News Stephen King adaptations

Two Previously Announced Stephen King Adaptations Appear to Be Dead

Thankfully, about four million other Stephen King adaptations remain

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on January 5, 2026

Credit: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Credit: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

While several Stephen King adaptations have made it to a screen near you lately (I’m looking at you, The Running Man, IT: Welcome to Derry, and The Long Walk), there are at least two adaptations that seem to have fallen to the wayside.

The first is The Talisman, a series of fantasy books King wrote with Peter Straub. Back in 2021, we found out that the Duffer Brothers were attached to adapt The Talisman novels into a series for Netflix, but in an interview with CBR for Stranger Things, Ross Duffer shared that “sadly, Talisman is no longer at Netflix, so we’re not involved.”

The wording there is interesting, because it doesn’t mean that the project is completely dead, just that it’s no longer a project at Netflix. The Duffers, however, will also no longer be working for Netflix. The two signed a deal with Paramount last summer that begins when the pair’s Netflix deal ends in April 2026. That doesn’t necessarily mean they couldn’t be involved with an adaptation, though, of course, they said they aren’t at the moment regardless. Whatever the case, it appears certain that the brothers will not be working on The Talisman, whether or not the project continues on elsewhere. At least we know that as of July 2025, King is “almost done” writing a third Talisman novel, which is based on an idea he and Straub talked about before Straub’s death in 2022.

The other project—the CW’s proposed adaptation of King’s short story, “The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson”—is very definitely dead. In it, a woman accidentally shoots herself in the head with a nail gun but is totally, totally fine, except for the fact she now talks to a manifestation of Jesus who wants her to stop an apparent apocalypse. The CW announced the project way back in July 2020, but Matt Webb Mitovich broke the news via his newsletter, Matt’s Inside Line, that the network dropped the series after it was acquired by Nexstar in 2022. As part of that acquisition, the CW has moved away from scripted series (which includes canceling all of the Arrowverse shows) and is turning toward reality television and sports. ‘Becka Paulson, it seems, was also in Nexstar’s crosshairs.

While these two projects are dead or at least delayed, don’t fret: there’s sure to be more King adaptations on the horizon, including Mike Flanagan’s takes on The Dark Tower series and Carrie. [end-mark]

The post Two Previously Announced Stephen King Adaptations Appear to Be Dead appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Long Walk

The Long Walk Posits that the Cure for the Male Loneliness Epidemic is Death

Interesting, often moving, and superbly acted.

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on September 12, 2025

Joshua Odjick as Parker, Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness, David Jonsson as McVries, Cooper Hoffman as Garraty, and Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close/Lionsgate

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Joshua Odjick as Parker, Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness, David Jonsson as McVries, Cooper Hoffman as Garraty, and Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close/Lionsgate

The Long Walk isn’t the best movie ever made about friendship and loyalty between men (That would be John Woo’s 1989 masterpiece The Killer) but it’s a damn good example of the genre.

I saw this one in a screening room—a rare thing for me, as I like to watch movies in real theaters with crowds—and to get a little more experiential with the movie, I did something stupid. After the film ended I walked down 12 very tall flights of stairs to the street rather than take the elevator, and then I walked two miles through Manhattan to meet a friends.

By the end of this movie, the remaining kids have walked THREE HUNDRED MILES, and yes, they’re younger than me, and probably in better shape, but given how I felt the next day after all those stairs they should be wayyyy more destroyed physically than they seem.

But that’s one of very few quibbles—I thought The Long Walk was interesting, often moving, and superbly acted. It’s not exactly a fun night out at the cinema, but I’m glad I saw it.

This is the first time The Long Walk has made it to the screen. It was supposed to be adapted by George A. Romero back in the 1980s, then Frank Darabont was going to tackle it, then André Øvredal. Finally, it’s been brought to the screen by Francis Lawrence, who, having made The Hunger Games adaptations, is familiar with building stories around societies that sacrifice their young. The script was adapted by JT Mollner, whose previous work includes Outlaws and Angels and Strange Darling.

The plot is exactly what it sounds like: a group of boys, all teens or early-twentysomethings, gather to walk for as long as they can. The can’t drop below a pace of three miles and hour, they can’t leave the road, they can’t stop. If they stop, they get three warnings before they’re shot—because never fear, there are trucks of armed soldiers flanking them along the way. The last one still walking wins a pile of money and a “wish”. They’re also filmed. The Walk is organized by The Major, a high-ranking official in the conservative, authoritarian government that rose to power after the old American democracy collapsed into civil war and anarchy.

The Walk is ostensibly a morale-boosting exercise—a chance for society to come together and root for the kids even though they know most of them are doomed. It’s also, of course, a warning. An example of what the powers that be can make you or your children do if you dare to challenge them.

One of the many strengths of the film is that the idea of anyone in this society challenging the status quo is very farfetched. As the boys walk through miles (and miles and miles and miles) of countryside, they only occasionally see other people—beaten down farmers and little kids who run out to see the spectacle. The land itself is largely empty. What billboards there are are falling apart, when they do pass through towns they’re sparsely populated and let’s say Last Picture Show-esque.

Another important thing to note is that the Long Walk is “volunteer”. No one has to enter the lottery—but every boy enters the lottery. And if you’re picked you can decline—but we don’t know what happens if they do. We don’t learn how many back out, if any, but the system relies on teen hubris and immortality haze. None of these kids think it’ll be THEM until after the first one dies. Even after that they can still banter and talk about what they’ll do with the prize money, as as though that doesn’t mean everyone else will be dead. But then you have to find a way to cope.

That’s the real meat of the story, and the reason to watch it. The movie becomes a character study and an endurance test, as the extreme conditions bring the boys’ true personalities to the surface.  

We start out with 100 kids, and a lot of them need to be nameless cannon fodder—the movie needs to give you a sense of the Walk’s danger, and its relentlessness, by showing how much smaller the group gets each day. We can’t get backstory on all of them, so the focus is on the ones who, for various reasons, become part of main character Ray Garraty’s journey. But I appreciated that for the first half hour or so, different characters came in and out of focus, and you could see how any one of these kids might become the main character. They’re all important, they all have a story, they all have a past and a reason for being here, and all but one of them are going to die a stupid, meaningless death.

We primarily follow a group who end up calling themselves The Four Musketeers. They kind of fall in line with a stereotypical World War II movie: the thoughtful audience proxy, the philosophical, endlessly loyal best friend, the religious one, and the lewd, sarcastic motormouth. The Audience Proxy is Ray Garraty, played by Cooper Hoffman, his Thoughtful BFF is Pete McVries, played by David Jonsson, the Religious One is Arthur Baker, played by Tut Nyuot, and our Motormouth is Ben Wang’s Hank Olson.

Cooper Hoffman is fantastic as Ray. Obviously this is a difficult role, a constant balancing act between realistically showing Ray’s terror and physical pain, and letting his personality come through, and not overplaying anything into mawkishness, but also not downplaying that he’s on a fucking death march. I don’t think there’s a single moment where he doesn’t feel real. Especially as we get into the second half, and reality has completely broken through any fantasy of what the Walk would be. David Johnsson, already a favorite of mine from his work in Alien: Romulus and Bonhoeffer, plays Pete beautifully. His is the most subtle role, the stalwart philosophical one who has hidden depths, and he could have become too perfect. But I don’t think that happens—as more of his story’s revealed we see just how much of his personality is a character he plays to keep himself sane, and the layers work really well. Tut Nyuot is solid and moving in a role that could have been too one-note—Art is sweet, innocent, and wants to win so he can take the money home to his family in Baton Rouge. And Ben Wang is hilarious as Hank Olson, but better than that is how well he cracks when his gallows humor finally fails him.

(Lol, as if gallows humor ever fails. Just part of the movie’s fun fantasy world, right?)

