrounding of director Francis Ford Coppola, whose reputation, like that of Kubrick with The Shining, “lent the film critical prestige” (30). The same is true of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which again highlighted its literary heritage in the title and was directed by and starred the classically trained British Shakespearian actor Kenneth Branagh alongside American acting royalty Robert De Niro. Abbott concludes that in manufacturing these products as films that “moved out of niche markets and pushed into the mainstream . . . horror [could] only be one of many genre influences” (41). In other words, in order to achieve a broad appeal, these films embraced their horror elements and origins, but presented them as one ingredient within a hybrid text that offered scares, but also gothic romance, sumptuous visuals and design, and quality acting.

When analyzing King’s own writing with a view to explaining his broad appeal, it is possible to see that it too evidences a form of hybridity, in which horror exists alongside a number of other, equally significant, thematic and stylistic elements. As Carl Sederholm points out, King is “seen as the master of horror, but (is) the master of creating his own hybrid genre” (2015, 154). Together, these various features work to formulate the literary brand that is Stephen King. Furthermore, it is the manner in which these elements are de- and re-constructed in the process of adaption that forms the very different cinematic Brand Stephen King. But before considering how this hybridity contributed to King’s mainstream success, it is first relevant to examine how he managed to build his writing career and readership.

THE ERA OF MODERN HORROR AND THE MAKING OF STEPHEN KING

King became a published novelist in 1974, a time when horror was undergoing a renaissance across literature, film, and television. In literary terms, as King himself says, three books “kicked off a new horror ‘wave’ in the seventies—those three, of course, being Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other. The fact that these three books, all published within five years of each other, enjoyed such wide popularity helped to convince (or reconvince) publishers that horror fiction has a commercial potential” (King 1981b, 284). (Gary Hoppenstand suggests that Shirley Jackson should be added to this list, but while her work, notably The Haunting of Hill House [1959] and its adaptation The Haunting [1963], are acknowledged by King as an influence, they predate this particular wave of new horror writers [2011, 2]). For all the impact the three works had on literary horror fiction, two arguably had a stronger influence on horror cinema. Ira Levin’s second novel, Rosemary’s Baby, was published in 1967 and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist came out in 1971, as did Thomas Tryon’s The Other. In 1968, Roman Polanski directed the film version of Rosemary’s Baby. The Other, directed by Robert Mulligan and adapted by Tryon himself, came out in 1972 and The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, in 1973. The film version of The Other largely failed on its initial release, but Rosemary’s Baby and, in particular, The Exorcist proved enormously popular.

These two films played a key role in the renaissance of the American horror film in the late 1960s through the 1970s, their success inspiring a type of big-budget, studio-produced horror film that Gregory Waller describes as “highly professional [and] much-publicized” (1987a, 5). As with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist were literary adaptations, but from popular books rather than literary classics. In addition, they were serious, challenging, and adult horror films at a time when the cinematic horror genre, best exemplified by Hammer Film Productions in the United Kingdom and Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations in the United States, was moving increasingly toward camp. Set in the real and contemporary world rather than in a quasi-mythic nineteenth-century past, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist emphasized realism over gothic excess. It was this seriousness of tone, the large budgets, the studio backing, and the box-office success—particularly in the case of The Exorcist—that marked both as being a type of horror film aimed at general audiences. Waller describes these films as “mainstream” forms of horror and asserts that this label signaled that they were “somehow acceptable and authorized” and therefore suitable for general cinemagoers (5). These associations meant that they were in some ways more respectable than their genre, as indicated by Jancovich’s observation that the novel of Rosemary’s Baby “is usually unfavorably compared with the film version, probably because the film was directed by the respected ‘auteur’ director Roman Polanski” (1992, 87).

Yet, this horror renaissance did not take place just in the respectable confines of studio-based American cinema. It also occurred in low-budget horror outside the studio system, similarly beginning in 1968 when alongside Rosemary’s Baby came George A. Romero’s independent zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (1968). Between them, these two films shepherded in what Waller calls the era of the “modern horror film” (1987a, 2). The success of Rosemary’s Baby led to Warner Bros. making The Exorcist, while Romero’s work, shot guerrilla-style on a tiny budget, inspired a number of young would-be filmmakers who would use the horror genre to show their despair at the state of America.

The destruction of the family unit in Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Thematically, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist focused on a comfortable middle-class milieu and took as their main theme the “desecration of everything that was considered wholesome and good about the fading American Dream—the home, the family, the church and, most shockingly, the child” (Kermode 1997, 9). Romero’s film offered an even bleaker assessment of the state of the country at the end of the decade. In it, the family unit, the basis of America’s vision of itself in the 1950s, is shattered, as indeed it is in The Exorcist. Yet, while The Exorcist ends with an albeit shaky return to a form of equilibrium in which the broken family unit of mother, daughter, and absent father is restored and the demon (apparently) defeated, the family in Romero’s film destructs to the extent that the daughter is zombiefied and eats her own father before killing her mother with a trowel.

Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and Night of the Living Dead all address the breakdown of the family, but Romero’s film is more political. It has been argued that the casting of a black central character, Ben, who is shot by Southern militia at the end of the film, comments explicitly on the civil rights movement that was tearing American society apart in the late 1960s. Romero denies this was the intention, but, as Ben Hervey points out, the review of the film in the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema stated that “the real subject of the film is not the living dead, but racism” (2008, 115).

Thus, while The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby adopt an enclosed familial setting in which to explore the disintegration of the American family and the American Dream, Night of the Living Dead opens its analysis to a broader political canvas. As Robin Wood noted, “the film continually counterpoints the disintegration of the social microcosm, the patriarchal family, with the cultural disintegration of the nation” (1986, 115). While the ending of Rosemary’s Baby, in which Rosemary embraces her offspring despite knowing that the devil is the father, remains ambiguous, Romero’s denouement, featuring the burning of Ben’s body, is nihilistic and offers neither solution nor resolution. Night of the Living Dead presents no answers, only a bleak future in which America is unable to overcome its differences to combat the menace that it faces.

This pessimistic vision of the disintegration of family and society, along with the bleak, unresolved, and ambiguous ending, was picked up by Wes Craven in The Last House on the Left (1972) and by Tobe Hooper in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), both of which, again, are political films. In the latter, a perverted form of the nuclear family terrorizes a group of teenagers, but the source of their perversion is largely economic. The slaughterhouse that sustained them financially has closed and so they simply use their skillset to survive—in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Mainstream Horror and Brand Stephen King
• 2. Stephen King from Vietnam to Reagan: The Early Adaptations and the Establishment of Brand Stephen King on the Screen
• 3. The Mainstream Adaptations, 1986–2007
• 4. Stephen King as Low-Budget and Straight-to-DVD Horror
• 5. Stephen King as TV Horror
• Conclusion. The Future Is Also History: The Contemporary Evolution of Brand Stephen King
• Selected TV and Filmography
• References
• Index