The Best Stephen King Movie Adaptation
Like most people who read a lot of fiction and watch a lot of movies, I tend to fall pretty strongly into the “the book was better” crowd. And it makes sense. In a book, you can tell me every internal thought the character has, what’s motivating them, how did their past influence their future, all of the exposition stuff that gives you deep, rich characters. And you have as much time as you want to do that. In a movie, you have three hours max to build characters, and you need to do it in a way that feels organic and with “show don’t tell” firmly in mind. So film adaptations are often hamstrung right out of the gate.
One of the worst victims of the film adaptation is just about any Stephen King novel.
Stephen King is wordy. He has said that he writes about 2000 words a day, and I swear, I think he publishes every single one of them. Beyond writing a lot of words, they tend to be really well done. Even his worst books have some truly visceral moments in them. And while he definitely has leaned into some problematic racial mysticism, especially in his older work, I really do love just about everything I’ve read.
I cannot say the same for the movie adaptations.
But I do think one is perfect.
You might think to yourself that it’s “Shawshank Redemption.” Or possibly “Misery,” with Kathy Bates’s Oscar winning performance.
And both of those are great, but neither of them are the best.
The best Stephen King adaptation is “Pet Sematary.”
I came to horror largely through books. Growing up, my parents were fairly strict about what I watched. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV. I had to sneak a terrible VHS copy of “Dirty Dancing” that I’m pretty sure was a copy of a copy, it was so bad.
But all of those rules kind of went out the window when it came to reading. I read “The Exorcist” when I was way too young to read “The Exorcist,” but I loved it. So when my school library had a stack of King novels, I started checking them out constantly. I felt like everything he wrote was just the best thing I’d ever read. His descriptions were so vivid and brutal, I remember them all. Patrick Hockstetter and the flying leeches in “It”? Not too many birthdays go by that I don’t think about Paul Sheldon’s thumb as a candle on his cake. An evil absorbed twin, a super flu, an evil, sentient car? They’re all in there, making me just a little bit afraid.
But the true genius of King, and really any gifted horror writer, is the ability to imbue stories with deeper meaning. “It” has an evil clown that’s really a spider that makes people do evil things, but the story is really about childhood friendship and the more mundane, but awful fears that plague us both as children and as adults. “Misery” is a story about obsession, both of the fans and of the artist. “The Dark Half” is about the fear of not fully understanding what drives your success. “The Stand” is about the fight between good and evil and how those lines aren’t always exactly what we think. And “Christine” just shows us that the teenage years are kind of a mess where we don’t have any power, but also need some power.
But those things are really hard to convey in a film adaptation. There is so much about King’s writing that is absolutely absurd that when we put it on screen, it drowns out the deeper message. Generally speaking, King writes bonkers action and leaves all of the good stuff as internal dialogue, meaning that most subtext rarely makes it to the screen in any meaningful way.
But most filmmakers at least try to give us something deeper. We have come close a couple times. Muschietti’s “It” manages to hit that better than most, with some truly poignant moments that hint at what he’s really going for in the book (though I hate the happy clappy ending so much that it kind of ruins all of it for me, especially since the book’s end is perfection).
And all of that brings us back to “Pet Sematary.” The book is one of the most powerful explorations of death and grief I have ever read. We see two parents who look at death in two unhealthy ways. Rachel is terrified of it, due to the traumatic death of her sister Zelda, so she never wants to talk about it at all. Lewis, on the other hand, sees it as a completely biological event with no mysticism at all, but it means that he also doesn’t want to talk about it because he sees no need. So when their son is killed in a tragic accident, they have no language to process their grief over losing him.
Despite the book being about grief, it’s told through the story of a little kid coming back to life, but evil. Yes, it’s a story about accepting loss and communicating with the people we love about our emotional response to death, but it’s also about a demon cat.
The movie knows this and wholly leans into the absurd. There is no examination of grief. There is no deep look at the ways that these characters process death. There is no depth to this movie at all. This movie knows that we want to see Gage pop out from under the bed and slice Judd’s ankle with a scalpel, and that’s what it delivers.
This is why I think this is the best King adaptation. Not because I think it’s a particularly faithful adaptation or even because it’s a good movie. It’s not really either of those things. But it realized there was no way to investigate the themes that the book puts forth, so it doesn’t even try. The movie adapts what works for film and leaves the rest for the book.
Do I wish that I could just see the whole book on screen sometimes? Sure. But ultimately, I think the best adaptations will always be the ones that take what works for film and make changes to the source material as necessary. I don’t think any other King adaptations do this as successfully as “Pet Sematary.”
Also, has there ever been a better ending to a horror movie than this?
Thank you for reading MacGuffin or Meaning: Entertainment Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.
ncG1vNJzZmiZnJ7Apq%2FHmp2foZ6oe7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZq2glWKvpr%2FTZqqtnaCdsq95yqKloGWdpMOqsYyam5qopJbBqrvN