Flasz On Film

As of August 2024, Stephen King has published sixty-five novels and novellas, many of which went on to be adapted into well-known movies, like Carrie, The Shining or The Green Mile. In addition, he has written well over two hundred short stories, most of which have been since corralled into twelve collected volumes. However, this number remains fickle because King—a pathologically prolific writer who has been banging out at least two thousand words a day since the day he figured out how to type—is most likely working on something right now. Who knows, maybe he’s hunched over his laptop right as I am hunched over mine? Maybe we are now somehow connected in our respective flow states? I can only wish.  

King’s work lends itself particularly well to cinematic adaptations and every time he finishes a draft, his agent must be already firing emails to prospective buyers ready to pounce on the opportunity to option his work for a movie adaptation.  

Who am I kidding? His stuff is probably optioned long before it’s finished. And we all know that King rarely leaves a book unfinished. He gets stuff done. But I digress.  

King has remained consistently suspicious of the way his novels are treated by auteur filmmakers who would happily make changes to his writing and turn them inside out for the purposes of advancing their own ideas or fleshing out nuances they found particularly resonant within the rich and supple prose King has produced. To this day King remains sore about the way Stanley Kubrick treated The Shining or how his Bachman vehicle The Running Man got completely upended when the Schwarzenegger-starring one-liner festival was forged using King’s work as a foundation. Therefore, you’d be excused to think that King isn’t too fond of filmmakers taking chances with his work at all, though it is perhaps more accurate to say he isn’t fond of filmmakers he doesn’t personally trust adapting his novels. He was fond of George Romero, Frank Darabont, Rob Reiner and more recently Mike Flanagan taking on his stories, so there clearly is a way to successfully navigate King’s prose and turn it into films the author would endorse. Maybe kissing the ring is part of the process, but for the most part, to get into King’s good graces, a filmmaker must treat the prose they are adapting with all due respect and impose changes only when safe and appropriate to do so (vide The Mist by Frank Darabont).  

Interestingly however, King has never been anywhere near as precious about people adapting his short stories into movies. In fact, he created what was known as the “Dollar Baby Initiative” under the auspices of which he would happily sell rights to his short stories for a symbolic dollar to young filmmakers eager to turn them into short films or independent ventures. This is but one reason why so many King adaptations exist and, perhaps for the best, many of such Dollar Baby adaptations remain unavailable, having screened at niche festivals and withered on the vine as work nobody wanted to pick up for mainstream distribution. Completely tangentially as well, this idea may have been one of the key reasons as to why King’s work has become so widely known and regarded in the grander popular culture as it shifted from having the written word to film and TV as its core. 

But that’s not the whole truth either. The way King writes short stories is probably the most powerful driving force propelling filmmakers to adapt them because, for the most part, King is fond of writing many of them as though he expected the reader to continue the narrative after putting the book away or at least to fill in the blanks in the world-building or in the narrative construction. He treats many of them as experiments in fiction narrative creation and allows himself to indulge a bit more overtly in paying homage to his own idols; something he’d embed in his major novels surreptitiously. 

 Think of The Jaunt, a short story he penned in the early 80s, and which was eventually collected in The Skeleton Crew. It’s nothing much, really, but an ode to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination with a typically Kingian what-if premise. If anyone wanted to adapt it, they would have to either turn it into a condensed  experiential short or expand it by a lot; at which point they could as well adapt Bester’s book instead… which by the way remains one of those seemingly unadaptable novels (like Neuromancer or Blood Meridian) that many filmmakers try to bite into and then drop unceremoniously into the ninth circle of the development hell for one reason or another.  

Nevertheless, partially thanks to the Dollar Baby Initiative and partially because King’s work is a consistently fertile ground for filmmakers to farm, many of his short stories have been turned into movies. And what I find particularly interesting in this regard is that there seems to exist a discreet constellation of modalities many of these adaptations adhere to, depending on how faithful they remain to the source material and where they take their liberties. 