They’re the ones who we spend most of our time with, though we do also check in with Roman Griffin Davis’ Thomas Curley, who is obviously too young to be on the Walk, and must have desperate reasons for being here, Jordan Gonzalez’ Richard Harkness, a young man who’s taking notes for a book about the walk (what’s Stephen King supposed to do—not include a writer in one of his stories? Nonsense.), Joshua Odjick’s Collie Parker, a quiet Native American boy who occasionally explodes into rage, Stebbins, an arrogant boy who seems like he was engineered in a lab for the Walk, and Charlie Plummer’s Barkovitch, who I’ll talk about more in a minute.

Watching over them and barking “encouragement” is The Major, played by Mark Hamill. His role is the exact opposite of the kind, loving grandfather he played in another King adaptation this year, The Life of Chuck, and he’s equally good here. The Major is larger-than-life, like a parody of a tough drill sergeant, except he’s also a terrifying, dead-eyed authoritarian who truly does not care whether you life or die. He often bellows compliments at the boys about them “having the sack” to volunteer for the Walk, and I found that really funny (although that’s also important, and I’ll get into it more below.) but they’re not even human to him.

Obviously a big part of the arc here is that when the boys show up, they’re boys. They’ve lived lives, they have families. But by the end of the first day they’ve been reduced to meat, shuffling along, barely able to think or talk. The point of the film is that as they acclimate, they have to dig into themselves to become people again.

The film explores the physical reality of this kind of event extremely well. Exhaustion, sunburn, blisters, and all of that, of course, but also, the boys can’t stop to piss or shit or vomit. As their bodies adapt to the constant exertion they have to just… take care of all of that as they walk. The film deals with it just enough that we know it’s one of the many ways the Walk breaks the kids physically (diarrhea becomes a real problem for some of the characters) but not so much that it becomes too disgusting for an audience to watch. They’re given “food” in the form of nutrient paste, and that’s rationed throughout the day. They can bring hats with them, but it’s not like anyone passing out sunblock, or umbrellas. Once the Walk begins, you either walk, no matter blisters, charlie horses, broken toes, twisted ankles, or you get shot. Sometimes in the head, like an injured racehorse, sometimes in the stomach, as an example to the others. Some boys crack. Some boys dissociate.

But about the violence: the first time a Walker is shot, it’s a close-up brutal scene of a boy’s brains splattering across a road. After that, the camera tends to keep its distance, and only a few of the deaths take center stage again. Lawrence creates a balance between showing us the horror of this situation, and avoiding tipping his film into exploitation or trauma porn.

Then you get the stuff I think of as Just King Things:

There will always be a person I think of as the “Stephen King Standard Issue Batshit Aggro Liability” or SKSIBAL. Sometimes it’s a bully, sometimes it’s a psychopathic prison inmate or abusive husband, sometimes an incel being puppeteered by Satan during the End Times. Often this person becomes a henchman to the story’s Big Evil. This story’s SKSIBAL gets a little more depth than most. He’s a young man named Barkovitch, he’s played by Charlie Plummer, he practically foams at the mouth, and he picks fights with other Walkers in an attempt to psych them out. But, like a few of the kids, he’s brought a project with him. He takes photographs almost constantly, sometimes as just another antagonism tactic, but sometimes from a place of genuine curiosity and creativity. Unlike with a lot of the SKSIBALs, you get a sense that he might have been a very different person when he was younger, and that he’s playing up the assholery either to give himself an advantage, or to shield himself against the fear and pain of the Walk.

Then there’s the “Stephen King Outdated Pop Cultural Hoedown” or SKOPCH. In this case, it comes when a boy mentions a girl named Clementine, another replies by singing “My Darling Clementine, and all the other boys join in and know all the lyrics. Would these teens and young-twentysomethings, in a dystopian near-future post-collapse America, really know all the words to that song? I don’t even know all the words to that song. It’s sweet to have them singing together as they walk, but wouldn’t it have been better to have some ‘90s or ‘00s pop hit, something innocuous enough that it slipped through the fascist censors? Like “Seven Nation Army” or a Bruno Mars song or something like that. Or even something like Springsteen or REM, something that had a subversive meaning but seemed mainstream, and no one paid enough attention to the lyrics to see the deeper connotations?

A movie like this is an endurance test. You come to this because you want to see how they adapt it, how they bring such a brutal story to life, and how hard it is to watch.

Can the movie make you care about people when you know they’re doomed?

I know some of us in the office have gotten a bit snarky about how many Stephen King adaptations there are at this point—the words “are there no other authors???” may have been howled a few times—but here’s the thing: King gets adapted often because he’s uncannily good at grabbing you and demanding you listen to his story.

Looking at the two King adaptations this year, The Long Walk is about kids deciding whether it’s worth it to form friendships when they know they’re doomed. Can they snatch a few days of happiness and camaraderie from a terrible situation? (The Life of Chuck is kind of about the same thing. How do you live when death isn’t a fuzzy abstraction, but a physical fact sitting in the room with you?) And the beauty of the film is that they do. These are deep, real, life-changing bonds—it’s just that this society only allows them to form those bonds under these circumstances.

This is where The Long Walk finds its spark, I think. When King began the novella back in the mid-‘60s it was a brutal allegory for a brutal war as young men were marched off to Vietnam, drummed up with a fever for righteous sacrifice that wasn’t really any less dystopian than the fiction King wrote. By the time it was published, in 1979, I’d argue it was a work of both near-future and recent history.

But what do we get out of it now?

I would say that the story becomes a commentary on how propaganda remains the same.

By appealing to young men at what can only be called a scrotal level, with Mark Hamill yelling about “the sack” intermittently, the kids talking about walking off morning erections, the boys comparing physiques and dreams of the women they’ll woo once they win, it all builds to show us The Walk as a fantasy aimed at young men who are still in the throes of puberty, and, for the most part, still have their senses of youthful immortality glowing around them like halos. There’s not a fully developed prefrontal cortex among them. Of course each of them thinks they’ll be the one to win, and of course their minds gloss over what that actually means, and what they’ll have to experience for that to be true.

This performative machismo is tempered by the fact that there is at least one story of queer love woven in among the boys, brought to the surface far more than it was in the book, and I think I loved the way the movie handled it.

The problem with Stephen King is that he wrote so much prescient shit in the 1970s and ‘80s that now the adaptations feel almost old hat. Dehumanizing reality show? (The Running Man [1982]) Teen sacrifice competition meant to both unite a fragmented society, and remind the poor that they’re under the boot of the elite? (This one [1979]) School shootings? (Rage [1977], which King has since pulled from shelves.) Populace under an authoritarian regime that takes on a folksy persona? (A couple of them, but let’s round up to The Stand [1978], which features a bonus society-shattering epidemic!)

King got to them all before The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Squid Game, American Idol, Survivor—all of it. This is why I think he’s still so popular with young people—at his best, he’s very good at calling bullshit on society, and holding a mirror up not to reality, but to the seething greed and apathy that allow reality to be what it is.

The most uncanny moment, the thing that stuck with me comes right at the end—no worries, I’m not going to spoil the actual ending—but there comes a point when the Walkers come to a large town. Not one of the burned out wastelands they’ve walked through, with a gas stations and hardware stores and maybe some scattered houses on the outskirts, but a cute downtown area: brick streets, sidewalk cafes, soft glowing lights strung up in alleys for al fresco dining. The streets are lined with people cheering the remaining Walkers.

Because places like this still exist.

These boys can only get there through the Long Walk, but these kinds of towns, with bookshops (with extremely limited, government-approved books, presumably) restaurants and boutique hotels, still exist in this world.

None of the boys who grow up here will have to go on the Walk. They probably enter the lottery—every boy enters the lottery—but I highly doubt any of them go. This is where the Walk ends. In a town that looks very much like the lovely downtown plaza in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I used to get brunch on Sundays before a long wander through the giant used bookstore. This place still exists, with people living their happy lives, as their society eats its young and destroys its future.[end-mark]

The post <em>The Long Walk</em> Posits that the Cure for the Male Loneliness Epidemic is Death appeared first on Reactor.

Column Reading the Weird

Disaster Response, Hard Mode: The Mist

Even during a paranormal disaster, are humans the real monsters?

