Your top 5 Stephen King films?

1982...PUBLISHED UNDER RICHARD BACHMAN

Rare is an understatement.

LOL yup. I think Stratego hates it too if I recall correctly, the only other poster on the board who does maybe. I know a few folx irl who echo the sentiment, but usually you got some 'splaining to do when you let that one rip. I once made an ""ironic meme"" where the Dole Dippers penguin is serving up Shawshank and Transformers special edition DVDs on his platter and the bottom text says "YOUR DOLE DIPPERS LIBTARD" or something like that. (Disclaimer: 100% pisstake, 0% expressive of real political belief)

According to Tom Savini it was originally intended to be Creepshow 3. The SK story, "The Cat from Hell" is adapted into one of the segments, starring William Hickey. So this is a little bit of a cheat to call it a "Stephen King movie" per se, and I love the film as a whole more than this one segment, but I'm going with it. I also can't quite separate my appreciation for the movie from the TFtDS series, which also features a bunch of Stephen King story episodes, and being a tonally similar George Romero anthology project as well, is in a sense Creepshow the series. It's probably my favorite horror/weird tales anthology show next to Twilight Zone.

I'm a big fan of both 1 and 2. The John Harrison score is one of my favorite horror scores ever, (he also did the music for and even directed Darkside: The Movie,) and between that, the fantastically pulpy and iconic individual stories, and to a huge degree the perfectly atmospheric animated interstitial sequences, I'm hard pressed to think of a movie that captures the spirit of the Halloween season and what we love about the genre better. If you love it you'd probably be into TFtDS too. It has a lot of kindred dark and creepy, totally weird, but charmingly campy and satirical cartoon horror energy.

I'd love to see a renaissance of new horror anthologies. Shudder has a new Creepshow series going, and while it's better than I'd expected, it doesn't quite capture the magic they had going on the first two films. They sure don't make em like this anymore. I want to see someone come in and outdo Creepshow (1982)!

That's something that's certainly philosophically debatable. Maybe we could call it an unwilling collaboration. I don't think The Shining could have existed without the dynamic of both King and Kubrick's contributions, and sometimes the most fruitful art comes from conflict.

I think as soon as literary source material is adapted for the screen it has to change in certain fundamental ways and become something totally new. I personally attribute the rift in this case, mainly, to King not having a very sophisticated sense of metaphysics of film, while Kubrick is an absolute master when it comes to understanding how film can communicate with the unconscious directly in ways unique to the medium, beyond mere narrative, which is King's whole domain. I relate to Kubrick hard on this. IMO he was right to use the novel as a springboard to make the film he wanted to make, and to liberally cut and add whatever necessary.

Film is its own art form, and, just as painting in my view is most effective when it owns its innate qualities, rather than struggling to be photography for example, film is at its best when it is not trying to merely translate literature. I'd like to imagine if Kubrick's Shining had been made later in King's career, his assessment might not have been so stubbornly obfuscated by pride or indignity or whatever was going on there.

On the other hand, I'm personally pretty hung up on extremely loosely Lovecraft influenced films being touted as Lovecraft films. To me no one ever quite gets the spirit of his work right on film, and in cases where movies like, for instance, Cabin in the Woods get talked about as being Lovecraftian, I have to say it ruffles my jimmies a bit, and I would want to dig my heels in and say this is not really at all Lovecraftian, and more like Lovecraft abuse. In my subjective opinion while Kubrick took King's source material as a rough starting point and improved upon it in every way, more often than not in Lovecraft adaptations, the source material is cheapened and mishandled. So it's certainly debatable.

Word... at the end of the day though... it is a vibe.

Actually I would replace it with Creepshow in a redo. Misery is also another one on the bubble.