“Tight, terrific, and very, very scary”: the survival thriller Stephen King wishes he’d written
Although horror is the first thing that comes to mind whenever anyone thinks of the genre most closely associated with Stephen King, he’s been known to try his hand at multiple different styles.
The bestselling author and favourite pipeline of producers all over Hollywood has dabbled in fantasy, crime, thrillers, and drama as part of an extensive and expansive career that’s seen him sell hundreds of millions of copies of his work, during which time he’s crafted his fair share of classics.
King has been responsible for several literary giants and served as the inspiration behind a number of classic films ranging from The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Carrie to Stand by Me, The Shining, and Misery, but he still feels the occasional pang of jealousy when he catches wind of a tightly-crafted tale he wishes he’d written himself.
The spine-chilling purveyor of all things terrifying was left suitably impressed by a vertigo-inducing survival thriller that took a bare-bones conceit and turned it into 107 minutes of nerve-shredding nausea and palpitations, which does sound as if it had been ripped right out of his legendary playbook.
Sometimes, the simplest stories can be the most effective, and they don’t come much more straightforward than co-writer and director Scott Mann’s Fall. Grace Caroline Curry and Virginia Gardner star as a pair of thrill-seeking friends who climb to the top of an abandoned radio tower that stands a dizzying 2,000 feet high. That’s the story in a nutshell, but it’s all in the execution.
When the ladder presents them with a safe retreat break, the pair is left stranded with no way of contacting the ground-level world and very little in the way of supplies. It’s hard to wring that sort of paper-thin narrative out over the course of an entire movie, but thanks to the performances of the leads and some truly mesmerising camerawork, Fall is difficult to watch but impossible to look away from.
King called it “tight, terrific, and very, very scary” when singing its praises on social media, saying it even reminded him of Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough Duel in a way. Not literally, of course, with a vengeful truck driver having little in common with a sun-baked battle for survival featuring two characters who remain virtually stationary for most of the film, but more in the atmosphere and sense of dread.
As far as compliments go, “wish I’d written it” coming from King is among the highest. He built his entire brand on the back of creating unimaginable nightmares, and while it’s not a horror flick in the conventional sense, Fall is an unrelenting and breathlessly terrifying time that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible. With exceptions being made for those afraid of heights, obviously.
