Stephen King names the most forgettable Stephen King movies: “I’d rather have bad than boring”
Even if Stephen King retired tomorrow and never wrote another word for the rest of his days, the author still wouldn’t have to worry about downscaling the life of luxury he’s grown accustomed to.
Not only will his books continue to fly off the shelves, but he’ll continue earning money each time one of his stories is adapted for the screen. Looking at how many have trundled off the production line since Brian De Palma unwittingly kickstarted a cinematic craze with 1976’s Carrie, he’ll never be short of a penny or two.
Whether it’s production companies buying the rights or residuals from the dozens of page-to-screen movies and TV shows Hollywood has churned out so far, King’s passive income likely dwarfs what most people make in a year. Of course, with so many of them arriving on such a regular basis, there have been just as many hits as misses.
Some of King’s works have provided the backdrop to stone-cold classics like Stand By Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile, and there’s also been plenty of dreck. Most people would agree that a film is better off being bad than forgettable, and it’s something the horror icon wholeheartedly agrees with.
“Several honourable adaptations have come from this 30-year spew of celluloid,” he remarked. “And the best of those have had few of the elements I’m best known for: science fiction, fantasy, the supernatural, and pure gross-out terror.” He’s got a point, with those four aforementioned features – and plenty more – acting as more straightforward dramatic pieces than the spine-chilling tales that made King famous.
“The books that do have those elements have, by and large, become films that are either forgettable or outright embarrassing,” he reasoned. Again, he’s not wrong, with King also being complicit by making his one and only directorial effort on the dismal Maximum Overdrive. A word to the wise, then: for any filmmaker planning an adaptation, it’s best to shy away from the fantastical.
Then there are the outliers: those that are neither offensively nor abjectly awful, but neither are they particularly memorable, and King knows exactly which pair fall into that camp. “Others, I’m thinking chiefly of Christine and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, should have been good but just, well, they aren’t. They’re actually sort of boring. Speaking for myself, I’d rather have bad than boring.”
King’s distaste for Kubrick’s The Shining is hardly a secret, even if he’s among the few who think the atmospheric chiller is an unmemorable slog. Carpenter’s Christine is a cult favourite like so many of the genre legend’s other works, but he probably wouldn’t argue with the creator of the source material’s assessment when he confessed that he only made the movie because he needed the money.
