Original subtitles

Stephen King is just quite hard

to adapt, right, because 90% of his books

take place in someone's head.

And it's not just someone's head,

but it's like their backstory. It's their mother.

It's how they grew up.

It's this like interesting story about these pair of pants

they're wearing and why they're important.

And that's why we love to read Stephen King.

But you can't do that in a 90-minute movie.

It doesn't translate.

It doesn't work.

And so all of these people, God bless them,

who chose to adapt Stephen King, that's a tough job, right?

And there's some that I think really work and some that don't.

You could do a whole season of just the King and all the work

in film that his writing has inspired from the stuff

at the very bottom that is still kind of wonderful--

and I'd love to watch the Graveyard Shifts of the world--

all the way up to cinema classics.

What are the must see Stephen King adaptations?

The very best Stephen King adaptations

are not horror films.

The very best of them would be Shawshank Redemption

and Stand By Me--

You guys want to go see a dead body?

--which aren't scary pictures.

They have scares in them, but they're

clearly not horror films.

Why did he have to die, Chris?

Why did Danny have to die?

One of the reasons that Shawshank and Stand By Me were

so effective is because the filmmakers

were free to focus on the rich inner lives of those characters.

Hope is a dangerous thing.

Hope can drive a man insane.

--whereas with the horror films,

they always find themselves in competition

with the scares on the page.

I'm coming for you, Rachel.

And that is a competition they are almost always destined

to lose that it's always going to be more

frightening on the page and in the reader's

imagination than anything they can possibly get on the screen.

Georgie.

Bill.

Of the horror films there's no doubt that the best of them

is Andy and Barbara Muschietti's take on It chapter 1.

I think It chapter 1 is and what the Muschietti has put

on the screen was better than anything

De Palma managed, anything that Kubrick managed.

Part one is a masterpiece.

I think everything works so well in that movie.

And it's also so much love for Stephen King that--

--that's a book that changed my life.

And when I watched the movie, I was like so relieved.

It's like, oh, he nailed it.

Stan, we all have to go.

That's a fantastic adaptation because it stayed so

close to the source material.

No.

It felt like the book.

You know, I got that feeling of the struggles of being a kid

and how you're going to figure that out--

Boop, boop, boop, boop.

--the monster kind of being representative of all of that.

One of the reasons the film is so effective and so powerful

is that we sense that the Muschietti's

care about those kids.

Stay cool, Ben from social class.

Yeah.

You too, Beverly.

Think tough new kid on the block.

They respect and love those kids.

And that compassion for Bev and Bill and Ben and Stan and Eddie

run so deep that we can't help but be swept up by it

and care for them as well.

And so when they're put in mortal danger,

we feel it very deeply.

That seems like one of the main elements you need

for a successful adaptation is taking a little bit of time

to build that world and to put those characters forward.

I'm not afraid of you.

You can't just lead with the action.

You can't lead with the horror.

You have to lead with the protagonist and the world

around them.

Oh, The Mist, oh, the movie that

will never leave your brain.

Oh, the way you feel the cold wetness

of what that mist must have felt like and that almost like

got in my mouth.

It tasted sort of moldy.

What's it, daddy?

Mist.

Yeah, it's the darkest of all adaptations,

the one in which humanity

gets to really show its colors.

The Mist mostly takes place in a supermarket.

There is a big storm, all these people go to the supermarket

to get supplies.

And during that time, a mist rolls in.

Something in the mist.

Something in the mist to John Lee.

And monsters come out of the mist.

But the thing that's scary about the movie is not the monsters,

it's the people.

Well, it is this kind of hubris that brought the wrath

of God in the first place.

This kind of pride and defiance of--

You know so much about this community

so quickly because they are both specific point

of view characters and universal stereotypes.

So you can immediately click in, but then

King has created such specific voices

for every single character.

And the adaptation honors that in a beautiful way.

Well, if you need a friend.

I have a friend, God up above.

I talk to him every day.

The story is about human dynamics, what happens to people

when they're under pressure.

Shut up you miserable buzzard.

You old bitch!

No, no, no, no, no.

But who are you?

Are you the crazy lady in the supermarket?

Or are you the hero who's going to try to actually help people?

Douse the lights.

Look out!

Frank had always been very much a formalist as a filmmaker.

His movies were very studio style.

They were very elegant and precise and well thought out.

After he had done a pilot for a TV show,

he completely changed his philosophy about filmmaking.

Glass is going to give.

And The Mist is very by the pants, a lot of handheld

and a lot of CG that's very realistic

looking, especially considering the year that it came out.

At the very beginning of the movie,

there is a woman who is like, I have to go find my family.

I can't--

I can't stay here.

I got to get home to my kids.

And she leaves.

And you just assume that these monsters just ate her right up.

But instead they're in the car at the end,

and they realize these monsters are everywhere.

There's nothing they're going to be able to do.

So he takes the gun.

He kills everyone in the car.

And then he realizes there's no bullets

left for him to kill himself.

So he gets out of the car ready to sacrifice

himself to the monsters--

--only to have the military pull up at that exact moment

with the woman who left in the opening.

She made it.

She made it through the end.

She had the best idea the whole time.

And it is so dark.

The ending of The Mist is such a powerful and ballsy

change to do because the novella has

a completely different ending.

They just keep going.

And there's some sort of hope, and

Darabont was like, fuck hope.

To put your protagonist in that state in the end

the movie there was probably the cruelest thing

in the history of horror films.

But it was honest.

You don't have much faith in humanity, do you?

