“I screamed out loud”: the creature feature that shocked Stephen King
Stephen King has had more film and television adaptations of his work than any living author by far. To date, there have been over 60 movies and 50 TV shows of his books and short stories, though that list grows longer by the year. He has a knack for writing books that cry out for cinematic adaptation. With sympathetic characters, visually evocative prose, and stories about family, fear, and the supernatural that never go out of date, his work has been a goldmine for filmmakers for decades.
Some of King’s novels have been turned into landmark movies that have defied the usual critical dismissal of the horror genre. Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and Rob Reiner’s Misery were all met with rapturous praise and are still considered to be some of the best movies ever made. Meanwhile, adaptations of his non-horror-related short stories such as Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption have been met with equal amounts of admiration.
Although King’s involvement in shaping on-screen adaptations of his work varies, he is still a cinephile who knows quite a bit about the medium. In 1981, he wrote a non-fiction book called Danse Macabre in which he explored how the horror genre has evolved in print, TV, radio, film, and comics, and offered his take on why the genre exists, how societal changes inform it, and what it says about the readers and viewers.
In the 2011 edition of the book, King added a chapter in which he tried to suss out what makes a horror movie scary. Through various examples, he made the case for why some films succeed at terrifying the audience while others fall flat. Among his list of examples is one that conjured a particularly visceral reaction from the Carrie author – the 1999 B-movie shark flick, Deep Blue Sea.
“Directed by the ever-popular Renny Harlin, who could potentially turn Heidi into an action flick, this movie about genetically engineered sharks, you could say, isn’t up to very much,” King wrote. “[U]ntil, at the most unexpected point of the film, one of the supermakos rears up and bites Samuel L. Jackson in half! Yessss! I screamed out loud, and I treasure any horror movie that can make me do that.”
Deep Blue Sea is an unabashedly campy Jaws rip-off. Starring Saffron Burrows, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport, and LL Cool J, it follows a group of scientists working on a cure for Alzheimer’s. For some reason, they are testing their work on sharks in a remote underwater facility, and, not surprisingly, it doesn’t go well.
Despite the outrageous premise and self-consciously over-dramatic script, Deep Blue Sea was a hit, raking in $165million off of a budget of $60million. It has aged so well and become such a cult classic that in 2018, a sequel was made which featured a nearly identical premise. Two years later, a third film was released, this time seeking to update the plot with an angle about climate change. Not surprisingly, both films failed to capture the B-movie glory of the first and went directly to streaming.
