A Brief Guide to Stephen King (31 page)

Reviews were mixed: Richard Corliss in
Time
thought ‘the treatment manages to be both perfunctory and languid; the jolts can be predicted by any ten-year-old with a stopwatch’. Roger Ebert was kinder: ‘Romero and King have approached this movie with humour and affection, as well as with an appreciation of the macabre.’

A sequel, with the uninspired title
Creepshow
2, followed in 1987 (see below).

Cat’s Eye
(1985, directed by Lewis Teague)

After escaping a rabid-looking St Bernard, and narrowly avoiding being squashed under the wheels of a 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine, a cat hides in a truck bound for New York City, hearing the voice of a small girl calling for help. It becomes the test subject for electric shock treatment needed by the owners of ‘Quitters, Inc.’, escapes from there and heads for New Jersey, where he watches as a mob boss tries to take revenge on his wife’s lover by making him walk on ‘The Ledge’.

The cat takes a freight train down to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he is adopted by the little girl, Amanda, who names him ‘General’. Her mother is convinced General is responsible for the death of their parakeet, but in fact it was a troll. General saves Amanda from the troll after an epic battle.

Although King was keen in interviews to stress that
Cat’s Eye
was not an anthology movie like
Creepshow
, the simple presence of the cat doesn’t turn it into one coherent plot: the film is obviously based around three separate stories, only one of which was new for the movie.

Speaking to Tim Hewitt for
Cinefantastique
in 1985, King explained that
Cat’s Eye
was intended as a movie to showcase Drew Barrymore, who had played Charlie McGee in the film of
Firestarter
. King had been contemplating a story with the beats of ‘General’, although originally it was a boy rather than a girl who faced the troll. Dino De Laurentiis had acquired the rights to various King short stories, and asked the author to incorporate both the cat and the girl into the other tales within the film, with the cat very much regarded as the hero of the whole piece. Sixteen cats were needed for the various sequences.

To ensure that the final film matched his expectations after writing the first draft of the script, King became more involved in the production than he normally would
have done – leading to his directing
Maximum Overdrive
. Unfortunately,
Cat’s Eye
was not a success financially, even if Roger Ebert did note: ‘Stephen King seems to be working his way through the reference books of human phobias, and
Cat’s Eye
is one of his most effective films.’ King admitted that he found parts of ‘Quitters, Inc.’ ‘the funniest things he had seen on film that year apart from William Shatner’s wig in
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock!’

The screenplay for ‘General’ was printed in 1997 in the collection
Screamplays
, edited by Richard Chizmar.

Creepshow 2
(1987, directed by Michael Gornick)

The Creepshow Creep is back with some new tales to delight young Billy. In ‘Old Chief Woodenhead’, a wooden carving of a Native American comes to life to avenge the deaths of the store owners at the hands of some young Native Americans. ‘The Raft’ is the refuge taken by four students after they encounter a living slick on the surface of a lake. ‘The Hitch-hiker’ is killed by an adulterous wife who is then haunted by him, after he simply refuses to die – and he finally gets his revenge by gassing her in her car.

George A. Romero wrote the screenplay for this belated sequel, with Michael Gornick taking over from him in the director’s chair. King’s story ‘The Raft’ was the basis for the central segment, and the writer confirmed in 2011 that he had written a synopsis for the other two segments of the film, although he was not responsible for the screenplays.

Creepshow III
(2006) was not connected to either King or Romero.

Stephen King’s Golden Years
(July–August 1991)

Elderly janitor Harlan Williams’ life gets completely turned around when an experiment at Falco Plains, the top-secret military lab at which he works, goes wrong, killing one doctor, and fatally injuring an intern. Dr Richard
Todhunter has been working on cellular regeneration, and Harlan gets in the way of an energy form known as K-R3. As a result he starts to grow younger: his eyelids glow bright green, and the grey in his hair begins to disappear.

