The TV series Stephen King called a masterwork: “Close to a work of genius”
Film and television have reached a point where at least one generation of filmmakers who specialise in horror have grown up devouring the work of Stephen King, and some of them have even been given the author’s blessing for creating particularly effective adaptations of his prose.
It was unavoidable, really, when Hollywood has been mining his back catalogue for almost 50 years. At the time, little did Brian De Palma realise that he was laying down a new marker and creating one of the industry’s most popular page-to-screen pipelines when 1976’s phenomenal supernatural nightmare Carrie became the first of King’s books to be made into a movie.
The creator even admitted it was superior to his original, but setting the bar so high at the first time of asking may have created unreasonable expectations. While there are plenty of top-tier King adaptations, including Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, The Green Mile, and Misery, there are just as many – if not more – duds.
The quantity and quality have always skewed too far towards the former, but when it works, it really works. Not only is he one of the genre’s most talented filmmakers working today, Mike Flanagan has been a massive fan of King since his youth. Adapting the so-called unadaptable with Gerald’s Game, his first time tackling the maestro’s work instantly showed him to be one of the best.
Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep was so good that it even helped remedy some of King’s animosity toward Stanley Kubrick’s seminal predecessor. It would appear the reboot of The Dark Tower is in good hands after the first feature-length stab at the author’s magnum opus was deservedly greeted with resounding apathy and box office disaster.
However, none of those projects are the ones King made a point of celebrating, with the first of Flanagan’s five exclusive series for Netflix taking the honour. “The Haunting of Hill House, revised and remodelled by Mike Flanagan. I don’t usually care for this kind of revisionism, but this is great,” he said on social media. “Close to a work of genius, really. I think Shirley Jackson would approve, but who knows for sure.”
Jackson’s novel has been adapted several times for the screen, but Flanagan modernising and altering certain aspects of the story led to one of the most atmospheric, spine-chilling, and terrifying TV shows of 2018.
The filmmaker has become increasingly adept at using existing source material as the jumping-off point for finding fresh insights into the narrative without sacrificing the core themes or plentiful jump-scares, a lesson plenty of creatives to have dug their hands into King’s back catalogue would do well to learn from, based on how many of them have turned literary chicken salad into cinematic chicken shit.
