Stephen King’s least favourite Stephen King adaptation: “I feel a little bit like, yuck”
If it’s been going strong for almost 50 years without ever slowing down, then it stands to reason the pipeline of Stephen King adaptations has enough gas in the tank to keep studio executives occupied for 50 more, if not a whole lot longer.
Since Brian De Palma first transformed one of the horror icon’s terrifying tales into big screen gold when he crafted Carrie in 1976, the floodgates have never come close to closing. As a result, quantity and quality have been locked in a constant battle, with the page-to-screen production line covering the best and worst that cinema has to offer.
For every The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, or Stand by Me that wins a rapturous reception from critics and audiences, there’s always going to be a Dreamcatcher or Lawnmower Man lurking right around the corner to highlight the consistent inconsistency, something King has even been complicit in himself after making his one and only movie as a director with the dire Maximum Overdrive, and it’s an experience he never wants to replicate again.
Of course, King is entitled to think whatever he wants about how filmmakers have approached his stories, which doesn’t mean everyone is inclined to agree. Most famously, he’s one of the very few people who believe that Stanley Kubrick completely missed the mark when he crafted The Shining, and it’s fair enough that he tends to prefer the adaptations that remain the most faithful to his work.
Some of them are just indefensible, though, and King knows exactly which one he’d rank at the bottom of the pile. In an interview with Deadline, the bestseller was put on the spot and asked to name which movie, based on his bibliography, was his least favourite, and he didn’t deliberate for too long before coming up with an answer.
“Should I even say that?” he wondered before going ahead and saying it anyway. “I guess there are a number of pictures that I feel like, a little bit, yuck. There’s one, Graveyard Shift, that was made in the ’80s. Just kind of a quick exploitation picture.” King could also “do without all of the Children of the Corn sequels,” but at least he can deflect the blame because the follow-ups weren’t based directly on his writing.
Graveyard Shift, however, isn’t quite so fortunate. Helmed by Ralph S Singleton and released to widespread apathy in October 1990, David Andrews’ John Hall is hired to work the titular shift at a textile mill in small-town Maine. Once there, he discovers during the clearing out of the factory’s basement that something horrifying lurks below, and it just so happens to have a taste for human flesh.
The story definitely had cinematic potential when the combination of King and the creature feature seemed like a winning one on paper, but the execution left a lot to be desired. So much, in fact, that the guy who scribbled the source material thinks it’s about the worst bastardisation of his work to ever come out of Hollywood, which is saying something when there have been more than a few pretenders to that unwanted throne.
