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Stephen King

Stephen King76 posts

Stephen King is an American author born in Portland, Maine 1947. He has written over 50 horror, thriller, fantasy and science fiction books, and over 200 short stories. Many of his books have been adapted to film and TV. He is married and has three children.

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3 Nov, 1976

Carrie

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Carrie becomes the first of King’s novels to be adapted into a feature film. Directed by Brian Da Palma and starring Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, the film grosses $33.8 million after being filmed on a $1.8 million budget. King believed Da Palma depicted his character perfectly.

Carrie White is a sadly mis-used teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man- and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she’s also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.

Carrie (1976) - Original Trailer

4 Aug, 1979

The Dead Zone

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hardcover_prop_embed (5)A school teacher gains the ability of seeing a person’s future and past by simply touching them after awakening from a five-year coma. He sees the ability as a curse, but must decide if he should do everything in his power to change the future after shaking the hand of a renowned young politician.

23 May, 1980

The Shining

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Stanley Kubrick adapts King’s The Shining into a feature film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall as young parents who move with their young son to a large abandoned hotel to be caretakers for the winter off season. The film grossed $44.4 million after being filmed for $19 million. The famous line proclaimed by Jack Torrence as he chops down a bathroom door, “Here’s Johnny!” was improved by Nicholson on the spot, originally being inspired by the introduction of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. King was disappointed with Kubrick’s decision not to film at the Stanley Hotel and did not like the adaptation, saying that his novel focused on main problems such as the disintegration of a family and the dangers of alcoholism, which, he believes, Kubrick completely ignored.

Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others. What’s basically wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shining is that it’s a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that’s why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.

The Shining - Official Trailer [1980] HD

8 Sep, 1981

Cujo

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CujoA once-friendly St. Bernard is bitten by a rabid bat and transformed into a murderous killing machine in King’s Cujo. King wrote the book during a period in his life of heavy drinking and recalls that he doesn’t remember writing the novel.

I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.

29 Apr, 1983

Christine

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hardcover_prop_embed (3)King publishes a thriller of a boy’s new girlfriend and his jealousy-driven car. Dubbed Christine by it’s previous owner, the car is a junker that Arnie fixes up, accidentally making the car fall for him and ultimately try to push away any other woman in his life.

14 Nov, 1983

Pet Sematary

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After moving from Chicago to Maine, Dr. Louis Creed finds a cemetery the neighborhood kids created for the countless lives of cats and dogs a local high way has taken. Close by, Creed finds another cemetery in the form of an ancient Native American burial ground. After losing his family cat, he learns the connection between the two spooky burial plots.

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9 Dec, 1983

Christine

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John Carpenter directs the film adaptation of King’s novel, starring Keith Gordon. The film grosses $21 million after being made on a $9.7 million budget. King approved of all the work done on the film, apart from one major difference from his original novel. In King’s version, Christine was haunted by the spirit of a previous owner. In Carpenter’s version, the car is haunted from the very moment it’s built. When asked why he made Christine a 1958 Fury:

Because they’re almost totally forgotten cars. They were the most mundane fifties car that I could remember. I didn’t want a car that already had a legend attached to it like the fifties Thunderbird, the Ford Galaxies etc. […] Seriously, I don’t know how Chrysler feels about Christine, anymore than I know how the Ford Company feels about Cujo, in which a woman is stranded in a Pinto. But they should feel happy, because it’s a pretty lively car and it lasts a long time. It’s like a Timex watch, it takes a licking and goes on ticking.

9 Mar, 1984

Children of the Corn

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King’s Children of the Corn is adapted into a feature-length film. The tale was originally released as a short story in his compilation book, Night Shift. It’s a story of a twelve-year-old preacher who convinces all the kids in a rural neighborhood to kill everyone over eighteen for Jesus. King originally wrote the screen play for the film adaptation of Children of the Corn, but his version was thrown out due to having too much dialogue and back-story. Instead, a much more violent/gory version with more conventional narrative style was written by George Goldsmith and used for the film. Directed by Fritz Kiersch and starring Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton, the film grosses $14.5 million after being made on a minimal budget of $800 thousand.

Children of the Corn (1984) Trailer

12 Sep, 1986

It

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hardcover_prop_embed (6)Twenty-eight years after seven teenagers battled a haunting creature that preyed on children, the group returns as adults to finish what had begun nearly three decades ago as local children begin going missing yet again. They prepare to battle what is lurking in the sewer system as they try to make sure what they thought they’d defeated before was truly vanquished once and for all. In King’s It, the creature often takes form as a clown to attract children, making King one of the first people to paint clowns as a scary figure.

As I began to grow up I began to look at kids and I noticed that kids are all terrified of [clowns]. The parents say, “Aren’t the clowns funny, Johnny?”, and Johnny’s like “No! Get me the hell out of here!”

