The TV show Stephen King compares to ‘Lord of the Flies’: “It’s a huge hit”
Having reached a point where adaptations of his own work are being remade and rebooted, Stephen King is no stranger to having his bibliography hoovered up by the Hollywood machine.
One of the best-selling authors in history was always going to be one of the most heavily-adapted, but while it may have served as the basis for several spiritual successors across multiple mediums, one of the writer’s favourite-ever novels has remained untouched by the movie business for well over three decades.
It’s strange considering the desire to repurpose famous content is higher than it’s ever been, but while this is a world where there are two feature-length versions of Carrie, multiple iterations of Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Firestarter, Pet Sematary, The Shining, Children of the Corn, and The Mist, there remains but a pair of movies directly attributing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as the source material.
They were released in 1963 and 1990 respectively – sandwiched in between the Philippines’ Alkitrang Dugo in 1975 – but so far the seminal book King has repeatedly named as being among the greatest things he’s ever read has remained unsullied by Hollywood for a third time.
That’s not to say its fingerprints haven’t been felt, with a planned all-female adaptation eventually being reworked into his series Yellowjackets, while any film or television project focusing on a group of stranded or outcast people force to fend for themselves in remote or isolated conditions offers at least a small debt of gratitude to Golding’s work.
Even reality TV got in on the act, giving rise to a global franchise that’s spawned innumerable localised offshoots since the flagship first premiered in 1997. As King asked The Guardian somewhat rhetorically considering it’s been one of the most prominent shows on the small screen for over a quarter of a century, “Have you seen that programme Survivor? Pretty close to Lord of the Flies.”
“They kick one guy off the island every week,” he continued. “They don’t actually chase him with sharpened sticks, but you get the feeling they’d kind of like to.” Given King’s well-known fondness for the source material, it was inevitable that he’d try to pay tribute in his own way, even if he didn’t get around to finishing his own spin on Lord of the Flies.
“I started a book like that about 15 years ago. It was called On the Island, and it was about rich people who talked these street kids into going to an island and being hunted with paintballs,” he said of his idea that ultimately never came to fruition. “And they get there and they find these guys are actually shooting live rounds, and in my story, there were two or three who escaped and waited for these rich guys to come back. I’ve got it on the shelf somewhere. Survivor is a sort of a Stephen King idea, and it’s a huge hit.”
There may not have been a Lord of the Flies movie since 1990, but with Survivor still going strong on TV, the book’s influence is still being felt.
