The three directors Stephen King always wanted to write a movie for: “I came very, very close”
When you’re as inundated with collaboration requests and adaptation projects as Stephen King is, it’s almost impossible to even process all of it.
While that has always been the case for one of the bestselling and widely renowned horror writers in history, with directors like Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick (whose vision of The Shining Stephen King absolutely fucking hated) lining up for the opportunity to adapt his books, King has been spoiled for choice. In recent years, that has only snowballed into a rapidly increasing stream of adaptations while the quality of those projects has declined.
Despite King’s many complaints, and I mean many (seriously, he never got over it), about Kubrick’s cold interpretation of The Shining that had more of the director than King in it, it’s still counted among the greatest horror films ever made. The same can hardly be said about one of the most recent flicks based on King’s work: Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, which used a very constipated-looking simian prop to try and “scare” audiences.
Now, with Edgar Wright’s reboot of The Running Man in the works, one can only hope that the trend of shitty Stephen King adaptations is going to see a welcome disruption. However, considering the money involved in these streaming platform deals for such projects, it looks like crappy extractions from King’s vast literary repository are here to stay, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Interestingly, in an interview recorded in the book Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, King himself harboured dreams of collaborating with certain filmmakers, but in a very different capacity. According to the ‘Master of Horror’, he knew very well that most directors were interested in exercising their own sensibilities within the frameworks of adaptations, but King wanted to create original subject material.
He said, “I’d like to work with Spielberg. I think that would be fun. I came very, very close to writing Poltergeist. I would have liked to work with Don Siegel, the guy who did the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Another is Sam Peckinpah. There are a lot of directors I really like, but in most cases, the last thing filmmakers want is to work with an author.”
Adding, “I’d like to do originals, and I’d like to do some more with George Romero. It was a great experience. I’d like to work with long form on cable sometime. George really wants that mood to spread, y’know. Give that guy nine hours and he’ll give everyone in America a heart attack!”
Of course, on paper, that’s the direction that most fans want King to take going forward, instead of the adaptation sludge we’ve had to wade through to find something good. Even if Wright’s version of The Running Man lays down a blueprint for how King’s contemporary adaptations should be done going forward, the prospect of King working with the best directors in the industry on completely new material will always be the bigger draw.
