Not All Stephen King Adaptations Get Away With Rewriting The Books, But These 8 Changes Worked Perfectly

Stephen King adaptations sometimes make dramatic changes to the source material, occasionally improving the visionary author’s work. Oftentimes, Stephen King movies aren’t faithful to their books, resulting in disastrous stories that can’t hold a candle to their literary inspiration. In rare cases, however, changes movies make actually make the stories they’re based on better, contrary to the notion that the book is always better than the film.

By no means a perfect writer, even Stephen King’s most famous stories have their flaws. That’s not even to mention his more questionable work, churned out during the height of King’s struggles with drug addiction with little to no oversight (King famously doesn’t even remember writing Cujo). In reality, any good story still has room for improvement, and many of the most famous Stephen King adaptations make several changes that only serve to improve their source material.

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8

Jack Is The True Villain Rather Than The Overlook Hotel

The Shining

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Famously, Stephen King doesn’t care for Kubrick’s The Shining despite the film possibly being the single most critically-acclaimed adaptation of his works. While King has lodged several complaints with the film, in reality, his biggest point of contention is actually one of the best changes the film makes to the original book. In King’s version of events, Jack Torrance is depicted as a good guy who admittedly struggles with demons like anger issues and alcoholism, posing a danger to his family at times despite truly having their best interests at heart.

When Jack goes off the deep end, the book presents it as a result of the evil Overlook Hotel’s possession. However, Kubrick frames things so that Jack is really just using the location’s influence as an excuse to act out the twisted fantasies he desired all along, painting Jack as a terrible person from the very beginning. This refusal to excuse the violence and drug abuse of a protagonist clearly meant as a stand-in for King himself might rub the author the wrong way, but it makes for a far more compelling horror story.

7

Hobbling Instead Of Amputation

Misery

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Another very personal story to Stephen King, the changes made by Misery are a little bit more superficial, but no less effective than The Shining‘s. The film follows a horror writer who is saved from a deadly car crash by one of his obsessive fans, the delightful Annie Wilkes, who soon shows off her sinister side when she learns he’s planning on killing off her favorite character. Keeping him confined to a room, Annie forces her hapless favorite author to re-write the story as he desperately searches for a means of escape.

To prevent him from fleeing, the Annie of the book chops off Paul’s foot with an axe, cauterizing the stump with a blowtorch to keep it from getting infected. Deciding this would be too much gore for the film, director Rob Reiner opted to instead have Annie “hobble” Paul, breaking his legs with a sledgehammer and a length of wood. In a weird way, this form of injury is almost harder to watch, with the sickening snapping of bone being a more spine-chilling and relatable injury that’s wonderfully horrific to see in motion.

6

The Twist Ending

The Mist

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Interestingly enough, The Mist is arguably most famous for the one element that was changed the most dramatically going into the movie adaptation. The story centers on a huddled group of survivors hiding from a fog that brings horrific monsters along with it, slaughtering most of the population of their small town. The book ends with the protagonists tentatively heading out of their hiding spot and into the outside world, hopeful to find more survivors.

However, the film flips this more hopeful final note on its head, resulting in one of the most devastating movie twists of all time. Setting out in a car with no hope of rescue, protagonist David makes the difficult choice to kill his fellow survivors to spare them from the pain of being eaten alive, saving a final round for himself. Tragically, the military comes to the rescue just moments after David mercy kills his comrades, meaning that they died unnecessarily by his own hands. This deliciously brutal take on an ambiguously optimistic ending is pure genius.

5

Teddy And Vern Survive

Stand By Me

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Despite largely being a horror author, it says a lot that even Stephen King’s work that breaks from his routine style is compelling enough for film adaptations. Enter Stand By Me, a tale set in the 50s about a group of 12-year-old best friends who go on a journey to discover a dead body in a woods, only to meet some heart-racing danger along the way. The story famously ends with protagonist Gordie ending his reminiscing by chronicling what happened to Chris, Teddy, and Vern in their adult lives.