The Shop – the black ops outfit who were after Charlie McGee in
Firestarter
– take a keen interest, and Jude Andrews is assigned to bring Harlan in. His former partner, Terry Spann, is chief of security at Falco Plains and after Harlan’s doctor is killed, she realizes The Shop will stop at nothing. Her lover, the head of Falco Plains, General Louis Crewes, eventually takes her side and they help Harlan and his wife Gina try to reach their blind daughter Francesca, as Harlan’s power begins to grow further. Eventually, during a confrontation with Andrews, Harland and Gina disappear.

Stephen King wrote the screenplays for the first five episodes of this miniseries, and the story for the final two episodes, with the screenplays for those by Josef Anderson. Anderson was also responsible for the reshot ending – in the televised version, Gina is killed, Harlan captured by Andrews, and Crewes and Terry go on the run, providing a cliffhanger ending for the first season; the video/DVD release (which is more easily available) plays out as above. The Horror Channel in the UK has run the episodic version periodically; Netflix in the US also carries it.

In pre-publicity for the series, King compared
Golden Years
with David Lynch’s classic weird TV show,
Twin Peaks
, and noted that Lynch had revolutionized the idea of continuing drama on television. ‘He turned the whole idea of that continuing soap opera inside out like a sock,’ King told the
New York Times
. ‘If you think of
Twin Peaks
as a man, it’s a man in delirium, a man spouting stream-of-consciousness stuff.
Golden Years
is like
Twin Peaks
without the delirium.’ The paper itself described the series as ‘a mix of
The Fugitive
and
Cocoon’;
King called Jude Andrews
‘an insane version of
The Fugitive’s
Lieutenant Gerard’, unsurprising since he had noted that the show was one of the few he really enjoyed when he was younger.

King had the idea for
Golden Years
some years before the series, explaining that ‘it doesn’t exist as a novel, but it could’. At the time it was clear that he regarded it as a diversion rather than a career change: television was ‘a lovely place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here’. His original plan, according to the article he penned for
Entertainment Weekly
when the show was halfway through its initial broadcast, was for a fourteen-or fifteen-hour series, starting and finishing with a two-hour special; CBS were only interested in a summer show, and commissioned the eight hours – the opening episode is double-length, as King had hoped. It was not renewed. To maximize their profit from the story, CBS ordered extra scenes to be shot, which were then incorporated into a shortened version for videotape release – 236 minutes, rather than the 340-plus of the broadcast edition.

There are various overt links to other parts of King’s work, notably
Firestarter
– the assassin who featured in that, John Rainbird, is mentioned by name. One of the informants working for The Shop is known as Cap’n Trips, the nickname given to the superflu in
The Stand
.

Sleepwalkers
(1992, directed by Mick Garris)

Charles Brady may seem to be an ordinary high school student, who’s just moved with his mother Mary to a small town in Indiana, but in fact they are the last of an ancient species, the Sleepwalkers, who can shift into animal form and briefly turn invisible (or ‘dim’ as they describe it). Charles is the food gatherer: he feeds on the life force of virgin girls, and passes on the excess to his mother through sexual intercourse with her. When Charles gets feelings for his next victim, Tanya Robertson, he’s caught between the two women.

Charles tries to feed off Tanya but is stopped by the deputy sheriff, who Charles proceeds to kill – but the deputy’s cat attacks Charles. Sleepwalkers are vulnerable to cats, and the wounds it inflicts are fatal, unless Charles feeds. To save her son, Mary attacks Tanya’s house, killing multiple people and kidnapping the girl. Tanya manages to fend Charles off when he tries to feed off her, and then has to fight for her life against the maddened Mary, with the assistance of a large number of cats.

Sleepwalkers
may not have been the best piece that Stephen King has ever written, but it was an award winner, gaining the
Mostra Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza e del Fantastico di Roma
awards for Best Actress (Alice Krige), Best Direction (Garris), Best Film (Garris) and Best Screenplay (King). It was the author’s first original screenplay for the cinema to be filmed, and marked the start of his long and fruitful collaboration with director Mick Garris.

In his introduction to Garris’s first short-story collection,
A Life in the Cinema
, in 2000, King explained that he had ‘a bloody good time’ writing the original screenplay for
Sleepwalkers
(which was known at one stage as ‘Tania’s Suitor’) aiming to apply the lessons he had learned from working on films such as
Creepshow
and
Silver Bullet
. He was amenable to suggestions from the director, and happily penned new versions of scenes if Garris felt they needed alteration.

