Why John Carpenter called Stephen King a “weird-ass guy”
As a director who specialised in horror, there was an air of inevitability about John Carpenter tackling a Stephen King adaptation eventually, not that he needed to look towards pre-existing material when his position as one of the genre’s most important filmmakers was already secured by then.
In fact, Carpenter was already in the midst of a remarkable run before he even signed on to bring King’s novel Christine to the big screen, with his previous five features being Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, and The Thing.
However, despite its well-earned status as one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever horror flicks, the latter was a box office disaster that didn’t take off in a manner befitting its eventual legacy. Needing to recharge his batteries and find himself another hit sooner rather than later, Carpenter turned his eye towards the bookshelves.
The page-to-screen King pipeline was already in full flow long before Christine began production in 1983, with Brian De Palma’s Carrie getting the ball rolling in phenomenal style. Even though Carpenter knew horror like the back of his hand, though, he was under no illusions as to why he agreed to take the job.
He didn’t have a deep personal investment or connection to the source material like he had many of his previous films, but because The Thing was a flop, he had to stave off the potential threat of director’s jail by adding another entry to the win column. Christine did just that, too, winning a strong reception from critics and audiences on its way to comfortable profitability.
The tale of a homicidal car is ludicrous, but fortunately, Carpenter was fully aware of the inherent silliness, striking the perfect tone between nerve-jangling terror and tongue-in-cheek stupidity. King often has a tempestuous relationship with seeing his novels become cinematic fodder, but the director couldn’t care less what he had to say.
King’s distaste for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is his most famously disdainful, but it spoke volumes to how he felt about Carpenter’s movie that he lumped it in the same boat. “I’m thinking chiefly of Christine and Stanley Kubrick’s take on The Shining, should have been good but just, well, they just aren’t,” he said. “They’re actually sort of boring. Speaking for myself, I’d rather have bad than boring.”
In an interview with Roel Haanen, Carpenter was asked if he either knew or paid attention to King’s stance on Christine, which the veteran completely brushed off. “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Stephen King loves everything and then he hates it. He’s a weird-ass guy. Just weird. Started out as a teacher. What the hell do you want?”
Carpenter has a point, though, with King initially praising the TV series Under the Dome before growing to hate it so much that he refuses to even talk about it. Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep also went a long way to resolving his issues with The Shining, but semi-regular shifts in opinion are apparently enough in Carpenter’s book to forever tar him with the “weird-ass” brush.
