What a gift to have an author as prolific and talented as Stephen King in our midst for the last half century. The Dark Tower books are some of the best novels ever written, period. Fairy Tale, King’s latest, is a dark fantasy that tells the story of a young boy who inherits a magical key that leads him into a dangerous mythical land. While some reviews have called Fairy Tale King’s best work in years, it has been announced that filmmaker Paul Greengrass has optioned the rights and is set to write, direct and produce the film adaptation.
While the range of Stephen King adaptations range from above average to awful, some have stated that it is “impossible” to get King right. That doesn’t make any sense unless you’re looking at the idea of “get right” by using “faithfulness to the text” as the primary metric. Which shouldn’t be the case at all if you’re a fan of film.
I feel like most filmmakers have a deep misunderstanding of which genre King works in. It is my opinion that King is not and never has been a horror writer. King is a drama author. He writes about people, and cares deeply about how people perceive the world and about how their perceptions differ from other people’s perceptions and from reality. All of the “weird” elements of his books are in service of this central theme – is the way you perceive the world accurate? If not, are the decisions you’re making based on your distorted perceptions of reality causing more harm or good.
I think creatives have gotten a lot better at adapting King’s work though. Muschietti’s It did a great job of keeping both the horror and the characterization of the protagonists. Lots of people “slept” on Doctor Sleep, but it was also a wonderful adaptation of the book. Gerald’s Game was a fantastic movie. There are also plenty of King-inspired/King-adjacent movies and shows like Stranger Things and Super 8 wear that inspiration on their sleeves and are successful because of it. Part of the problem could be that the late 70’s and the 80’s saw probably the greatest number of King adaptations and horror was still very strongly guided by how much gore was present. Christine was simply a stand-in for Jason or Michael Meyers; in the absence of a knife wielding maniac, we had a murderous Plymouth. Ditto Cujo. However, I think as movie audiences got more savvy, so too did the people wanting to make King films.
King isn’t prohibitively hard to adapt at all. Talented storytellers who understand solid characterization seem to have an easier time of it. Is there a reason that doesn’t happen as often as it should? Absolutely, but that’s more of a result of diluted talent pools trying to serve audiences drowning in devalued storytelling they voluntarily consider and consume as “content” first and foremost. That’s not a King-specific problem. I think you can capture the spirit of a King work that might veer heavily from the source; done very well, you might get a poor adaptation relative to the text, but you have a chance at reaching past artisanal and finding something that is art.