The story was inspired by his son Joe, who had a crush on the girl selling popcorn at their local movie theatre; King could see why his son was attracted to her, and started thinking about someone wanting to ask her out for all the wrong reasons.

Unlike either of King’s two earlier screenplays,
Sleepwalkers
wasn’t played for laughs: ‘This is horror played straight, without comedy,’ Garris maintained. There certainly were some in-jokes though: King himself appears, as
do other horror icons, including Clive Barker, Tobe Hooper, Joe Dante and John Landis. There was some discussion of a sequel, but that never happened: the film was not particularly well received (‘Ms Krige is an all-too-predictable Hollywood incarnation of a Freudian nightmare come to life,’ the
New York Times
said). Garris and King moved on to two projects for TV:
The Stand
and
The Shining
.

There were a few links with other King stories: the Sleepwalkers have the ability to go ‘dim’ – as Randall Flagg did in
The Eyes of the Dragon
, and Carol Gerber later would in
Hearts in Atlantis
– and there’s a passing mention of Castle Rock. Despite a number of similarities, it can’t be the usual one, since that would not be local for Indiana cops even if it does have a Sheriff Pangborn just like the one in Maine!

Michael Jackson’s Ghosts
(1997, directed by Stan Winston)

Stephen King provided the story for this short film, which featured Michael Jackson as a creepy Maestro living on the top of a hill as well as the mayor of the local community and three other roles. The folk of Normal Valley want the Maestro to leave their town but when they confront him, the Maestro and his ghouls indulge in various dances in a scare-off. At the end, the townsfolk have changed their mind about the Maestro – although when he shows them something truly terrifying, the screams ring out . . .

Basically a long music video,
Ghosts
was scripted and directed by special-effects genius Stan Winston, with Mick Garris and Jackson credited as co-writers from an idea and story by King. In some overseas markets, it was aired before the film of
Stephen King’s Thinner
, although it was released separately in America.

The X-Files
: ‘Chinga’ (aka ‘Bunghoney’)

(February 1998, directed by Kim Manners)

FBI agent Dana Scully is on holiday in the coastal town of Amma Beach, Maine, the home of five-year-old autistic
Polly Turner who goes everywhere with her antique doll, Chinga, and her mother Melissa, who some in the town think is a witch. That idea is strengthened after a bizarre incident at the local grocery store, where customers begin to claw at their eyes after the doll announces, ‘Let’s have fun’, and Melissa sees a vision of one of the staff with a knife in his eye – which comes true. Mulder, back in Washington DC, suggests it might be sorcery but Scully doesn’t think so, and helps the local police department to investigate. If people hurt Polly, they seem to be hurt themselves, and Melissa’s windows are nailed shut, perhaps to keep something in.

Scully’s investigations reveal that the Chinga doll has been responsible for a string of deaths, including Polly’s father, and she and the local police captain get to the house just in time to prevent the doll from forcing Melissa to commit suicide. Scully throws it into a microwave oven, which burns it up – but it’s not dead, as a fisherman discovers when he drags up its burned remains a little later . . .

Although at the time Stephen King was quoted as saying that he would ‘happily repeat the experience’ and had already come up with an idea for a future plot, he was rather less positive about his time creating a script for
The X-Files
looking back on it a decade later. ‘I got rewritten pretty exhaustively,’ he told Lilja’s Library in 2008.

‘Chinga’ was the tenth episode of
The X-Files’
fifth season, the final one to be shot in Vancouver (which is why the gas station at which Scully refills at the start of the episode serves her in litres rather than gallons), and due to a quirk in scheduling was filmed after the first
X-Files
movie, which was set in the gap between the fifth and sixth seasons. The series was a great hit for the Fox network, following the adventures of two investigators of the paranormal – believer Fox Mulder and sceptic Dana Scully. One of the strengths of the series was the relationship between
the pair, which was lacking in the final version of ‘Chinga’, which was credited jointly to King and the show’s creator, Chris Carter.