“I’m still excited when somebody makes a movie out of something that I’ve done,” Stephen King recently told The Guardian. This openness to exhilaration on King’s part is remarkable, given that he is such a widely adapted writer. To date, more than 90 of his novels and short stories have been adapted for cinema and television (and more adaptations are currently in production).
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).