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on December 11, 2024

Credit: MGM Studios

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Credit: MGM Studios

Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we celebrate our 500^th post with Frank Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for harm to children, blood and guts, giant insects, fundamentalist Christians, and child death.

Artist David Drayton lives near Bridgton, Maine, with wife Stephanie and eight-year-old son Billy. Their lakeside house has been in the family for generations and seen bad weather, but nothing like the thunderstorm that hits one hot summer. Trees crash through David’s studio window and the boathouse. The boathouse-wrecker is a dead pine David’s been asking his neighbor, NYC lawyer Brent Norton, to remove. The Draytons have previously taken Brent to court over property disputes. They won, and bad blood persists. Finding Brent in mourning for a treasured car also pine-wrecked, David takes him to Bridgton for supplies along with Billy.

As they drive, a strange mist spills across the lake. A convoy of Army trucks heads toward the nearby base, home to the tightly-guarded Project Arrowhead.

Like the rest of the area, Bridgton has lost electrical and phone service. The supermarket is crowded. As David, Billy and Brent wait in a long checkout line, a local man (Dan Miller) rushes in, shouting about things that pulled another man into the mist. Sirens start wailing. Mist envelopes the store. An earthquake shakes it. Only one woman, who’s left her children at home, dares to leave.

The rest, including three base soldiers, hunker down. David goes into the storage area and finds a generator spewing toxic smoke. He turns it off, then hears something slithering outside the loading dock. Though incredulous about the slithering, two workmen (Jim and Myron) and assistant manager Ollie check out the generator. A bagger (Norm), urged on by the workmen, agrees to clear the exhaust vent. As he exits, huge tentacles snake in and grab him. Jim and Myron are shocked useless. David and Ollie try to free Norm, but he’s dragged into the mist.

Enraged by Jim and Myron’s cowardice, David punches Jim. The dock doors are holding, but the storefront’s all plate-glass. David approaches Brent for help rallying the shoppers. Brent thinks the attack witnesses are pranking him because he’s an out-of-towner. Even after seeing a severed tentacle, he remains skeptical. Shoppers help build a window-barricade. Brent, however, gathers followers. Another faction forms around Mrs. Carmody, who claims the mist is God’s judgment on sinners.

David and Billy connect with schoolteachers Irene Reppler and Amanda Dunfrey; with Ollie and Dan, they oppose Carmody’s ranting and Brent’s denialism. Amanda entrusts her self-defense revolver to competitive target-shooter Ollie. With nightfall, yard-long fly-scorpions swarm the windows, along with pterodactyl-things that break through the glass. It’s pandemonium as shoppers battle the monsters. Oil-soaked mop-torches set a pterodactyl on fire, killing it, but one man’s severely burned. Checkout clerk Sally dies from a venomous “fly” sting. Having “miraculously” survived, Carmody broadens her congregation. She begins calling for atonement through blood sacrifice.

Next morning, Brent’s group leaves to look for help. They’re swiftly killed. David leads a group to the pharmacy next door for medical supplies. Everyone there, including a military policeman, are hung like flies in webs. The M.P. babbles that he’s sorry before bursting open and releasing monster-spiderlings. Adult “spiders” attack, shooting corrosive webbing. Two men die; the survivors flee to the market.

David’s crew decide to question the soldiers. Two have hanged themselves in the storage room. The third, Jessup, admits that Project Arrowhead was investigating extradimensional space and may have opened a door. Carmody incites her followers to stab Jessup and throw him outside, where a mantis-creature devours him.

With Carmody ascendant, David’s crew plans an escape to his four-wheel drive. Carmody’s followers cut them off and demand that Billy be the next sacrifice. As the “sinners” fight the mob, Ollie shoots Carmody dead. Leaderless, the remaining shoppers let David’s party leave. Five survive to reach David’s vehicle: David, Amanda, Billy, Irene, and Dan. Ollie’s seized by a monster, but drops Amanda’s revolver onto the hood. David risks leaning out to get it.   

At the Drayton house, they discover Stephanie dead in a spiderweb. They drive on through a mist-shrouded landscape alive with monster calls. Wreckage and corpses block highways, but they inch slowly south. A cyclopean walker crosses their path. At last, running out of gas, they’re stranded on the roadside. David checks the revolver and counts four remaining bullets. The adults watch, then quietly agree to suicide. Earlier, Billy made David promise he wouldn’t let the monsters get him.

David shoots his companions, even Billy. He lurches outside and shouts for the monsters to come get him. Instead the mist dissipates to reveal a long parade of Army vehicles packed with civilians. Realizing he’s killed his son and friends minutes before rescue, David screams in despair.

What’s Cyclopean: “Welcome to Sesame Street. Today’s word is expiation.”

The Degenerate Dutch: It’s unclear if Norton suffers more from being Black or being not-from-around-here-are-ya. Though the grocery denizens do tend to lash out at everyone they think might be patronizing them, whether because of education or New York snobbery.

Weirdbuilding: The first monsters have tentacles. That’s how you know they’re not-from-around-here.

Madness Takes Its Toll: “As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we start dreaming up sides.”

Anne’s Commentary

Unlike other menaced kids in King’s oeuvre, Billy has no psi sensitivities or superpowers to help him survive. He must rely on well-meaning adults. Sadly, not all adults are well-meaning. Some parents tell children that, if lost, they should approach women for help rather than men. What if the woman approached is Mrs. Carmody? On good days, she might suffer the little children to come unto her without scorching their ears with dire prophecies. On bad days, well. It’s okay to throw sinners who’ve pissed you off onto the sacrificial barbecue, but innocent lambs will best please the Divine Palate.

As a competitive sharp-shooter, Ollie comes closest to an adult superhero. But out of ammo, he too will be reduced to flaming mops, broom handles, a fire axe or two, and bug spray (preferably set alight.)

As for supervillains, King’s Carmody comes closest by wearing a pantsuit so glaringly yellow it could blind any superhero who’d left their super sunglasses off the utility belt that day. Darabont’s Carmody dresses churchladyish but doesn’t otherwise stand out. Nor, as scripted by Darabont and played by Marcia Gay Harden, is she absolutely unsympathetic. Every manifestation of the mist-fauna terrifies her off her pulpit into fellowship with the other shoppers. She even has a Gethsemane scene in the women’s restroom, tearfully sharing with God her doubts about the whole End Times thing.

Ordinarily, Bridgtoners get along well enough, politely (or politically) suppressing dislikes, resentments, prejudices. The storms creates extraordinary circumstances that exert negative pressure on tempers, patience, and finances, but initially camaraderie prevails. Even Brent and David manage to cooperate. Inside the market, employees get harried and shoppers get antsy as supplies dwindle and checkout lines lengthen, but the pressure level in this “cooker” remains tolerable. Thunderstorms, however severe, are natural. Even unprecedented mist banks must have a natural explanation, to be revealed during the News at Six.

But—what about mist banks that eat people? We sitting comfortably in front of our screens can argue that if thing-hosting mist banks exist, they must be natural, Nature being the sum total of existence. What seems supernatural is just a phenomenon we haven’t written into our philosophy yet, no need to panic.

Huh. If those smug screen-sitters were in the market when Dan came screaming in and the mist whited out a trembling world, they’d panic along with everyone else. The seeds of panic being sown, they could only try to bury them beyond germination, probably insisting that Dan was freaking out, and writing Carmody off as the town’s crazy-conspiracy lady. But would they walk home with the lady worried about her kids? Nobody else did, even before giant tentacles whisked Norm away. Before the nocturnal “flies” and “pterodactyl-birds” appeared.

The “flies” and “pterodactyl-birds” seen and barely fought off, Brent’s companions in denying the existence of things that should not be switch to denying the futility of going in search of rescuers. Rejecting reality under the self-delusion of being the reasonable ones doesn’t get Brent’s faction out of the parking lot. Coping strategies still in play are copious alcohol consumption, catatonic withdrawal, and suicide. David’s faction clings to the hope of a rational path to safety. They’re increasingly outnumbered by Carmody’s “congregation.” Observers of the current sociopolitical scene will readily believe that the loudest mouth in the room, the doomsayer claiming to be the voice of God, can capitalize on fear and uncertainty to win support. Even though Carmody preaches the end of the world, at least that will divide the sinners from the righteous, the prideful from the ones they’ve long disparaged.

