The iconic horror character Stephen King can’t stand: “Alright until he opened his mouth”
No matter how hard anyone tries, intentionally creating an iconic character is impossible. Whether in print or onscreen, the combination of intangibles that make someone or something an icon can’t be predicted until readers or audiences discover it for the first time, although Stephen King has penned quite a few in his time.
Whether in his novels, novellas, short stories or their many, many, many film and television adaptations, King’s imagination has been responsible for countless figures that have haunted dreams, terrorised nightmares, and become embedded into the cultural consciousness for more wholesome reasons.
Without his prolific literary career, there wouldn’t be a Pennywise, Kathy Bates wouldn’t have won an Academy Award as Misery‘s Annie Wilkes, Jack Nicholson wouldn’t be spawning memes four decades later as The Shining‘s Jack Torrance, Morgan Freeman wouldn’t have grown sick of The Shawshank Redemption, and Michael Clarke Duncan’s John Coffey wouldn’t have reduced audiences to blubbering wrecks.
Of course, King can’t and wouldn’t take all the credit. Even though he was the one who created those characters, their live-action counterparts owed everything to the actors who played them. The horror icon is acutely aware that translating a fully-realised and three-dimensional person from the page to the screen isn’t easy, and finding the right person to play them is the key factor for their success.
“What they look like isn’t terribly important to me,” he said when discussing how his characters are portrayed in live-action, per Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. “It doesn’t have to be John Wayne in True Grit. It doesn’t have to be Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. It doesn’t matter to me. Some actors are better than others.”
Having already name-dropped one of Universal’s most indelible and symbiotic relationships between an actor and their signature part, King revealed that he doesn’t hold another in very high esteem. “I thought [Bela] Lugosi was terrible as Dracula. He was alright until he opened his mouth, and then I just dissolved into gales of laughter.”
For many genre aficionados, it’s sacrilege for anyone to speak ill of Lugosi’s seminal stint as Dracula, even if that person is Stephen King. After all, it’s been almost a century since he debuted as the most famous vampire of them all in Tod Browning’s 1931 classic, and there are plenty of folks who’d die on the hill that he’s still the definitive interpretation of Bram Stoker’s nocturnal menace.
One of the two most heavily adapted characters in history alongside Sherlock Holmes, Dracula has been played on stage and screen by actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, Nicolas Cage, Christopher Lee, Rutger Hauer, and even Adam Sandler, but there’s a high chance Lugosi will be the first one that comes to mind anytime someone conjures up a mental image of the Count.
King didn’t have anything against the actor, as evidenced by the sympathy he felt towards Lugosi for ending his career with the derided Plan 9 from Outer Space; it’s just that he didn’t do it for him as Dracula.
