The movie Stephen King refused to watch ever again: “That tells you something right there”
It’s no secret that Stephen King watches a lot of movies, which he does for both business and pleasure. After all, when so many of his novels, novellas, and short stories are constantly in development for film and television, he presumably sees most of them at one stage or another before they’re released.
Like any creative who’s spent decades watching Hollywood cannibalise their back catalogue, King has his favourites. Typically, the ones he prefers don’t exist in his usual wheelhouse. He’s one of horror’s foremost names, but whenever he’s asked about the finest page-to-screen adaptations to roll off the production line, most of them tend to be dramas.
He’s got a soft spot for Brian De Palma’s Carrie, which he called superior to his book, but The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and The Green Mile are also up there, none of which feature things going bump in the night. Well, they do to a certain extent, but the terrors are more physical than supernatural.
King also has no issues denigrating what happens to his prose when it gets put through the industry’s meat grinder, with the scribe having often lamented the adaptations that didn’t quite do him justice. With so many arriving with such frequency, there was never any chance they’d all be winners, but some of them have been genuinely wretched, and he knows it.
Thanks to the ongoing obsession with remaking, rebooting, repurposing, and reimagining virtually anything that possesses a shred of cultural cache and residual name value, studio executives have now started eating themselves by mounting new versions of King tales that have already been adapted.
One of the most forgettable recent offerings was director Keith Thomas’ fresh take on Firestarter, which should have fared better among the filmgoing public in theatres and at home when it carried the triple threat of King, Blumhouse, and a score composed by the legendary John Carpenter.
The most memorable thing about it was arguably the controversy, with the Razzies rescinding a ‘Worst Actress’ nomination for Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who played the young pyrokenetic Charlie McGee, after the completely understandable and justifable backlash to the ceremony that mocks the worst cinema has to offer publicly shaming a 12-year-old child for their performance.
King famously hated the 1984 original with Drew Barrymore as Charlie, notoriously comparing it to the filmic equivalent of “cafeteria mashed potatoes.” Despite the fact that the 2022 edition earned less money and scored worse reviews than its predecessor, he still viewed it as a massive upgrade.
“I’ve gotta tell you the truth, I have not gone back and revisited it since I saw it in the theatre,” he explained to Vanity Fair when pressed on his disdain for Firestarter V1.0. “I’ve never seen it again. So that tells you something right there. Whereas I’ve seen this remake three times already.”
Neither iteration of Firestarter is very good, and they comfortably reside among the bottom rung of King adaptations. And yet, despite the remake being objectively worse and falling short of the first attempt by every metric, the source material’s creator was happy to see it at least three times while never once considering giving the original a second viewing.