It does look like the end of the world out there in the parking lot. Jessup’s confession confirms that science opened Hell’s gates: the godless science of a godless government. As sole survivor of Project Arrowhead, Jessup becomes the first sacrifice.

Now David’s group must risk a dash to his car. The guilty having paid, innocence (aka Billy) must be offered up. However, thanks to Ollie’s marksmanship, Carmody becomes the not-so-snowy-fleeced lamb. Her cult collapses. Slack-armed, former congregants watch as David’s group departs.

Until now, Darabont follows King’s story closely, aside from cutting a desperation-sex scene between David and Amanda. Good call. I’ve always felt their adulterous pairing was out-of-character and distracted from the bonding of their larger coalition. Post-escape, King’s David drives homewards. Trees block the road, and he never learns Stephanie’s fate. Darabont’s David reaches the house, where mist-spiders have webbed Stephanie’s corpse to the eaves. It’s the first last blow to David’s resilience. Then the party’s drive south passes universal destruction, and they spot a creature more massive than any dinosaur. Finally, they run out of gas far from filling stations. Foot-travel’s no option: The mist remains thick, reverberant with mist-fauna vocalizations. As Carmody insisted, death is out there.

Death’s also in the car. Provisions run low. As David counts their four remaining bullets, the camera dwells in torturous silence on the adults considering their choices: starvation, suicide, or death by monster. Billy too seems to take in the situation. He makes no protest—the last promise he extracted from David was not to let the monsters get him.

Darabont doesn’t show David’s point-blank shots, though we hear them. We glimpse Irene and Dan’s corpses, only blurs of Amanda and Billy. You know the rest from the summary. Darabont’s saved his most horrifying sequence and most killing irony for last.

King allows his survivors to survive. More critically, he allows hope to survive, via a short-wave radio. David gets nothing but static until, near the end of dial-twiddling, he makes out the single word Hartford. It’s this word, along with hope itself, he’ll whisper in Billy’s ear.

I can take either ending. For Darabont’s, though, I have to feel like getting my heart ripped out and handed back to me dripping, emotional practice for the End Times.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

After you read this column, and before the next apocalypse, I strongly recommend you all read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. It’s a good antidote to assuming that, should you ever find yourself stranded with random neighbors during a crisis, you’re two hard days away from fistfights and human sacrifice. And avoiding that assumption is a good way for everyone to get more safely through said crisis. Thank you for listening to my PSA about a Good Book.

Prior to Solnit’s 2009 book, the general lay assumption was that crisis always brings out the worst in humans. This makes for great stories, not to mention a lot of not-so-great-but-exciting stories full of cannibalistic biker gangs, but also leads to stupid decisions, and the sort of newspaper reporting that captions our friend David Drayton as “retrieving emergency supplies from a pharmacy” while the Black characters get described as “looting.” No one’s having much good luck in The Mist, but at least the poor visibility undermines any such photographic bias documentation.

But I digress. In my teens I adored King’s “The Mist” novella. I loved scary weather, apocalypses, half-seen monsters, and crises that close the world down to a microcosm of intense drama—but especially scary weather. Anything could come out of the fog, or at least you can imagine that anything could. Anything could change. Sound is muffled along with vision, and everything holds its breath—something the movie captures beautifully with the cutting of the soundtrack during most outdoor scenes.

Looking at the story summary now, I’d forgotten much of the actual detail beyond the vivid image of giant walker legs going by, monstrous head hidden in the fog. The movie hews close to the original, save for a harsher and less ambiguous ending. In the novella, only a stray radio broadcast offers hope of survival—but everyone in the car is still alive and still has the gas to chase that hope. In the movie, the military is coming through to save the day, and the mist even starts to clear—less than five minutes after David fulfills his promise to not let the monsters get his kid. Given that I spent five minutes beforehand typing “He’s gonna shoot him, isn’t he. Oh god, please don’t do that, please don’t, please, please don’t oh god please,” into my live notes, this ending was extremely effective and I kind of wish I hadn’t watched it. But everyone was traumatized enough that this extremely stupid decision made sense in character.

But: If you are stuck in a safe-ish place and can’t get out, please just wait for a while. Maybe sing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Because something might change and frequently disaster response is actually working to respond to the disaster. And you can always shoot everyone when an actual monster shows up.

The cast is great—I particularly loved the cynical older teacher with flamethrower chops, and tougher-than-he-looks Ollie the Grocer. He makes a great contrast with David’s leading man muscles, and I just love that this guy has been quietly running an indie grocery store for years and is suddenly stepping up for the monster brigade.

And then there’s Mrs. Carmody. She’s a bit of a caricature, so I really appreciated the early scenes with her praying to make a difference—and yet refusing any real offer of personal connection in favor of preaching herself up a cult. It’s a good bit of detail before she goes full villain and the rest of us start praying for her to get eaten sooner rather than later. Thank you, Ollie.

Are humans the real monsters? Contra Ollie’s cynicism, I would have to say: some of us. Sometimes. The cult-leader types are real, and eager to take advantage of any opportunity. But humans are also the real heroes, and the real crying kids and the real crying manly men and the real ordinary sandbag-stackers. I think it helps to realize that terrifyingly wide range of possibility—and to consider ahead of time which of those things we want to be.

Next week, we celebrate with a little holiday tale—join us for E. Catherine Tobler’s “To Drive the Cold Winter Away.”[end-mark]

The post Disaster Response, Hard Mode: <i>The Mist</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News The Running Man

Lee Pace and Josh Brolin Will Make Glen Powell’s Life Miserable in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man

Would you run all that fast if Lee Pace were chasing you?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on October 18, 2024

Screenshot: Apple TV+

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Screenshot: Apple TV+

Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man, the novel by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachmann, has been in the works since the long-ago year of 2021. But in recent months the adaptation has been moving forward with a certain swiftness, casting Glen Powell as the titular Man and later adding Daniel Ezra (A Discovery of Witches) and Katy O’Brian (The Mandalorian) to the cast.

But no reality-game-show-type story is complete without a ruthless villain or two, and now we know who will play those roles in this film: two Marvel bad guys. Thanos himself, Josh Brolin, is set to play the “ruthless producer” of the murderous game show. And Lee Pace—who once glowered frightfully as Ronan the Accuser—will play a character The Hollywood Reporter describes as “the brutal chief hunter for the network airing the game shows and tasked by the producer with tracking down Powell’s character.”

Pace has a history of morally complex characters, from the depressed, storytelling stuntman in the just-rereleased The Fall to cranky, elk-riding elf king Thranduil to… well, okay, Foundation’s clone emperor (pictured above) isn’t morally complex so much as morally bankrupt. (He did go for that soul-searching walk in the desert, at any rate.) This is an interesting choice for Pace, though, as he had a sort of similar henchman role as Ronan. Or maybe there will be more to his hunter than the plot summary suggests.

The book The Running Man takes place in a terrible dystopia (the year 2025, natch) in which people compete in a deadly reality show in order to earn money. Ben Richards, the main character, wants to save his gravely ill daughter, so while his wife turns to prostitution, he turns to running away from hunters who are dead set on killing him. A not-terribly-true-to-the-book movie adaptation was released in the ’80s and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The new version, from Shaun of the Dead director Wright, is due in theaters on November 21st, 2025.[end-mark]

The post Lee Pace and Josh Brolin Will Make Glen Powell’s Life Miserable in Edgar Wright’s <i>The Running Man</i> appeared first on Reactor.

I rewatched it a few days ago for the first time since 1990. It was one of those boundary shows for me, when it first aired; I was just old enough to get away with seeing some of it but not everything. That actually made it even better; getting fleeting glimpses of the Derry streets and a couple of moments with Pennywise. In fact I have a very distinct memory of the first Pennywise sighting but that’s about it. It was part of the shadowy coastline of grown-up entertainment and while I was heading there as fast as I could, in 1990 I still had a ways to go before I could properly approach It.

