“Wouldn’t it be really fun to do this?”: the 1992 movie Stephen King called “an ugly piece of work”
One of the easiest ways to get anything into production in Hollywood is to name-drop Stephen King, with producers and executives falling over themselves to bring as many of his stories to the screen as possible.
The obvious downside is that those adaptations have run the gamut from the classic to the catastrophic, but since he gets paid either way, he probably doesn’t mind too much. If he writes anything, the chances are high it’ll be snapped up and made for film or television, but sometimes he fancies a change of pace.
It’s rare, but there have been a few Stephen King adaptations that aren’t Stephen King adaptations at all, since they’re original scripts that he’s written with live-action in mind. From his perspective, Storm of the Century is the best non-literary take on his work, which is a pretty big pat on the back to give yourself.
However, the precedent was set in 1992, when the scribe penned Sleepwalkers, the first time he’d ever penned a screenplay directly for the screen. It was also the first time he’d unite with Mick Garris, who’d become his go-to director and helm The Stand, The Shining, Desperation, and Bag of Bones for TV, as well as Riding the Bullet.
Without having any pre-existing source material to fall back on, King was in uncharted territory and conjured a supernatural tale about a pair of shapeshifting vampires who have a deathly fear of domesticated housecats, which inevitably comes back to bite them, both figuratively and literally.
In one scene, Brian Krause’s Charles Brady takes Mädchen Amick’s Tanya Robertson to a cemetery for their first date, which doesn’t seem to arouse her suspicions, for whatever reason. She catches on quick, though, when the vampire tries to drain her life force, with King relying on uncomfortable and obvious subtext to get his point across.
“What goes on in that cemetery is date rape, pure and simple, and it’s an ugly piece of work,” he conceded. “But it’s not an untruthful piece of work, and I don’t feel it’s a licentious piece of work. Or, I guess, salacious would be a better word.” Still, he had concerns about how it could be interpreted by a more questionable cross-section of the audience.
“I don’t feel we’re there to look up her dress while she struggles to get away, and we’re not there to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to really do this?’ to the nerds in the audiences who are maybe getting off on it,” King elaborated. “What I’m saying is, this is what it looks like when some girl does go out with the wrong guy.”
Apart from the questionable decision to accuse some of the people who might be interested in catching Sleepwalkers on the big screen of being closeted sexual deviants and nerds, he didn’t want the scene to come across as gratuitous. Then again, he wrote it, and he knew it was pushing the boundaries of bad taste.
