Variations in the scale of his works have proved no barrier for potential adaptors of King. The 1,100 pages of The Stand (1978) have been processed for the screen. But so too have been the 110 of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982). Genre shifts across the long arc of King’s work have also been accommodated by adaptors. While early ventures in horror such as Carrie (1974) and Misery (1987) were rapidly taken up by Hollywood, equal haste has been expended recently to bring to American TV King’s crime novels featuring the likeable sleuth Holly Gibney from the Holly series.
In all of this furious adaptive activity, differences in quality are only to be expected. For every screen treatment with the lustre of Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), there is a dull or clumsy transposition such as John Power’s two-part miniseries of The Tommyknockers (1993).
Even King’s involvement in a project is not a guarantor of success. His role as executive producer failed to prevent Salem’s Lot (1975), his horrifying tale of vampires in Maine, from being defanged when it was adapted for cinema in 2024.
Now King is back as an executive producer, this time attached to The Life of Chuck, a film adapting one of the novellas included in his 2020 collection, If It Bleeds. Here, however, he is working alongside something of a King specialist (if not a King obsessive), the screenwriter and director Mike Flanagan. He has already adapted two novels by the author: Gerald’s Game (1992) and Doctor Sleep (2013).
Happily, The Life of Chuck proves to be a thoughtful adaptation, shot through with King’s sensibility while augmenting the original novella through its own cinematic choices.
Continued…
For the full article by Dr Andrew Dix visit the Conversation.
ENDS