A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  The cat takes a freight train down to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he is adopted by the little girl, Amanda, who names him ‘General’. Her mother is convinced General is responsible for the death of their parakeet, but in fact it was a troll. General saves Amanda from the troll after an epic battle.

  Although King was keen in interviews to stress that Cat’s Eye was not an anthology movie like Creepshow, the simple presence of the cat doesn’t turn it into one coherent plot: the film is obviously based around three separate stories, only one of which was new for the movie.

  Speaking to Tim Hewitt for Cinefantastique in 1985, King explained that Cat’s Eye was intended as a movie to showcase Drew Barrymore, who had played Charlie McGee in the film of Firestarter. King had been contemplating a story with the beats of ‘General’, although originally it was a boy rather than a girl who faced the troll. Dino De Laurentiis had acquired the rights to various King short stories, and asked the author to incorporate both the cat and the girl into the other tales within the film, with the cat very much regarded as the hero of the whole piece. Sixteen cats were needed for the various sequences.

  To ensure that the final film matched his expectations after writing the first draft of the script, King became more involved in the production than he normally would have done – leading to his directing Maximum Overdrive. Unfortunately, Cat’s Eye was not a success financially, even if Roger Ebert did note: ‘Stephen King seems to be working his way through the reference books of human phobias, and Cat’s Eye is one of his most effective films.’ King admitted that he found parts of ‘Quitters, Inc.’ ‘the funniest things he had seen on film that year apart from William Shatner’s wig in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock!’

  The screenplay for ‘General’ was printed in 1997 in the collection Screamplays, edited by Richard Chizmar.

  Creepshow 2 (1987, directed by Michael Gornick)

  The Creepshow Creep is back with some new tales to delight young Billy. In ‘Old Chief Woodenhead’, a wooden carving of a Native American comes to life to avenge the deaths of the store owners at the hands of some young Native Americans. ‘The Raft’ is the refuge taken by four students after they encounter a living slick on the surface of a lake. ‘The Hitch-hiker’ is killed by an adulterous wife who is then haunted by him, after he simply refuses to die – and he finally gets his revenge by gassing her in her car.

  George A. Romero wrote the screenplay for this belated sequel, with Michael Gornick taking over from him in the director’s chair. King’s story ‘The Raft’ was the basis for the central segment, and the writer confirmed in 2011 that he had written a synopsis for the other two segments of the film, although he was not responsible for the screenplays.

  Creepshow III (2006) was not connected to either King or Romero.

  Stephen King’s Golden Years (July–August 1991)

  Elderly janitor Harlan Williams’ life gets completely turned around when an experiment at Falco Plains, the top-secret military lab at which he works, goes wrong, killing one doctor, and fatally injuring an intern. Dr Richard Todhunter has been working on cellular regeneration, and Harlan gets in the way of an energy form known as K-R3. As a result he starts to grow younger: his eyelids glow bright green, and the grey in his hair begins to disappear.

  The Shop – the black ops outfit who were after Charlie McGee in Firestarter – take a keen interest, and Jude Andrews is assigned to bring Harlan in. His former partner, Terry Spann, is chief of security at Falco Plains and after Harlan’s doctor is killed, she realizes The Shop will stop at nothing. Her lover, the head of Falco Plains, General Louis Crewes, eventually takes her side and they help Harlan and his wife Gina try to reach their blind daughter Francesca, as Harlan’s power begins to grow further. Eventually, during a confrontation with Andrews, Harland and Gina disappear.

  Stephen King wrote the screenplays for the first five episodes of this miniseries, and the story for the final two episodes, with the screenplays for those by Josef Anderson. Anderson was also responsible for the reshot ending – in the televised version, Gina is killed, Harlan captured by Andrews, and Crewes and Terry go on the run, providing a cliffhanger ending for the first season; the video/DVD release (which is more easily available) plays out as above. The Horror Channel in the UK has run the episodic version periodically; Netflix in the US also carries it.

  In pre-publicity for the series, King compared Golden Years with David Lynch’s classic weird TV show, Twin Peaks, and noted that Lynch had revolutionized the idea of continuing drama on television. ‘He turned the whole idea of that continuing soap opera inside out like a sock,’ King told the New York Times. ‘If you think of Twin Peaks as a man, it’s a man in delirium, a man spouting stream-of-consciousness stuff. Golden Years is like Twin Peaks without the delirium.’ The paper itself described the series as ‘a mix of The Fugitive and Cocoon’; King called Jude Andrews ‘an insane version of The Fugitive’s Lieutenant Gerard’, unsurprising since he had noted that the show was one of the few he really enjoyed when he was younger.

  King had the idea for Golden Years some years before the series, explaining that ‘it doesn’t exist as a novel, but it could’. At the time it was clear that he regarded it as a diversion rather than a career change: television was ‘a lovely place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here’. His original plan, according to the article he penned for Entertainment Weekly when the show was halfway through its initial broadcast, was for a fourteen-or fifteen-hour series, starting and finishing with a two-hour special; CBS were only interested in a summer show, and commissioned the eight hours – the opening episode is double-length, as King had hoped. It was not renewed. To maximize their profit from the story, CBS ordered extra scenes to be shot, which were then incorporated into a shortened version for videotape release – 236 minutes, rather than the 340-plus of the broadcast edition.

  There are various overt links to other parts of King’s work, notably Firestarter – the assassin who featured in that, John Rainbird, is mentioned by name. One of the informants working for The Shop is known as Cap’n Trips, the nickname given to the superflu in The Stand.