When adapted verbatim, it is almost impossible for those stories to sustain a more substantial movie than a short vignette or a segment in an anthology series, like Tales from The Crypt, The Twilight Zone, or King’s own Creepshow. In fact, a good example of a King short story adapted word-for-word is Grey Matter which was published in the 1978 volume Night Shift and adapted into a single-act vignette in Shudder’s reimagining of Creepshow. The story itself wasn’t particularly outstanding and its intrinsic value remains confined to its tangential relationship with King’s later work, such as The Mist or The Stand; but truthfully, it was merely an exercise in tension-building and scene creation that involves multiple characters and a simple premise, in addition to being an opportunity for King to tip his hat to one of his old masters H.P. Lovecraft.  

Thus, Shudder’s Grey Matter remains rather unremarkable, though it bears mentioning that it was directed by Greg Nicotero, who also managed to convinced Tobin Bell, Giancarlo Esposito and Adrienne Barbeau to take part in it as well. So, there’s that. However, the story is still a simple exercise in building narrative tension on the back of a Lovecraftian mystery with a solid enough dose of gross-out horror underpinning the proceedings. But it is nothing more than a succession of short scenes in which we find out how a guy drinks a suspicious-looking beer and turns into a monster which would look the part as a runaway from the set of John Carpenter’s The Thing (a movie based in part on a short novel King adores too, the John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There).  

Also published in Night Shift, King’s Jerusalem’s Lot presents a prospective filmmaker a similar offer. Tethered to his sophomore novel ‘Salem’s Lot by way of world-building and setting, this short story is nothing but an exercise, yet again, this time in epistolary writing, which King was also quite fond of. After all, his vampire novel was a straight-up nod to Dracula ruminating among other things about the place of science in the understanding of the natural world, so it is perfectly understandable that the author would also have a go at composing a narrative out of letters and journal entries. What remains quite fascinating to me about Jerusalem’s Lot is how it hides world-building riches within a concise narrative structure and allows whoever chooses to adapt it to walk away with a product similar in structure and mission statement to that of Grey Matter. When treated as-is, it could produce a one-reel mood piece about a scourge of undead slowly brewing in the woods of New England, all working towards an ambiguous climax yet again harking back to Lovecraft and his Old God fetishes. 

But this isn’t how this short story was adapted, as it spawned a TV series with ten episodes full of storytelling and a promise of another season; before it succumbed to death by cancellation—a ubiquitous malady in the world of network television. Nevertheless, it breathed even more colour into what essentially was a fun little afternoon practicing epistolary fiction in the style of Bram Stoker. It also added a wrinkle to the backstory of ‘Salem’s Lot one could use to defend it as a piece on the inextinguishable nature of evil lurking underneath the thin layer of soil covering the titular New England town.  

Starring Adrien Brody as the lead character Charles Boone, Chapelwaite used King’s writing as a canvas upon which to build a world Stephen King didn’t necessarily imagine, and if so—only in part. Setting aside the show’s intrinsic filmmaking quality—especially since it suffers from what I identify as TV-borne plot bloat where the narrative is often stretched to produce a tight fit within the parameters of network broadcasting—it is nonetheless an intriguing case of working with King’s prose and focusing on two of its strongest aspects, namely character depth and world-building.  

Chapelwaite treats both notions respectfully and adds incredible colour to figures King sketches out in his story only using incredibly broad strokes. Boone is given a family and a character arc which extends beyond a journey to uncover whatever it is King wanted him to uncover. It also sets those freshly coloured-in characters in a world ripe for expansion, as opposed to being limited by the brevity of the narrative King left behind. It’s not the best piece of TV you could ever find, especially because its budgetary constraints shine through in production design and costuming while it often feels as though those rich and intriguing characters were left to fend themselves against the unyielding demands of plot trying to advance their stories instead of letting them exist, if only for a second. Though, it remains an instructive example of filmmakers both showing respect to the author and, with permission, adding loads of context and colour to what otherwise would have been a rather dry chapter of Tales from The Crypt in period-accurate costuming.  