In the book, the narrative has something of a downer ending, as it turns out that all three of the lads died young as adults, somewhat souring the whole tale. While the film’s ending monologue includes Chris’ death attempting to break up a knife fight, Teddy and Vern are allowed to survive, simply growing distant in adulthood as childhood friends so often do. This more realistic set of endings for the main characters puts into perspective their bonding as kids in a more interesting way than simply leaving Gordie as the sole survivor.

4

Merging Jessie’s Hallucinations Into One

Gerald’s Game

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No director can hold a candle to Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptations, easily being the best horror director at the helm of the famous author’s stories. The undisputed greatest at adapting King’s work, Flanagan manages to stay relatively faithful to the source material while still making some worthwhile changes necessitated by the format of filmmaking. A great example of this is in Gerald’s Game, which tells the story of a woman who ends up trapped, handcuffed to the bed of a remote cabin when her husband dies of a heart attack mid-coitus.

Similar to 127 Hours, Gerald’s Game is a great bottle movie that relies primarily on hallucinations to drive the terror forwards. In the book, protagonist Jessie ends up talking with a whopping four distinct personalities generated by her fraying sanity, each representing a different aspect of her personality. Mike Flanagan makes the wise decision to condense these personalities into a single hallucinatory version of the tough idealized survivalist Jessie needs to become in order to escape with her life.

3

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Making All Machines Evil Rather Than Just Trucks

Maximum Overdrive

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Despite being literally directed by Stephen King himself, Maximum Overdrive actually does make some prescient changes to the source material, proving that even King can recognize the value of changes to his work. Based on the short story Trucks, Maximum Overdrive concerns a group of survivors huddled in a gas station hiding out from murderous sentient semi-trucks. The film is famously bad as King’s disastrous sole directorial debut, but is endlessly fun in a so-bad-it’s-good way.

In Trucks, only gas-based vehicles like trucks and cars are shown to have any sentience, though the story ends on the grim possibility that a plane flying overhead might also be doing so free of human influence. On the other hand, the film elaborates that the trail of a mystical comet causes all machines on the planet to become killing machines. This allows for some of the most audaciously great deaths in Stephen King movie history, including a homicidal vending machine and a pinball cabinet that shocks Giancarlo Esposito to death.

2

Omitting The Disturbing Sewer Scene

IT

After the made-for-TV movie series left much to be desired, a cinematic modern take on Stephen King’s famous killer clown was very much a welcome opportunity. However, IT certainly had to take some big liberties when it came to condensing the massive tome that is even the childhood portion of the original story into a digestible blockbuster. Part of that task included thankfully cutting out a bizarre scene King wrote into the original story that’s horrifying for all the wrong reasons.

The controversial IT scene involves the sole female member of the Loser’s Club, Beverly, having sex with each other member one after the other in the sewers just after Pennywise is temporarily defeated. The narrative reasoning for this scene is flimsy at best, with Beverly arguing the act will help them find their way home as well as lose the childish innocence Pennywise preyed upon. This weak justification doesn’t help the fact that all the characters involved are 11 or 12 years old, thankfully causing it to be cut out of the film.

1

Ellie Discovers The Pet Cemetery

Pet Sematary

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There have been two adaptations of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, with the most recent version taking more dramatic liberties with the original book. All three versions feature a grieving father who buries his dead child into the titular mysterious grave site, causing them to revive as an evil version of themselves. But the protagonist’s knowledge of this profane location in the first place is generated in an odd way in the original book.

In the initial story, the elderly neighbor Jud Crandall serves as the classic harbinger of doom present in so many horror stories, making the Creed family aware of the Pet Cemetery only to later warn them against using it. It makes no sense for Jud, who knows the evil of the land firsthand, to even tell his new neighbors about the place. The most recent movie version instead has daughter Ellie stumble upon the location herself, causing the chain of events to play out far more naturally and believably in this particular Stephen King adaptation.

Source: https://dinhtienhoang.edu.vn
Category: Entertainment