Watching it 27 years later, the bits that don’t work stick out like sore thumbs. Weirdly, most of the problem seems to lie in the direction. TV was incredibly static in 1990, and I know in this manic post-Paul Greengrass era we live in, that doesn’t necessarily sound like a bad thing, but it actually was. A lot of scares are rendered toothless by how flatly they’re presented, and that’s not helped by some weirdly sluggish pacing. The end of Episode 1 in particular is this moment of Troll 2-levels of badness where we do nothing but watch someone realize something awful has happened VERY, VERY SLOWWWWWLLLLLLYYYY.

King’s recurring problems depicting women are also on display for all to see, here. Audra has so little character she may as well be a sign that says “DAMSEL” and Bev, played as an adult with typical gusto and compassion by Annette O’Toole, has a clichéd, off-the-shelf background as a victim of abuse that plays more like ticking boxes than character development. That being said, Bev is at least directly involved in the plot.

Weirdly, the final weakness that really stands out now is Pennywise himself. Not that Curry’s bad in the part—he isn’t. In fact, along with Clue and Rocky Horror, his portrayal of the murderous clown/face of unknowable evil is arguably part of his finest work. The problem comes in the way he’s directed. Time and again we see Curry hit the mark, nail the scare, and then clearly either the script, or the director, felt the need to drag out the moment, diluting the shock and softening the overall effect. It makes Pennywise more overtly comedic than frightening, and pulls the show’s teeth where it should be baring its fangs.

But if you can get past those problems, there’s still a lot to enjoy here and a vast amount of that is down to the cast. Both the child and adult versions of the Loser’s Club are anchored by the character of Bill Denbrough, and Jonathan Brandis and Richard Thomas both turn in great work as the young and adult Bill, respectively. The late, missed, Brandis absolutely nails Bill’s cocktail of terror and rage, and Thomas lands several of the show’s subtler moments. The way his stutter returns is a great character grace note and the sense of his fundamental decency, tinged with the darkness they’ve all faced, is inspiring without coming across as cornball.

Elsewhere,  Seth Green and Harry Anderson are great as both versions of Richie Tozier. Anderson’s fast-talking, mile-a-minute shtick and slightly odd, trained magician screen presence provides an interesting discordant note the show repeatedly manages to build upon. In the flashback plot, Seth Green, who gets to be one of the taller members of the ensemble for one of the few times in his career here, plays Richie as a kid on fast forward. He’s witty, sly, never slows down, and, for Mass Effect fans, you can see the seed of what would become Joker in his scenes. Likewise, Dennis Christopher is great as Eddie, and the entire show is anchored by Tim Reid who doesn’t get nearly enough to do as Mike, the group’s designated stoic and “lighthouse keeper.”

A cast this good manages to paper over pretty much every flaw in the script, and the result is an adaptation that’s often uneven but never less than entertaining. Better still, it remains one of the purest distillations possible of both the book and King’s favourite themes. The Loser’s Club are outsiders who make armour out of their joy. They hide inside the painstakingly-constructed consensual fortresses of shared childhood trauma and trust, and together they dare to face down the dragon that’s at its gates. They believe in each other, even when the struggle costs some of them their lives, and the emotional honesty at work here is still so pure, so genuine, that it gets you even now. The final scenes with Eddie and the closing montage are both far more poignant than you might expect or remember, and that’s entirely due to the series’ straightforward, emotionally honest, and open-hearted approach to King’s story. It never once shies away from the horrors of childhood, but it never fails to celebrate the joys of friendship, either. The story is about the Loser’s Club, but it almost feels like a member of the club itself: scrappy, isolated, and ultimately defined and sharpened by everything that tries to tear it down and fails. It’s a survivor, like them. Hi-yo, Silver, away!

Alasdair Stuart is a freelancer writer, RPG writer and podcaster. He owns Escape Artists, who publish the short fiction podcasts Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and the magazine Mothership Zeta. He blogs enthusiastically about pop culture, cooking and exercise at Alasdairstuart.com, and tweets @AlasdairStuart.

The post The Losers’ Club, ’90s Edition: Looking Back at the First Adaptation of It appeared first on Reactor.

Today’s MRGN will be a little different from our usual fare, O my Peeps! Owing to Easter weekend madness and a truly absurd concatenation of scheduling conflicts, my sisters will not be joining us for this post; your Auntie Leigh will be flying solo on this one. And given that, I decided to do a film appropriate to my solo status: 1984’s Firestarter, adapted from the 1980 Stephen King novel. Yay!

Previous entries can be found here. Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers for the film.

And now, the post!

So! Firestarter is the story of young Charlene “Charlie” McGee and her father Andy McGee, who are on the run from what we hope is an entirely fictional secret branch of the U.S. government known as The Shop, who performed illegal experiments on Andy and his to-be wife Vicki, which gave them (faulty) psychic powers, which then got passed on to their daughter in distinctly non-faulty fashion, in a way which meant that the latent pyros on the stunt and special effects teams for this movie probably had the time of their lives.

As I mentioned in my Carrie post, I had really wanted to do Firestarter as the MRGN’s first Stephen King movie, but we switched to Carrie because my sisters had neither seen the Firestarter movie nor read the book it was based on, and were therefore not nostalgically equipped to comment upon it.

This obviously made perfect sense, but I was still a little sad about it. Because as I also mentioned in that post, Firestarter was not only the first Stephen King novel I ever read, but it was very possibly the first novel not aimed at a younger audience I ever read as well. It was certainly a great deal of the source of my childhood fascination with stories about psychic phenomena – a fascination King and I clearly share, given how many of his books center around the idea in one fashion or another. Firestarter, though, was arguably the quintessential Stephen King take on paranormal mental abilities and the probable results of their introduction to the modern world.

Needless to say, I adore the shit out of the novel, and have reread it probably at least a dozen times over the years. By contrast, I’m pretty sure that before this week I had only seen Firestarter the movie once or maybe twice, and that many years ago, but I remembered that I had loved Drew Barrymore in the role of Charlie McGee, and had general warm fuzzy feelings about the movie overall, and so I was moderately excited to see it again and see if it held up.

And, well. It, uh, didn’t.

We’ve all heard or read – or said – some variant on the truism that The Book Is Always Better Than The Movie, but I feel like that takes on an especially pointed truth when applied to movie adaptations of novels about psychic phenomena in general, and adaptations of Stephen King novels about psychic phenomena in particular. That latter may only be because King’s books were the ones that everyone tried the hardest to make into movies (because as I said before, Stephen King in the 80s was money, baby), but it was a distinct and recurring problem that I really should have remembered before getting my hopes up about Firestarter.

And it’s not like I’m not sympathetic to the inherent problem here. Figuring out how to visually depict things that are almost exclusively happening inside characters’ heads is really difficult, you guys. Many a film director has flung him-or-herself against that particularly sharp-edged windmill and come out the worst for it, and perhaps I should therefore cut Firestarter’s director Mark L. Lester a little slack about it.

Maybe I should, but I ain’t gonna, because I spent the whole film irritably making mental notes about the ways in which Charlie’s pyrokinesis and Andy’s “mental dominance” could have been depicted SO much less cheesily. So many directors seem to feel that there has to be some kind of obvious visual or aural component of an otherwise invisible action to make sure the audience knows something is happening, and I personally think this is bullshit. Mostly because it leads to eye-rolling nonsense like mandating that Charlie can’t set things on fire without being in her own personal and inexplicable wind tunnel:

Or that her father can’t mentally “push” people into doing what he wants without clutching his head and popping a forehead vein, which is supposed to convey the strain his gift is putting on him, but mostly just made David Keith look like he was trying (and failing) to take a massive dump.