In addition to these two fundamental modalities—(1) adapt as is and (2) treat the short story as an invitation to expand its universe and character work left (deliberately or not) underbaked by the author—one can dig a tad deeper and build an adaptation out of the ideas and themes which propelled the author to write the story and match them with ideas and themes this story evokes in the reader. Granted, many filmmakers stay much closer to the narrative and choose to stretch and pad out the narrative while leaving the plot and characters intact otherwise. Think of Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler or Ralph S. Singleton’s Graveyard Shift, both of which extend King’s lean writing to fit the requirements of a feature film, while still leaving the plot and character work mostly intact and only adding enough filler to check off that ninety-minute running time box.  

However, I personally find movies which attempt to smuggle a lot of their own personality into the operation and use King’s short fiction as an inspiration to get them going quite a bit more intriguing. One great example of this modality in action is found in The Boogeyman, a movie which came out relatively recently, in 2023, adapting Stephen King’s early short story collected in Night Shift, over four decades earlier.  

In many ways, King’s short story was just as lean as the rest of them—a veritable exercise in scare creation with a garish twist at the end. What it essentially amounted to was a man’s conversation with his therapist where he describes how a supernatural entity, the titular boogeyman, killed his children and how nobody would ever believe him. In a sudden twist of events, the therapist is then revealed to have been this boogeyman all along, leaving the reader in a state of perplexed discombobulation. Narratively, this is it. Not much in there. However, paying a little attention to the man’s ramblings (Lester Billings his name) you’d begin wondering (a) if he’s making all this stuff up and (b) if this is after all what the author is interested in.  

In a way, The Boogeyman story functions as a piece of elevated genre fiction as we’d describe it now because it uses its narrative to advance a thematic conversation about parental anxieties, domestic abuse and a rather acrid attitude of some men (especially at the time) towards their family life and obligations towards their partners and children. You could see it as a literary protoplast to stuff we’d witnessed in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a horror movie which distinctly encapsulated the concept of post-partum depression into a genre vesicle.  

Interestingly, what the filmmakers adapting The Boogeyman ended up gravitating toward wasn’t necessarily an extrapolation of these very anxieties King may have imbued within the narrative he wrote, but rather the idea of adjusting these themes to fit the times a bit better. Nobody would find Lester Billings of the 1978 short story a believable father character, but the idea of using The Boogeyman as a launchpad for a conversation about era-appropriate anxieties many parents would find more identifiable was very much a possibility they decided to prosecute. In fact, they used King’s short story, or at least the gist of it, as their opening act and then went on their merry way to do whatever they saw fit with the central concept of the boogeyman and how it would inform a metaphorically elevated conversation about unresolved grief and ripples of the trauma imparted on a family losing a mother.  

None of that is in the King story, but equally the movie (directed by Rob Savage who previously did Host and Dashcam) doesn’t feel as though it ventured far from where King was because the spirit of hiding a thematic pill inside a genre dog treat remained. The pill changed just as much as the treat did, but the intentions of the film mirrored the ones driving the author. Ultimately, King ended up recommending The Boogeyman, a rare move on behalf of the writer so widely known for his troubled relationships with filmmakers taking liberties with his work.  

There you have it. Although there are no wrong answers when it comes to adapting Stephen King’s shorts—while there definitely are some when the matter relates to taking on his novels—there’s something to be said about the idea of finding the appropriate modality for what the filmmaker may intend. Adapt as is and produce a short or a segment in an anthology. Colour in the character and world-building and the world’s your oyster. You may end up stretching a few pages worth of fiction into never-ending seasons of television if you play your cards right and if the audience remains in your corner. Or you can do some thinking on the matter and really let your hog loose because doing an interpretative dance about the way King’s writing made you feel is very much on the table. And King might like it too if the movie in question executes on its mission with competence and respect towards the genre and the man who contributed so much to its evolution.