Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television by Simon Brown

Author:Simon Brown [Brown, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Goodness in a bad world: John Coffey in The Green Mile (1999).

Like Shawshank and Stand by Me, the filmmakers of The Green Mile and Hearts in Atlantis avoided using King’s name in the marketing, and also, like many King adaptations, distanced themselves from the horror genre. The Green Mile was billed as a film “from the director of The Shawshank Redemption” and the only other name in both poster and trailer is that of the star, Tom Hanks. In a short documentary accompanying the DVD release of The Green Mile, director Frank Darabont notes that “it’s not the kind of story that people immediately think of when you hear Stephen King mentioned. It didn’t have the fur and the fangs and the haunted car.” Star Tom Hanks adds that “usually you throw around the name ‘Stephen King’ and you think that you are going to be getting this very particular brand of a horror story and this is really not.” Similarly, the Empire magazine review of Shawshank begins, “This movie is based on a novella by Stephen King, but don’t let that put you off. It’s not a horror film, rather a thumpingly good ode to friendship, hope, wit, wiles and wisdom” (Anon. 1994). Yet, as has been established, what works in Shawshank and The Green Mile are elements that had always been present in King’s work. Darabont says that, in his view, the story of The Green Mile “had this really rich world that it presented. It felt like that Stephen King that I really, really love. That humanistic writer that he is.” Hanks adds, “This is what Stephen King does so well. He is able to really create these characters that are flawed but good.”

Many of the adaptations discussed so far sold themselves either not as horror or as distinct from the general trends in horror at the time of release, and they often run afoul of the perceived requirement to be both effective and popular horror films through the foregrounding of the King name and the resulting associations. In contrast, Shawshank, The Green Mile, and Stand by Me, partly through their avoiding the use of the King brand and partly through adapting material atypical of the literary King brand, capture more completely the essence of King’s hybrid mainstream success: character, language, reality, and morality. These are not horror films; they are melodramas, and like almost all the King adaptations discussed so far, as a strand they appeared, flourished briefly, then declined. In 1994, Shawshank was a box-office failure, but the film found its audience on VHS, becoming the most rented tape of 1995. Five years later, The Green Mile became the most successful Stephen King adaptation, yet three years after that, Hearts in Atlantis barely broke even and signaled the end of this particular strand. The next decade would see the fewest number of mainstream King adaptations since the 1970s, as the brand continued to decline and the horror genre struggled to find its identity.

KING ADAPTATIONS IN

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