  Sleepwalkers (1992, directed by Mick Garris)

  Charles Brady may seem to be an ordinary high school student, who’s just moved with his mother Mary to a small town in Indiana, but in fact they are the last of an ancient species, the Sleepwalkers, who can shift into animal form and briefly turn invisible (or ‘dim’ as they describe it). Charles is the food gatherer: he feeds on the life force of virgin girls, and passes on the excess to his mother through sexual intercourse with her. When Charles gets feelings for his next victim, Tanya Robertson, he’s caught between the two women.

  Charles tries to feed off Tanya but is stopped by the deputy sheriff, who Charles proceeds to kill – but the deputy’s cat attacks Charles. Sleepwalkers are vulnerable to cats, and the wounds it inflicts are fatal, unless Charles feeds. To save her son, Mary attacks Tanya’s house, killing multiple people and kidnapping the girl. Tanya manages to fend Charles off when he tries to feed off her, and then has to fight for her life against the maddened Mary, with the assistance of a large number of cats.

  Sleepwalkers may not have been the best piece that Stephen King has ever written, but it was an award winner, gaining the Mostra Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza e del Fantastico di Roma awards for Best Actress (Alice Krige), Best Direction (Garris), Best Film (Garris) and Best Screenplay (King). It was the author’s first original screenplay for the cinema to be filmed, and marked the start of his long and fruitful collaboration with director Mick Garris.

  In his introduction to Garris’s first short-story collection, A Life in the Cinema, in 2000, King explained that he had ‘a bloody good time’ writing the original screenplay for Sleepwalkers (which was known at one stage as ‘Tania’s Suitor’) aiming to apply the lessons he had learned from working on films such as Creepshow and Silver Bullet. He was amenable to suggestions from the director, and happily penned new version
s of scenes if Garris felt they needed alteration.

  The story was inspired by his son Joe, who had a crush on the girl selling popcorn at their local movie theatre; King could see why his son was attracted to her, and started thinking about someone wanting to ask her out for all the wrong reasons.

  Unlike either of King’s two earlier screenplays, Sleepwalkers wasn’t played for laughs: ‘This is horror played straight, without comedy,’ Garris maintained. There certainly were some in-jokes though: King himself appears, as do other horror icons, including Clive Barker, Tobe Hooper, Joe Dante and John Landis. There was some discussion of a sequel, but that never happened: the film was not particularly well received (‘Ms Krige is an all-too-predictable Hollywood incarnation of a Freudian nightmare come to life,’ the New York Times said). Garris and King moved on to two projects for TV: The Stand and The Shining.

  There were a few links with other King stories: the Sleepwalkers have the ability to go ‘dim’ – as Randall Flagg did in The Eyes of the Dragon, and Carol Gerber later would in Hearts in Atlantis – and there’s a passing mention of Castle Rock. Despite a number of similarities, it can’t be the usual one, since that would not be local for Indiana cops even if it does have a Sheriff Pangborn just like the one in Maine!

  Michael Jackson’s Ghosts (1997, directed by Stan Winston)

  Stephen King provided the story for this short film, which featured Michael Jackson as a creepy Maestro living on the top of a hill as well as the mayor of the local community and three other roles. The folk of Normal Valley want the Maestro to leave their town but when they confront him, the Maestro and his ghouls indulge in various dances in a scare-off. At the end, the townsfolk have changed their mind about the Maestro – although when he shows them something truly terrifying, the screams ring out . . .

  Basically a long music video, Ghosts was scripted and directed by special-effects genius Stan Winston, with Mick Garris and Jackson credited as co-writers from an idea and story by King. In some overseas markets, it was aired before the film of Stephen King’s Thinner, although it was released separately in America.

  The X-Files: ‘Chinga’ (aka ‘Bunghoney’)

  (February 1998, directed by Kim Manners)

  FBI agent Dana Scully is on holiday in the coastal town of Amma Beach, Maine, the home of five-year-old autistic Polly Turner who goes everywhere with her antique doll, Chinga, and her mother Melissa, who some in the town think is a witch. That idea is strengthened after a bizarre incident at the local grocery store, where customers begin to claw at their eyes after the doll announces, ‘Let’s have fun’, and Melissa sees a vision of one of the staff with a knife in his eye – which comes true. Mulder, back in Washington DC, suggests it might be sorcery but Scully doesn’t think so, and helps the local police department to investigate. If people hurt Polly, they seem to be hurt themselves, and Melissa’s windows are nailed shut, perhaps to keep something in.

  Scully’s investigations reveal that the Chinga doll has been responsible for a string of deaths, including Polly’s father, and she and the local police captain get to the house just in time to prevent the doll from forcing Melissa to commit suicide. Scully throws it into a microwave oven, which burns it up – but it’s not dead, as a fisherman discovers when he drags up its burned remains a little later . . .

  Although at the time Stephen King was quoted as saying that he would ‘happily repeat the experience’ and had already come up with an idea for a future plot, he was rather less positive about his time creating a script for The X-Files looking back on it a decade later. ‘I got rewritten pretty exhaustively,’ he told Lilja’s Library in 2008.

  ‘Chinga’ was the tenth episode of The X-Files’ fifth season, the final one to be shot in Vancouver (which is why the gas station at which Scully refills at the start of the episode serves her in litres rather than gallons), and due to a quirk in scheduling was filmed after the first X-Files movie, which was set in the gap between the fifth and sixth seasons. The series was a great hit for the Fox network, following the adventures of two investigators of the paranormal – believer Fox Mulder and sceptic Dana Scully. One of the strengths of the series was the relationship between the pair, which was lacking in the final version of ‘Chinga’, which was credited jointly to King and the show’s creator, Chris Carter.

  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 tha
t 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.