A Brief Guide to Stephen King (32 page)

King had told the show’s star David Duchovny that he was a fan of the series, and would be interested in contributing; however, he later thought his style might be a better fit for Chris Carter’s other show,
Millennium
. Eventually, after discussion with the show runner, King agreed to write an episode of
The X-Files
, and came up with a story originally called ‘Molly’. This was a more traditional
X-Files
story, with Mulder and Scully working together to investigate an odd incident at the grocery store in which people slap themselves. The entire plotline goes in a different direction, with fake federal marshals, and links to earlier
X-Files
stories, such as ‘Eve’.

After further conversations with Carter, King reworked the story to the plotline featured in the episode (King credited the ‘evil doll’ plotline to Carter), although Carter then did a major rewrite himself, sufficient to merit the co-writing credit since he felt that King hadn’t quite captured the Mulder–Scully dynamic correctly. King insisted that Carter should have the credit. Director Kim Manners was keen to work on the story, but ‘when it was all said and done, there was very little Stephen King left in it. The nuts and bolts were his, but that was really one of Chris’ scripts’.

King’s alternative idea was ‘Night of the Living Dead’ which started with a girl dying of fright after a hand grabs her when she is running away from Mulder. It never went beyond a brief discussion.

The alternative title was created after it was discovered that ‘Chinga’ is a colloquialism for f*** in Spanish; Fox executives insisted that the episode was sold under the new name in territories outside North America, although no changes were made to the content of the episode. Since the episode titles weren’t displayed on screen, the alteration was pretty pointless.

Storm of the Century
(1999, directed by Craig R. Baxley)

‘Give me what I want and I’ll go away.’ That’s the simple demand of Andre Linoge – but what he wants will tear the community of Little Tall Island apart. Arriving just ahead of a terrible storm that cuts the Maine island off from the mainland, Linoge commits murder and is arrested by Constable Mike Anderson. However, locking him up doesn’t remove his power, and eight of the town’s children fall unconscious. He explains that he needs one of the children to act as his heir – he cannot force the people to do what he wants, but he can punish them, as he did to the ‘lost colony’ of Roanoke in the sixteenth century, forcing them all to commit suicide. The islanders are petrified of Linoge, who seems to know their darkest secrets.

Mike is a lone voice trying to prevent the townspeople from agreeing to Linoge’s demands, and he is horrified when his son is chosen as Linoge’s heir. After revealing his true form, Linoge leaves with the boy. Nine years later, after he has left Little Tall Island, Mike runs into his now-teenage son – but decides not to tell his now-ex-wife.

As King explains in his introduction to the published screenplay of
Storm of the Century
– which is different only in very minor details from the transmitted version, which is available on DVD – the idea for the story came to him in late 1996, and he began work on it in December that year. By this stage, his own adaptation of
The Shining
had been completed, and he felt that he had learned a lot about writing in the miniseries format, much as he had applied the lessons from earlier screenplays to the writing of
Sleepwalkers
.

When King pitched the idea of an original novel for television to ABC’s Maura Dunbar and Mark Carliner, and received an immediate positive response, he developed the central image of an evil man sitting in a prison cell. It was built round the theme of a community coming together
and making a situation worse, rather than the normal circumstance in his work where it is only through everyone working together that the evil is defeated.

The six-hour script was written as a piece of psychological horror, for the most part, rather than blood and guts, although Linoge’s original attacks were as violently portrayed as they needed to be. The series cost around $35 million, making it ABC’s most expensive miniseries project up to that date. The ratings weren’t as good as they might have been: ABC unfortunately scheduled the final episode against George Clooney’s last regular appearance as Dr Doug Ross on the medical drama
E.R
. when they first broadcast the miniseries in February 1999. King however ‘loved the way it turned out’. The voters for the Saturn Awards agreed –
Storm of the Century
was awarded Best Television Presentation for 1999 by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films.