Sorry, but no. Even Brian De Palma’s “quick zoom and violin screech” method of indicating psychic happenings in Carrie was less annoying than this. I am very much a fan of the “less is more” approach when it comes to conveying this kind of thing from the actors’ end, and just making sure that the results are the spectacular and/or visually communicative aspects of what’s going on. I feel that this is the key method in which to avoid much cheese when it comes to portraying ESP-type things on screen, and I also feel this is an area in which Firestarter very much fell down on.

Ham-handed visual cues were not the only failing of the movie, sadly. King’s novel was really about two things: the wonder and horror of a little girl with such destructive power at her beck and call was the main thing, of course, but it was also just as much about the terribly casual way it’s taken for granted that the U.S. government is doing illegal and awful things to its own citizens, with total impunity and horrific disregard for the principles it and we are supposed to be operating under.

The film adaptation of Firestarter sorrrrt of conveys that, but not with anything like the conviction (or power) of the novel. The best example of this, I think, is the scene with the postman.

In both the novel and the film, Andy McGee attempts to send letters to major newspapers and magazines to expose the fact that the U.S. government is hunting him and his daughter in completely illegal and unsanctioned ways, and in both novel and film, Shop agents intercept those letters before they can be delivered.

The difference is that in the film, the Shop’s resident hitman Rainbird just strangles the postman to death and steals the bag with the letters, whereas in the novel, the mailman lives. More importantly, the scene is from the postman’s POV, as Shop agents pull him over and hold him at gunpoint while they rifle through the mail for the letters, and then leave him behind, crying, because, he pleads, this is the U.S. mail. It’s supposed to be protected, because this is America, and yet, it isn’t.

It’s a scene that struck me vividly, even as a kid, because of how palpable King made the sense of utter betrayal the postman feels. The postman’s ideological anguish at the revelation that America is not the shining bastion of justice and good that we have always been taught it was is a theme that’s endemic to the entire novel, and while the government agents in the movie are obviously just as callous and awful as their novel counterparts, the movie’s failure to make that point as, er, pointedly as the novel did meant it just kind of melted into this nothing of random villainy. I know it’s maybe a bit weird that I’m arguing that it’s worse to make the guy cry than to actually kill him, but I’m talking about thematic and dramatic impact here. This is a story; those things matter.

Speaking of random villainy. There’s no denying that George C. Scott did a good job of portraying the deeply creepy semi-pedophiliac serial killer character of John Rainbird, to the point where I can’t decide whether the blatant whitewashing of what was supposed to be a Native American character might actually have been a good thing, because ain’t nobody going to want that in their ethnic group. And besides, statistically nearly all psychopathic serial killers are white men anyway. (Though of course the actual problem is that the whitewashing erased a chance for a Native American actor to have a significant role in a major Hollywood film, so.)

Also, holy crap is Martin Sheen young in this. Also jarring, because I totally forgot he was in this movie, and by far my most significant association with Sheen is in his decidedly heroic role as President Bartlet on The West Wing. But in fact, his cold and calculating Captain Hollister isn’t even the first “Stephen King evil government figure” Sheen had portrayed at that point, as he also played the apocalypse-bringing potential future President Greg Stillson in the 1983 adaptation of The Dead Zone. Which makes his later West Wing role kind of hilarious by contrast, doesn’t it.

This movie in general had a pretty stellar cast, actually. In particular I have to point out that Drew Barrymore’s performance as Charlie McGee is really way above and beyond what I would expect out of 95% of child actors that age. I know she rather went off the rails once she grew up (though by all accounts she actually pulled herself back on the rails as well), but in my opinion her fame as a child actor was entirely deserved.

Holy crap reaction #2: Hey, that’s Heather Locklear! Not that we got to see her for long, as she played the swiftly fridged wife/mom Vicki, whose character got even shorter shrift in the movie than she did in the book. (This is, probably, my one real beef with the novel.)

So, good cast, but the movie failed to use them very well. There were some good choices made in adapting the exposition from the novel, but the slow pace and weird editing choices killed nearly all the narrative tension that the book sustained so beautifully. The special effects were probably pretty good for the time (and it must have been hell, ha ha, to work with so much fire), but they were not employed to nearly their best effect, in my opinion.

I also have to note that the music for the movie was by Tangerine Dream, whose score for Legend, as you may recall, I considered so iconic and essential to the movie that I threw a temper tantrum at the director’s cut for taking it out. By contrast, well. I would not have stomped a single foot had someone decided to take away Firestarter’s “score”. I use the scare quotes advisedly, as one of the little bits of trivia I found about the film stated that Tangerine Dream never even saw the movie; they just sent a bunch of music to the director and told him to “pick out whatever he wanted”. Let’s just say, you can tell. Ugh.

Basically I would have made many many many different choices in how this movie was made, because as is, it doesn’t remotely do justice to the source material. I’m also pretty sure I would have been bored out of my mind had I watched this movie without knowing the source material.

In fact, I was pretty bored anyway. My sisters should feel pretty good about the bullet they dodged on this one.

So! In conclusion, O My Peeps, if you’re jonesing for some excellent psychic psychodrama avec a healthy side of evil government conspiracy, give the film version of Firestarter a distinct miss, and go read the book instead. You won’t be sorry, I promise.

And at the last, my patent pending Nostalgia Love to Reality Love 1-10 Scale of Awesomeness!

For Firestarter the movie:

Nostalgia: 6-ish

Reality: 3

For Firestarter the book:

Nostalgia: 10

Reality: well, I haven’t reread it all that recently but I’m willing to bet it’s probably at least a 9

And that’s the MRGN for today! Come back and see me reunited with my lovely siblings in two weeks! Later!

The post Firewalk Without Me, Please: Firestarter appeared first on Reactor.

Check out the full trailer below!

The show will add new members to Stephen King’s cast of characters, and use the series format to expand on what was a tight 200-page-long novella—instead of all gathering into a single grocery store, disparate groups of survivors will huddle up in a church, a mall, and a few other locations, and various people try to exploit the Mist for their own gains. This will all create a series of pressure points as The Mist brings out people’s deepest flaws, as well as mining all of Stephen King’s usual commentary on class and gender issues. You can read more about the show over at EW!

The post Check Out the First Trailer for Stephen King’s The Mist Television Series appeared first on Reactor.

Today’s entry concerns the official Worst Prom Date of 1976, Carrie. Well, the actual worst prom date in this movie was the girl who wore a freakin’ baseball cap with a formal gown to the dance, because WTH, why would you do that why, but mass murder comes in at a close second!

Previous entries can be found here. Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers for the film.

And now, the post!

Unlike most of the other Nostalgia movies we’ve covered so far (Ghostbusters is the other exception), I’ve rewatched Carrie fairly recently; probably the last time was no more than two or three years ago. This is in contrast to my sisters, neither of whom had seen it for at least a decade, probably longer. So this was an interesting reverse of the Starman situation, because this time I was the one who remembered the movie clearly, while my sisters’ memories of it were decidedly spotty.

Liz says, though, that she remembers the tampon scene in particular vividly, and that she found it scarier than any of the rest of the movie put together. Asked why, she thinks it’s because the first time she saw it, she had not had her first period herself, and had only the vaguest idea as of yet what it entailed.

I’ll spare you my concurring rant on the state of sex education in this country, and instead note that this meant that Liz—probably, all three of us—saw this movie at a way younger age than we should have.

But that is about par for the course when it comes to me and Stephen King. I’m not a hundred percent sure of this, but there is a very good chance that the first adult novel I ever read (“adult” meaning “aimed at adults”, not “porn”) was Firestarter, originally published in 1980 (though I didn’t read it myself until a few years later). And since I distinctly remember being excited to realize that Firestarter’s heroine Charlie McGee was about my age (i.e. 8 or 9 years old), that means I was definitely way too young to be reading it—objectively, at least. Subjectively, though, I loved it to tiny itty bitty bits even if a lot of it flew over my head at the time, so I suspect child me would be telling adult me to get bent right about now. Sigh. Kids those days.

