JP Nunez
Over the last 100 years or so, countless great horror novelists have had their works adapted into movies and TV shows. Authors like Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson have provided the blueprints for some of the best genre films ever made, but if you ask just about any horror fan, there’s one name that stands head and shoulders above the rest: Stephen King. His novels and short stories have been put on screen over 80 times, so he’s not just the most adapted horror author of all time, he’s the most adapted author in any genre. He’s one of the horror community’s greatest living treasures, so naturally, when I heard about the trailer for King on Screen, I had to check it out as soon as I could.
King on Screen is an upcoming documentary about the history and appeal of Stephen King adaptations, and from the looks of it, it’s going to be awesome. It includes interviews with such notable names as Mike Flanagan (Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep), Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Mist), and Tom Holland (The Langoliers), so viewers will be learning from the people who know these movies and series the best, the filmmakers themselves.
On top of that, the King on Screen trailer also gives us a small taste of the top-notch analysis we can expect from this film. To take just one example, it shows a clip of an interview with Taylor Hackford, the director of Dolores Claiborne, and in it, Hackford basically sums up the appeal of King’s works in a single line. He says, “Stephen King writes human beings, and then he puts them in fantasmagorical situations.” And if you’ve ever read any of King’s work, you know that’s true. He takes his time fleshing his characters out and making them feel like real people, and that’s a huge part of the reason why his stories are so great and why so many filmmakers want to adapt them.
The rest of the King on Screen trailer is chock-full of similarly great lines, so I’m dying to see the full documentary. It promises to be an absolute must-watch for Stephen King fans, and thankfully, it’s coming out fairly soon. It’s set to get a limited theatrical release on August 11, and then it’ll hit VOD about a month later, on September 8.
