“A lesser medium”: the movie adaptation Stephen King called a “trainwreck”
The widely admired literary works of Stephen King have always been considered good options to make into movies. Throughout the years, countless excellent pieces of cinema have been created with King’s imaginative fantasy and horror stories as their primary source material.
From Brian De Palma’s 1976 version of Carrie to Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me and countless others, the worlds of King’s creation have proven especially fertile. They are excellent avenues for screenwriters and directors to bring them to life on screen.
Interestingly, King once denounced any film adaptations of his works in an interview with Rolling Stone, saying, “The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they’re good, that’s terrific. If they’re not, they’re not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.”
Still, that kind of ambivalence hasn’t stopped the legendary horror author from dishing out criticism of movie adaptations of literature, particularly that of his own work. King looked to not be overly impressed with Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining, but it was at least better than Lawrence Kasdan’s attempt to bring King’s 2001 novel Dreamcatcher to the big screen.
The writer once admitted that he always tries to get the best production team together to ensure a movie’s success, but that doesn’t always necessarily pan out. “Most times, you’re going to have something that’s interesting anyway,” he once noted. “That doesn’t mean you’re [not] going to have the occasional thing that’s just a train wreck like Dreamcatcher because that happens, right?”
Dreamcaster, directed by Kasdan, the co-writer of several Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, was released in 2003, just a couple of years after the publication of King’s original novel. It tells the story of four Maine friends who possess extraordinary supernatural and psychic abilities and who bond over a childhood bullying experience.
As adults, the friends take an annual hunting trip where their troubled past resurfaces, leading to a strange meeting with a malevolent extra-terrestrial entity. Starring Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, plus Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore, even an impressive cast could not save the science fiction horror movie from its doom, with widespread negative reviews and a disastrous box office. Throw into the fact that King himself hated the adaptation, and Dreamcatcher becomes a film that should never have been made.
Now, as so many of King’s novels have been made into movies, it’s fair to say that some of them have been more hit than miss. The Shining and Dreamcatcher are not the only King adaptations that the author himself hates, having also expressed his disdain for the likes of Firestarter by Mark L. Lester, The Running Man by Paul Michael Glaser and Graveyard Shift by Ralph S. Singleton.
It’s a difficult task to bring a literary work to life on screen, and where Brian de Palma and Frank Darabont succeeded with Carrie and The Shawshank Redemption, respectively, not every King novel to make its way into the cinema has been half as good. But few are certainly as low in the estimation of King as 2003’s Dreamcatcher.
Check out the trailer for Dreamcatcher below.