Stephen King interview about clowns

3 Feb, 1987

Night Shift

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hardcover_prop_embedKing publishes his first collection of short stories in ‘Night Shift’. It includes his work originally published in Cavalier, Urbis, and Penthouse magazines, along with previously unpublished works.

12 Jun, 1987

Misery

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hardcover_prop_embed (7)After being saved from a car accident, novelist Paul Sheldon is taken in and nursed by his number one fan, Annie Wilkes. Under her care, he finishes the final novel in Wilke’s favorite series, starring a character named Misery. Wilkes becomes infuriated by Sheldon’s surprise death of Misery and keeps him captive until he writes another novel bringing Misery to life. King says the inspiration for Misery came from poor fan reception of his books that weren’t horror/thriller focused. It also came from King’s struggle to give up drugs and alcohol.

Take the psychotic nurse in Misery, which I wrote when I was having such a tough time with dope. I knew what I was writing about. There was never any question. Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave.

14 Nov, 1987

The Tommyknockers

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hardcover_prop_embed (9)After finding something mysterious buried in her back yard, Bobbi Anderson becomes obsessed with digging it up and discovering what it is. Soon, the town’s population becomes increasingly ill due to the appearance of the aliens known as the Tommyknockers.

After becoming discouraged with his progress, King parted with the manuscript, only to come back to it decades later.

That was another case of a book I tried to write a long time ago. I had the idea of the guy stumbling over the flying saucer when I was a senior in college. I had 15 or 20 pages and I just stopped. I don’t remember why.

30 Nov, 1990

Misery

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Directed by William Goldman, produced by Rob Reiner and starring James Caan and Kathy Bates, King’s Misery is adapted into a major film. The film grosses $61.3 million on a budget of $20 million. King had refused to sell the novel’s adaptation rights because of how other works of his were mishandled in film translations, but eventually let Reiner do Misery after his 1986 adaptation of Stand by Me. In his collection, Stephen King Goes to the Movies, King states that Misery is one of his top ten favorite film adaptations.

8 May, 1994

The Stand

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Mick Garris directs the made for television film adaptation of King’s The Stand, which premieres on ABC network. Starring Gary Sinise, Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald, the 366 minute, four part film follows a group of post-apocalyptic survivors as they begin to reform a society after the world population is wiped out by a militarized version of the plague. When King heard that The Stand was being made into a film, he was less than enthusiastic about it and unsure if it would work.

I didn’t know anything about this until I read about it on the Internet. You absolutely can’t make it as a two-hour movie. If it was a trilogy of films…maybe. People who’ve seen Kubrick’s The Shining dislike the miniseries I wrote (and my amigo Mick Garris directed) even if they haven’t seen it. That’s always annoyed me. But the wheel of karma turns! This time people will probably say, “The miniseries was lots better.”

The Stand Movie Trailer (1994)

23 Sep, 1994

The Shawshank Redemption

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King’s short story Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is adapted by Frank Darabont into The Shawshank Redemption, a feature film starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as two inmates involved in a money laundering plot in Shawshank State Prison. The film makes $28.3 million in the box office after being produced on a $25 million budget. The film currently holds the #1 spot in IMDb’s “Top 250” best films list. Darabont has adapted many of King’s works into film and says he’s always been attracted to his work as a writer.

What attracts me to his work? He’s one hell of a story spinner. He spins yarns in a very old-school way that tend to be very involving, very rich in character. […] Stephen is a very old-fashioned storyteller, in the best sense of being old-fashioned. Aside from character and absorbing narrative, he has one hell of a knack for suspense, as he’s proven time and again.

The Shawshank Redemption - Trailer - (1994) - HQ

5 May, 1997

The Green Mile

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The Green MileKing originally published The Green Mile as six shorter novellas. The tale of a former prison guard at a state penitentiary in 1932 who encounters a peculiar inmate, John Coffey, is categorized as magic realism after prison guard Paul Edgecombe begins to doubt that the kind-hearted Coffey actually committed his crimes.

There’s a feeling in the Green Mile that the human spirit is alive and well even under the most difficult of circumstances. I’ve heard sometimes the more difficult life becomes, the more the human spirit has a chance to shine, and I can’t think of a place where life is more difficult than on death row.

15 Sep, 2001

Black House

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hardcover_prop_embed (2)King and Straub team up again to release numerous novels that tie into the Dark Tower series. As a sequel to the Talisman, King publishes Black House about a series of murders that plague the town of French Landing, Wisconsin and Jack Sawyer has to reschedule an early retirement to stop the killer.

19 Mar, 2002

Everything’s Eventual

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hardcover_prop_embed (7)King publishes a collection of 14 short stories with Scribner publishing called Everything’s Eventual. One of the tales is The Little Sisters of Eluria, an adventure of Roland pre-The Dark Tower series.