In any case, it is more or less impossible to overestimate the impact of Stephen King on the formative experiences of SF fans in my general age bracket. If you don’t believe me, look no further than the popularity of the new Netflix series Stranger Things, which has been aptly described as “every Stephen King novel in a blender”, run through an early Spielberg filter and then liberally soaked in nerdy Generation X nostalgia, served with a side of eldritch horror and awesomely horrible 80s fashion. The thrill I got when I saw that the title card was in the Stephen King font was really rather ridiculous. Needless to say, my sisters and I have all binged the crap out of this show, and its nostalgic awesomeness was at least partially the motivation for choosing to do Carrie for the MRGN at this juncture.

My point is, back in the day, Stephen King was the shit, y’all. At the height of his popularity, King was the best-selling novelist in the world, and over 100 of his various written works have been adapted for film and/or television. And of all of these, Carrie was the first—both his first published novel, in 1974, and the first work to be adapted for the screen, in 1976.

(It was also, I have just discovered, adapted as a Broadway musical in 1988, which I have trouble believing, and apparently has since become the gold standard for spectacular Broadway flops, which I have no trouble at all believing. Jeez.)

Anyway, Carrie’s position as a seminal work, of both King himself, and of the 40-years-and-counting tradition of adapting his stories into other formats, is another part of the reason why we chose it as the first (though almost certainly not the only) King-related film for the MRGN, despite my deep love of Firestarter. (The rest of the reason is that neither of my sisters has actually seen the film adaptation of Firestarter, nor have they read the book, and therefore campaigned successfully for Carrie instead. And it’s not like I was mad about doing Carrie, so here we are.)

Carrie was also the first mainstream commercial hit for director Brian De Palma, whose work you probably know even if you don’t recognize the name per se. De Palma’s films are characterized by a fondness for, among other things, unusual camera angles, 360-degree revolving shots, split-screen shots, and lots and lots (and lots) of slow motion. All of which are on full display in Carrie, that’s for sure.

His style is something that we felt, on watching it this time, was both an asset and a detriment to the film. On the one hand, the way the infamous prom crowning scene, unquestionably the pièce de résistance of the movie, was shot and edited was nothing short of masterful, in the way it generated almost unbearable tension and suspense leading up to the moment of Mean Girl Chris Hargensen’s revenge on Carrie, and then in the building horror of Carrie’s response. I still get chills every time I watch it, and I’m just gonna put the clip here because you know you want to watch it:

That said, for a lot of the rest of the time De Palma’s addiction to slomo and long, lingering shots frequently became pretty frustrating, especially toward the end; seriously, did we actually need to watch over a minute of Carrie just going up the front walk of her house? And as for 360-degree shots, the famous “first dance” spinning shot at the prom actually made us feel nauseated to watch. That, along with some other bizarre choices, like randomly choosing to “fast-forward” some of the dialogue in the tuxedo rental scene, were affectations that honestly I could have done without.

Granted, the over-leisurely pace was at least partially just a “movie made in the 70s” thing, because there are quite a few films from that decade which feel painfully slow from a modern perspective, but even given that, De Palma rather took it to extremes, I think. But then again, even with all the slomo, the film’s running time is barely over 90 minutes, so I suppose De Palma felt he had to do what he could to stretch it out, especially since he decided to exclude the epistolary interludes from King’s novel (which, ironically, King has said were his own way of padding out an otherwise very short book). Still, I feel like there’s a line between using a slow pace to build up suspense in your audience, and having that pace lose that tension to boredom, and Carrie crossed it a couple of times.

So there’s all that. But aesthetics of filmmaking aside, there is absolutely no way one can write an article about Carrie without having a conversation about its often deeply disturbing social implications. In particular as regards young women, of course, but also in terms of the almost inexplicably intense stranglehold that high school psychodrama holds over just about every American who’s ever attended one, male or female.

In his autobiography On Writing, King talks about how Carrie White was based on two of his own school classmates, and his observations of how they were relentlessly ostracized and/or bullied by the rest, for the unforgivable crime of deviating, voluntarily or otherwise, from an unspoken but utterly uncompromising perception of acceptability. In particular he talked about the seemingly contradictory yet nevertheless vicious response when one of those outcasts made an effort to break out of their imposed role, and conform to that very nebulous “norm” they were guilty of failing to be. It was a Catch 22, in other words: once pinned as the class loser, one could not be allowed to ever stop being the loser—perhaps because of the insight that, if you allow the lowest man on the totem pole to move up, that inevitably means that someone else would have to take her place, and that that someone just might be you. From that perspective it can almost be viewed as a sort of self-preservation instinct, callous as that sounds.

My and my sisters’ own experiences and/or observations of school bullying never quite reached the level of sheer cruelty displayed in Carrie, thank God, but I think it’s fairly telling that all three of us were instantly able to identify “the Carrie White” of our respective high school tenures—and the grammar school ones, too. I’m willing to bet that most of y’all reading this would be able to do the same. Perhaps some of you were the Carrie White of your school years. And if you were, please accept this virtual Internet hug from me, because that is a raw deal, my friends.

Part of the reason Carrie had such an impact is because of how, for all its fantastical trappings, it was rooted in things very real, mundane, and human as well—things that we could all, in one way or another, recognize as part of our own experiences. For the bullies, it was the horror of the idea that their victims might strike back at them tenfold; for the bullied, it was the disturbing but compelling allure of the idea of having the power to do so. It ain’t pretty, on either foot, but it rings true nevertheless.

TL;DR: High school is fucked up, y’all.

Then there’s the second cultural elephant in the room, represented by Carrie White’s utterly terrifying mother, and her gibbering, demented, and ultimately murderous take on religious fanaticism.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek

Needless to say, King has always had a distinctly dim view of those who, in his opinion, embrace piety at the expense of reason or compassion, and had no compunctions whatsoever about taking that tendency to its logical—and horrific—extreme for story-telling purposes. I wouldn’t say that his novels were the sole influence behind my own distaste for zealotry—I had plenty of real-life experiences which lent a hand there—but there’s no denying that characters like Margaret White made a significant impression on young me, and that impression was Do Not Want.

And lastly and probably most complicatedly, there is the feminist implications of Carrie, and the problematic lens it is (literally) viewed through.

I say that because, in my view, the sexist aspects of Carrie, the film, reside more or less wholly within the film itself, and hardly at all with the source material. It’s possible that I am biased here because of my general love for Stephen King’s books, but I feel that there is a subtle but unmistakable difference between the way King viewed Carrie and Sue and Chris and the other female characters in his novel, and the way De Palma depicted them in the film.

In his book, King was unquestionably tapping into the existence of gynophobic tendencies in our culture, like the unreasoning revulsion surrounding the issue of menstruation, for instance, or the hysterical (ha ha) emphasis placed on preserving some illusory and unsustainable version of female sexual purity that exists in many of the more hardline and/or fundamentalist religious traditions. Or even (more subtly) the persistence of the myth of constant and inevitable female rivalry, leading to the automatic disbelief by other characters that Sue Snell could ever possibly want to actually help Carrie instead of feel threatened by her.

However, nothing he wrote there or since then has led me to conclude that King believes in these brands of misogyny, only that he accepts that they are real, and considers them to be harmful. Which is, after all, perfectly true.

Which is why it’s disappointing that the first good ten minutes of De Palma’s adaptation is devoted to shameless objectification of the female body, including of Carrie White’s, which is doubly gross in context. Granted, second wave feminism, which was prevalent throughout the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, was in fact deeply divided between those who were vehemently against anything that smacked of pornography or exploitation of women’s bodies, and those who endorsed a sex-positive version of feminism, which asserted that sexual freedom was an essential component of women’s freedom. I have no doubt that the “locker room” scene that opens Carrie was ostensibly geared toward the latter faction; however, let’s just say I have my suspicions of De Palma’s sincerity on that score.

I don’t know, it is a tangled and complicated question. But the thing is, whatever you would like to think about the locker room scene, the fact remains that from a plot development standpoint, up until Carrie actually starts bleeding, it was completely extraneous and unnecessary. Thus it is worth wondering what its actual purpose could have been, if not to ogle the bodies of underage girls.