Little Tall Island was the location for
Dolores Claiborne
, and Linoge’s powers are reminiscent of Tak’s in the Richard Bachman novel
The Regulators
.

Rose Red
(2002, directed by Craig R. Baxley)

Parapsychology professor Dr Joyce Reardon of Beaumont University has been granted permission by Stephen Rimbauer, the new owner of an apparently haunted mansion, Rose Red, to give it one last investigation before the property is demolished to make way for new condominiums. She assembles a team of psychics who go into the property – but they are not prepared for what they find there, even if Reardon herself knows more than she’s letting on (and is closely involved with Steve Rimbauer, the last surviving descendant).

Autistic teenager Annie Wheaton, and her sister Rachel, are also part of the team, and it’s Annie’s latent powers which Joyce hopes to use to reanimate the powers within the house. As various members of the team and those
connected to them are killed by ghosts of past victims, it’s only Annie who manages to prevent further bloodshed, and is able to guide a few of them out alive.

Rose Red
owes a great debt to earlier haunted-house stories, particularly Shirley Jackson’s novel
The Haunting of Hill House
– a story that King admired for a long time, and paid brief homage to in
Carrie
, giving the young girl the ability to make stones rain from the sky. Annie Wheaton in
Rose Red
has that ability – and there’s an argument to be made that Annie could even be the young girl referred to in the closing pages of King’s 1974 novel. Certainly, this is the nearest that King has come to any sort of sequel to his first bestselling book.

King had wanted to work with Steven Spielberg on a project for some time, with Spielberg telling the writer that he wanted ‘to make the scariest ghost story ever made’. It seemed as if
Rose Red
, which was effectively a remake of the classic 1963 horror movie
The Haunting
(itself an adaptation of Jackson’s tale), would be a perfect fit for both men. However, during their discussions, it became clear that the two men had drastically different ideas about the approach, and they parted company. ‘In what he wanted, there was a feeling, almost a kind of sense of derring-do,’ King told the
Los Angeles Times
. ‘An “Indiana Jones” kind of thing that I didn’t really want in there. Steven wanted these people to be heroic. I just wanted them to be terrified.’ (Spielberg was executive producer at Dreamworks of the eventual remake of
The Haunting
in 1999, which was slated.)

After
Storm of the Century
, King pitched the story of
Rose Red
to ABC’s Mark Carliner, and in mid-June 1999, pre-production was all set to start, with King beginning adapting the script the following Monday. However, on the Saturday, King was knocked down by a vehicle, necessitating a long recovery period, during which writing
Rose Red
helped to keep him focused. The two-hour movie script
was expanded into a six-hour miniseries: ‘My problem with scripts has never been not being able to find enough material,’ King admitted. ‘My problem is getting ’em down to a shootable length.’

As far as the mystery of the house was concerned, King was inspired by the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. Its owner was told by a psychic that she would die if the house was ever finished, so she continued to add room after room to it over the decades, as the Rimbauer family do in
Rose Red
.

The miniseries was aired in January 2002, and did well for ABC. The
New York Times
concluded,
Rose Red
is a clever tale to the end. You’ll never be tempted to take it seriously. But if you let it hook you, you won’t be tempted to turn it off,’ although
USA Today
was more scathing, commenting on its ‘numbingly predictable series of seen-it-before jolts’.

As part of the high-profile publicity for the series, a book entitled
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red
was released, supposedly annotated by Joyce Reardon. While for a time people believed that King – or even his wife Tabitha – was the author, it was eventually revealed that King’s friend Ridley Pearson had penned the tie-in, which filled in some of the backstory for the miniseries. The
Diary
itself was filmed as a miniseries in 2003, directed by Craig R. Baxley.

