Stephen King explains why ‘Misery’ is his scariest adaptation: “Just unrelenting”
Stephen King knows scary. That much is obvious. The man isn’t called the ‘King of Horror’ for nothing, after all. However, while King may be able to craft his novels with precision, knowing which buttons to push to exact maximum fear, he has less control over the screen adaptations of his work. When his tales of terror fall into the hands of other writers and directors, they can often warp and change. Sometimes, that leads to them being even more frightening than he imagined, but on other occasions, the alterations lessen the potency of his stories. When King saw one particular big-screen incarnation of a famous 1987 novel, though, he immediately knew it was the scariest adaptation of his work – even if the reason it was so horrifying wasn’t quite what he anticipated.
In 2019, King sat down with Hostel director Eli Roth on his History of Horror Uncut podcast. The two horror maestros talked about all things ghoulish and grotesque while pondering the underlying themes and inspirations of the genre they’ve loved for their whole lives. When talk turned to the film King considers to be the scariest adaptation of his own writing, though, listeners probably had a few candidates pop into their heads.
For some, the two adaptations of IT—the 1990 TV miniseries and the recent two-part theatrical version—are at the top of the pile. Pennywise the Clown has gone down in horror history as one of the most bowel-loosening monsters of all time, and both Tim Curry and Bill Skarsgård delivered memorable interpretations of the character. However, that tale of a malevolent dancing harlequin menacing the Loser’s Club over generations wasn’t King’s pick.
To the surprise of many, King also didn’t spotlight Brian De Palma’s Carrie or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Fans love both of those films, but King famously only likes one of them. In 2010, he dubbed Carrie a “good movie”, although he admitted the 1976 film seems slightly dated nowadays. Still, it holds a special place in his heart as the first screen adaptation of his novels.
However, the same can’t be said for The Shining, which King famously despises. In his 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, King even admitted to hating Kubrick’s interpretation of his story, mainly because it was so different from the novel. He did concede, though, that Kubrick’s undeniable genius as a filmmaker still shone through, so even though he made “such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there.”
In truth, for King, there was only one answer to the question of which adaptation is most frightening. He mused, “If I had to say what’s the one movie that’s really, really scary and just is unrelenting, I would say, probably, Rob Reiner’s Misery.”
Indeed, Reiner’s version of that claustrophobic King novel is widely seen as one of the best translations of the author’s style to the screen. In fact, to this day, it is still the only King adaptation to win an Oscar, as star Kathy Bates took home ‘Best Actress’ for her searing performance as unhinged superfan Annie Wilkes. The film is fraught with tension at all times, as the audience constantly fears for James Caan’s stricken writer, Paul Sheldon, who is kept captive by Wilkes and forced to re-write the ending to his latest novel.
Fascinatingly, though, King has a theory about why Misery is so much scarier than other adaptations – and it’s because it makes viewers laugh as much as they scream. He mused, “One of the things that made that film work and made Rob Reiner the perfect person to do it is because humour and horror are really two sides of the same coin. You know, I always say, ‘It stops being funny when it starts being you,’ you know?” He added, “And Misery has a lot of funny things in it.”
King believes the film has many moments that catch an audience off guard because every terrible act is staged in a way that elicits a scream followed by a burst of awkward laughter, usually brought on by Wilkes’ bizarre niceness, which then switches instantly to rage. This odd dynamic serves to ratchet up the tension and fear to almost unbearable levels – and that is why Misery is King’s pick for the scariest King adaptation.
