The scene that got Stephen King “more hate mail about anything” he’d ever written
Has there ever been someone who has achieved so much and given as much entertainment to so many millions yet remained as under-appreciated as Stephen King?
Not only has he written some of the finest works of fiction in the last 100 years, he’s also produced short stories that have been turned into some landmark movies – not just The Shawshank Redemption, but The Green Mile, Stand by Me, Misery and Carrie too.
His biggest hindrance to being given the kind of credit he deserves has always been snobbery, and it continues today. It started with haughty book critics in the ‘80s, and if you take a cursory look around the web at who people believe are currently the greatest living authors, they are falling over themselves to say Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood – anyone to avoid naming King for fear it won’t make them sound clever enough.
But the truth is that King is without doubt the greatest popular storyteller of the past century, his total works stand far beyond anyone else’s and not just because of the sheer quantity of work he has amassed during a 60 year career; he has also pivoted from horror to detective thrillers in the last 15 years and done it seamlessly.
As mentioned, many of his books have been turned into films that have become outright classics. The Shining, with Jack Nicholson, is another example, but there have also been a number of adaptations that are excellent but flew under the radar somewhat. There was The Mist in 2011, which had the most harrowing twist imaginable. 1408 with John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson is an incredibly creepy tale. And 2017’s Gerald’s Game is a brilliantly disturbing watch.
Back in 1983, there was Cujo, a big-screen version of King’s book about an enormous dog that goes feral. Starring Dee Wallace, who had earlier that year found herself in one of the biggest movies of all time with her part as Elliot’s mother in Steven Spielberg’s E.T., Cujo was made when King was beginning to establish himself as ‘The Master of Horror’ and did well at the box office, recouping three times its budget.
Filming of the monster canine movie required a number of special effects and stuntwork, along with a huge number of different animals. Not only were there four St Bernards, there were also animatronic dogs involved, one Great Dane mix dressed up to look like a St Bernard and even one stuntman covered in fur pretending to be a dog.
Without giving too many spoilers away (for a start the film is 42 years old) there was one pivotal moment toward the end that even the producers of a blood-spattered film like Cujo would have been too much for audiences to bear, namely the munching-by-dog of the lead child Tad Trenton, played by Danny Pintauro. While the book originally has him torn to bits by the possessed puppets, the filmmakers reversed the choice.
Wallace revealed to Remind: “Well, we all took a vote on it. The producer, the director, and I. We all voted not to kill the kid at the end, like Stephen (King) does in the book. When the film came out, he actually called my producer and said, ‘Thank God you didn’t kill the kid.’ He had never gotten more hate mail about anything more than he did about killing the child at the end of Cujo.”
The last year or so has been a reminder that King still has the power to come up with story after story that make for great films, with Oswald Perkins directing King’s The Monkey, Glen Powell starring in a reboot of The Running Man, which King wrote as his pseudonym, and last month’s The Long Walk, which is a big screen version of one of King’s earliest novels. This week also sees a new TV series based around the world of King’s IT, released by HBO, called Welcome to Derry, serving as a prequel to the two more recent movies starring Pennywise the clown.