Kingdom Hospital
(2004, directed by Craig R. Baxley)

Welcome to Kingdom Hospital in Lewiston, Maine. It’s not your run-of-the-mill place of care for the sick. Mysterious spirits haunt the building, connected to the children who died in a fire many years before, and the staff aren’t exactly normal: there’s a nearly blind security guard and a nurse who faints at the sight of blood. And that’s before you meet Blondi, the highly intelligent German Shepherd dog, or Antubis, the anteater . . .

Artist Peter Rickman is the victim of a hit-and-run accident, and miraculously manages to survive, thanks to the forces gathering at the Kingdom. His assailant is killed by Antubis, and Rickman is regularly reminded by the anteater that there is a price to pay for his survival. Medium Mrs Druse wants to hold séances in the hospital, a serial killer fakes illness to get admitted, and the hospital’s chief of neurology, Dr Stegman, is starting to lose his grip on reality. If anyone at the Kingdom can be quite sure what reality is any more . . .

Kingdom Hospital
is based on Lars von Trier’s miniseries
The Kingdom
, which was first broadcast in Denmark in 1994, and released as a subtitled video and DVD in the US a year later. While working on his version of
The Shining
in Boulder, Colorado in 1996, King picked up a copy of the video, which he immediately fell in love with: ‘I was immediately knocked out by how scary it was, how funny it was, and how universal it was regarding the world of medicine.’ Von Trier produced a second series of
The Kingdom
in Denmark in 1997 before serious work started on the American version, about which the Dane was delighted, since he was a fan of King’s writing – a feature-film version for English-speaking audiences was considered by Sony/Columbia but they came to an arrangement with King whereby they co-produced the miniseries in exchange for the rights to King’s novella
Secret Window, Secret Garden
which became the Johnny Depp movie
Secret Window
.

King’s adaptation follows some of the beats of the Danish series, with character names suitably Americanized, but there are many aspects which are unique to each variant. Antubis is a King creation; in
The Kingdom
, the psychic (Mrs Druse) has a very unsettling hearing test which was not replicated in the English-language edition.

It was also heavily influenced by King’s own experience of hospitals following his accident in June 1999. Executive
producer Mark Carliner noted that, ‘The accident and Stephen’s extensive hospitalization gave him a more profound insight into Lars’ material. These things only happen to Stephen King.’ King was also inspired by the Dennis Potter miniseries
The Singing Detective
– the original BBC version with Michael Gambon rather than the movie starring Steve Martin.

At the launch of the show, King said
Kingdom Hospital
was ‘a little bit oddball, a little bit strange. It’s not a
CSI
clone; it’s not a
Law & Order
clone; thank God, it’s not a reality show – it’s not about carrying a tiki torch up the side of a volcano’.
Entertainment Weekly
called it ‘a small-screen B movie with the promise of turning into something richer and scarier’. The ratings were extremely high for the opening instalment – over 14 million viewers, an ABC record at that time – but they dropped off quickly, reaching what King described as ‘the ratings equivalent of the black death’.

Thirteen episodes were broadcast, with a two-month gap between the ninth and tenth. The scripts were by King and/or Richard Dooling, with Tabitha King providing the storyline for episode ten, ‘The Passion of Reverend Jimmy’ (aka ‘On the Third Day’). This marked the first time that the two writers had been credited together. King plotted out a second season, but the show was not picked up by ABC.

In July 2004, as the final episodes were about to air, King wrote an article for
Entertainment Weekly
– to which at that stage he was contributing a regular column ‘The Pop of King’ – explaining why he thought it failed: ‘We were asking viewers to give us a week or two, maybe three, and that was more time than most were willing to give.’ (A change in network bosses at ABC didn’t help the show’s chances of renewal either.)

Kingdom Hospital
was initially well promoted by the network, with another tie-in book prepared, this time T
he
Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident
, allegedly written by Druse, but penned by Richard Dooling. There are various links to other King tales within the story, and the series itself gets a mention in
The Song of Susannah
, the penultimate book in the ‘Dark Tower’ series.

Since then, King has written no other original stories for large or small screen.

Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men

(Marvel Comics, 1985)