The adaptation that shocked Stephen King: “My expectations were in the basement”
While Stephen King might not have had as many of his stories adapted into movies or television series as William Shakespeare, his name still appears right near the top of the list, sitting alongside Agatha Christie as an author with an incredibly large amount of cinematic adaptations to his name. With around 60 movies and shows based on King’s original ideas – many of which are widely known classics – the writer is one of the most impressive of his generation.
The first movie to spawn from one of his ideas was Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, with Sissy Spacek playing the shy teenage girl who soon harnesses her supernatural powers to destructive ends. A few years later, another incredibly popular movie emerged from one of King’s books – The Shining. However, the writer didn’t like how Stanley Kubrick interpreted his horror novel, once stating: “I think The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it,” adding, “I kept my mouth shut at the time, but I didn’t care for it much.”
That’s not the only adaptation that King has revealed a dislike for. Following The Shining, King’s work began to receive cinematic treatment more frequently, and in 1984, Firestarter was released, much to his dismay. He told American Film Magazine that the movie was “flavourless”, even comparing it to “cafeteria mashed potatoes”. A few years later, Maximum Overdrive was made, which he hated, and then in 1986, The Running Man also left King in despair, believing that the movie was miscast with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Thus, when a certain project was released in 1990, King found himself pleasantly surprised to love the finished result. It was, of course, the mini-series It, with Tim Curry playing the terrifying clown Pennywise. Talking to Yahoo, King explained, “You have to remember — my expectations were in the basement. Here was a book that sprawled over 1,000 pages, and they were going to cram it into four hours, with commercials.”
Not only was it a very large project to undertake, but he’d not had much luck over the decade when it came to movie adaptations of his work. Yet, spanning two episodes, the mini-series gave enough time to the most important parts of the book, and King was impressed. “The series really surprised me by how good it was. It’s a really ambitious adaptation of a really long book. The kid actors were good, and the adult actors were terrific. There’s an earlier generation who remember watching Salem’s Lot on TV, and then there are the kids who remember seeing It. Get ’em while they’re young — that’s my motto,” he added.
It was incredibly popular upon its release, terrifying countless kids – and adults – with its tale of a killer clown who can shapeshift into a child’s worst nightmare. The mini-series further popularised the widespread killer clown fear, and in 2017, a feature film version was made – followed by a 2019 sequel – with Bill Skarsgård taking on the role of Pennywise.
