Stephen King on the Big Screen

by Mark Browning

The Shining. Carrie. Misery. These are just a few of the film adaptations that have been made from the terrifying and eerie work of novelist and short story writer Stephen King. It is nearly impossible to think of another author who has inspired so many, and such diverse filmmakers—yet there has never before been a work by a film specialist that focused solely on Stephen King. Mark Browning, in Stephen King on the Big Screen , takes a film-by-film approach to exploring why some adaptations of King’s work are more successful than others.             Browning discusses every single film adaptation given a global cinematic release—including films by such well-known directors as Stanley Kubrick, George A. Romero, and David Cronenberg. His is the first book to consider in detail Sleepwalkers , Dreamcatcher, and 1408 as well as the much-neglected portmanteau films and touchstones like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. In a highly readable and engaging style, Browning examines how different film directors have interpreted and translated the original literary texts into a new medium. Throughout, he reveals the elements of style and approach that have helped make King one of the world’s best-selling authors.             This entertaining and accessible guide to the complete corpus of Stephen King films is a must-have for fans of his fiction and of the many directors who have sought to capture his macabre stories and bizarre characters in cinematic form.

Genres: Media Tie In

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2009

Reviews

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reads like an edited master’s thesis of an angry and overconfident film student (it is not—at least so I presume from the author’s credentials). There is only minor interest for King fans as most of the author’s comments follow a basic formula: If it is a famous, ‘high culture’ director (DePalma, Kubrick, Cronenberg) that he is discussing, the point is invariably that the film version is much better than the book. If it is a genre film (by a less known director) the point is that the original text was so bad anyway that no good could come of it. Some of the points made are interesting and valid, but the whining about obsolete genres, bad filming techniques, etc. gets tedious after a while and can’t hide the fact that even if ‘adaptation theory’ is frowned upon by the author, there is an implicit hierarchy reminiscent of the Frankfurt school critique of ‘mass culture’ in the analysis of the films.