But enough Deep Thoughts, let’s have some random commentary!

KATE: I never looked at a vegetable peeler the same way again.

I debated bringing up the fact that there’s no way in hell (ha) Margaret’s body would have stayed in that position once she became dead weight, but on balance I figured that the artistic parallels to the WORLD’S SCARIEST JESUS FIGURE were too nice to spoil with nasty reality.

Seriously, there has never been a creepier Jesus statue in the history of ever. (And if there is a creepier Jesus out there, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT. Shh!)

We also laughed (nervously) at Margaret’s mural of the Last Supper, in which every last apostolic participant looked like they were one coke snort away from a murder spree. Subtle, set designers.

It should be noted that one reason Carrie stands out among the general run of horror movies is the stellar performance of most of its cast, in particular Sissy Spacek as Carrie and Piper Laurie as her mother, both of whom received (well-deserved) Oscar nominations for their performances in the film. I distinctly remember watching this movie as a kid and just being in awe of Spacek’s acting during the prom scene. Like, I would never have thought anyone could be so frightening by just standing there, but Spacek was terrifying while barely moving a muscle.

It was damn impressive then, and it still is now. And of course, Piper Laurie made your hair stand on end no matter what she was doing, which is equally impressive.

(In a funny turn of events, I realized belatedly that this is the second time Laurie has appeared in the MRGN: she also played Auntie Em in Return to Oz.)

LIZ: OMG, that HAIR.

ME: I KNOW.

KATE: I can’t even with that hair.

LIZ: It’s like a LION’S MANE. It’s MAGNIFICENT. I HATE IT.

KATE: If I met someone with that hair I think I would have to back away from them, quickly.

We should probably take a moment, though, to be sad that Tommy Ross, the sole character in the entire movie who was completely blameless and innocent of any wrongdoing (as long as we don’t count the hair, natch), died so ignominiously and unfairly. You can have quite the debate over whether Carrie White holds any culpability for what she did at the prom, or if her state of being completely bugnuts at the time absolves her, but if there was going to be anything I would have held her responsible for, it’s Tommy.

It was right about here that we had to pause the movie for a 10-minute discussion about socks. We were all too late for the stupendousness of these particular socks, but we debated fiercely about wigwam versus bobby and which ones sucked more to wear in P.E., until my grandmother trumped us all with tales of the nylon stockings and actual freakin’ bloomers she had to wear for gym class, whereupon we conceded defeat and resumed the film.

ME: Holy shit.

LIZ: Right? If a teacher did that today she would be so fired.

ME: Fired? She would be arrested. And sued. Her life would be frickin’ over.

KATE: Truth.

There was a disconcerting amount of face-slapping all around in this movie, in fact, but not a single one of them startled me as much as this one. Not even when John Travolta’s Billy Nolan slapped Chris.

There is an entire essay I don’t have time for on the deeply messed up character of Chris Hargensen, and how I both loathe the stereotypes she represents and regretfully recognize the reality of the existence of girls like her, and the conflicted feelings I have about being so happy when Carrie kills the shit out of her at the end of the movie.

LIZ: That’s not as scary as I remember it being.

ME: OMG WHAT IS YOUR DAMAGE

I argued to her that it just wasn’t as scary because she was expecting it this time, but she remains unconvinced. I think she may be history’s greatest monster. Or, you know, something proportional like that.

In conclusion, while I have rather more issues with the movie than I thought I would, I still love it, and think that even with its flaws it absolutely deserves a place of honor in the horror genre. I know it’s been remade several times since the 1976 version, but frankly I never had the slightest interest in watching any of them. Nothing is ever going to beat the Sissy Spacek version of the prom scene, sorry.

And thus concludes my journey down memory lane for the nonce! And as always, we end with my fabulous Nostalgia Love to Reality Love 1-10 Scale of Awesomeness!

Nostalgia: 9

Reality: 8

And that’s it for the Nostalgia Rewatch for now, kids! Come back in two weeks, when we will be covering… er. Well, I just realized we haven’t settled on that yet but now we have, and it’s – drumroll, please – Legend! Unicorns! Infant Tom Cruise! Tim Curry as Satan! OMG! Until then, cheers!

The post The Unforgivable Crime of Deviating: Carrie (1976) appeared first on Reactor.

This one will have Divergent and The Time Traveler’s Wife (pictured above) star Theo James as its lead—its dual lead, presumably, as “The Monkey” is about twins.

The Monkey comes in part from horror master James Wan, who created what we’re apparently calling “The Conjuring Universe,” as well as having a hand in the endless Saw and Insidious series. (And, yes, he directed Aquaman.) (ed note: AND YES HE DIRECTED MALIGNANT, THE BEST MOVIE EVER, YOU MEAN.) Wan is producing The Monkey, which has Osgood Perkins as its writer and director. Perkins wrote and directed The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, an episode of the recent Twilight Zone, and has another horror film, Longlegs, coming out next year.

The story, as might be surmised from the title, is about a monkey—one of those cymbal-bashing toys. But this one is a very special and extremely cursed toy: when it smacks its little cymbals together, someone dies.

Why don’t they just tear the cymbals off its paws? Probably someone who reads more King than me knows the answer to this. Why don’t we adapt some creepy stories by someone other than Stephen King? Yeah, yeah, I know: Name recognition! Track record! Money!

The Monkey will crash its way into our eyeballs at some point in the future.

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Spring’s Arcana

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The post “The Monkey” Is the Next Stephen King Story Headed to the Big Screen appeared first on Reactor.

Like Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, which became a movie last year, The Life of Chuck is from King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds. The story of Chuck is told in reverse chronological order over three acts, from his early death at 39 to his haunted childhood. Hiddleston (pictured above in Loki) will play Chuck; Hamill is a character named Albie.

Deadline says, “According to the production, the genre project will draw tonally from Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.”

Of course, this is only one of many King adaptations currently making their slow way to the screen; there’s also Fairy Tale, The Regulators, Later, and, on Max, the It prequel series Welcome to Derry.

As he often does, Flanagan will direct, write, and produce The Life of Chuck, which does not (yet) have a release date or distributor.

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Spring’s Arcana

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The post Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill Team Up for Mike Flanagan’s Next Stephen King Adaptation appeared first on Reactor.

And now, it’s all happening again: Deadline reports that writer and director Kurt Wimmer’s new Children of the Corn lands in theaters in March before making its way to Shudder.

Wimmer’s version went into production at a fateful time—March 2020—and wound up being shot during lockdown in Australia. It stars Elena Kampouris (Jupiter’s Legacy), Kate Moyer (Station Eleven), Callan Mulvey (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) and Bruce Spence (The Road Warrior). The plot, of course, involves a nasty cornfield spirit and a whole lot of child-on-adult violence. Deadline’s summary says, “A bright high schooler who won’t go along with the plan is the town’s only hope of survival.”

Wimmer is also the director of the 2002 Christian Bale sci-fi film Equilibrium and the writer of both 1998’s Sphere and 1999’s Thomas Crown Affair remake. His last directorial effort was 2006’s widely panned Ultraviolet, a semi-vampiric dystopian tale which starred Milla Jovovich.

Children of the Corn comes to theaters March 3rd, and will be available on demand starting March 18th.

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Echo

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Echo

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The post Get Creeped Out By Cornfields (Again) When a New Children of the Corn Arrives in March appeared first on Reactor.

As Deadline reports, “King is a fan of Greengrass’s films and has granted him the option — at the usual $1 against a healthy backend — for an epic tale that follows a 17-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a terrifying world where good and evil are at war.”

The book summary introduces the story like this:

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Fairy Tale

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Fairy Tale

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Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is 17, he meets a dog named Radar and his aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

Fairy Tale is, of course, only one of many King adaptations in the works or nearly here (Netflix’s iPhone thriller Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is just around the corner). No casting or release date has been announced.

The post Paul Greengrass Will Bring Stephen King’s Fairy Tale to the Screen appeared first on Reactor.