None whatsoever.

Gerald's Game was something I wanted to make for years.

As soon as I read it, I thought this is going

to be a hard movie to make.

Nobody's going to want to make this movie

because it's basically 90 minutes of a naked woman chained

to a bed.

And how do you make that happen?

And if I couldn't do it, I'm glad that Mike Flanagan could

because I just think he's one of the best guys out there.

Gerald's Game was a feat of filmmaking.

Jessie and Gerald go to this house to try to like

spice up their marriage.

And in doing so, Gerald handcuffs her to the bed.

This is good.

You'll like this.

It's not working for her.

Daddy's going to get what Daddy wants.

Fucking stop it!

Uncuff me now.

And he gets angry about this and starts

talking about how badly their marriage is going

and during that has a heart attack

and falls on top of her dead.

So now she's alone in this House--

Gerald

--with her dead husband on top of her.

Gerald.

And the entire movie takes place with her handcuffed

and trying to get out of these handcuffs--

No!

Somebody help!

--while her husband is taunting

her from beyond the grave.

You can pull to your wrists break,

you're not getting out of those cuffs.

He is dead, but yet sticks around

because he is a shitty husband.

Gerald's Game is probably one of the best

adaptations of taking an unfilmable story

and bringing it to screen.

Mike Flanagan did an incredible job because in the book,

the voices in her head are multiple characters.

And narrowing that down to just one version of her talking

to herself--

He put you in those handcuffs way before Gerald did.

--is a brilliant solution because otherwise you kind

of get lost in the character drama, and that's not

what it's about, right?

Jesus.

It's about the need to survive and distilling it down

to that moment of survival--

The last thing I want is to have

to take you to the emergency room

and have your finger sewn back,

--which then blows everything up like a nuclear bomb

as we're all sitting there with our hands

over our eyes just not wanting to watch that degloving--

Gerald's Game is some of the only horror movie gore that has

ever made me feel lightheaded.

The scene where she degloves herself

to get out of the handcuffs, I genuinely

felt nauseous and dizzy.

And that just not happened to me.

I watch horror movies for a living.

But for some reason, that scene really got to me.

It's disgusting.

And Carla Gugino, chef's kiss.

Carla Gugino is one of the most underappreciated

actresses of our generation.

She approached that part with such a relentless bravery.

At every turn, there was a lack of vanity or a lack of fear.

She just dove in and ripped herself apart.

I mean, just to be handcuffed to a bed not even for three days,

but for shooting days.

I think it was 16 days in that position.

So the physical demands of the role aside,

the emotional demands of that role playing both sides

of the character and dealing with the trauma

she was dealing with as the character, flawless.

Girl, I don't have the balls to wear anything like that.

Don't I wish.

Just give me a beer.

Holy old Jesus!

And now, may the Lord bless you and keep you.

May the Lord make his face to shine upon you.

So give us your report, Craig.

Tell us how much money you made for us.

I ain't taking the rap on this.

I locked this place up every night.

It's not my fault if every pervert, weirdo--

Don't talk to me.

Go talk to someone in charge.

On the day of my judgment when I stand before God

and he asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles,

what am I going to say?

When you're adapting Stephen King,

you got to realize that the story is

the most important thing and the people

are the most important things.

So many people just use it as a jumping off point.

I ain't never seen me flick a show.

But King's books and stories are very cinematic.

Paul Sheldon: I guess it was kind of a miracle you finding me.

No, it wasn't a miracle at all.

In a way, I was following you.

You were following me?

Well, it wasn't any secret to me.

You were staying at the Silver Creek seeing as how I'm

your number one fan and all.

Don't move now.

I wouldn't want to hurt this neck.

Misery feels like a really strong adaptation.

It actually felt a lot like the book

and like a lot of the best King adaptations.

It also has the directors eye on it, stank on it.

James Caan is driving along one day in this blizzard,

and he gets in a wreck.

And thank God, Kathy Bates, Annie, she finds him.

And she takes him back to her house.

And she's going to nurse him back to health,

but it turns out that she's also a big fan.

How weird?

Oh, Paul, I've read everything of yours.

The misery novels, I know them all by heart, all eight of them.

I don't think there's ever been a movie that

sort of centered on a frumpy sort of character

like that becoming the main character

and the killer and the film.

It was really scary at the time.

A character like Kathy Bates was always sort of like the MPC.

They were just someone in the background.

Right.

Misery really put that type of character in the foreground.

Kathy Bates was terrifying in that movie.

They just cheated us.

This isn't fair.

He didn't get out of the Cockadoodie car.

The performance that Kathy Bates gives,

there's nothing like it.

There's never been anything like it.

There will never be anything like that

in the pantheon of horror.

She's so exquisite.

When you first came here, I only

loved the writer part of Paul Sheldon,

but now I know I love the rest of him, too.

I have this gun.

Sometimes I think about using it.

As a writer myself, the idea of being

held hostage by a superfan is already so terrifying.

But wow, she is basically the portrait of the superfan

you never want to meet.

You did it.

You murdered my misery.

Hey.

She ends up having a say in his new manuscript.

And her say is that she does not like it,

and he needs to rewrite it.

And it becomes this horrible fan versus creator movie.

You're going to write a new novel, your greatest achievement

ever Misery's Return.

Misery's return?

I know you didn't mean it when you killed her,

and now you'll make it right.

There's something about the marriage

of the filmmaker and the source material in Misery

that just radiates through your body.

The slow burn of the obsession and the realization of what

the author is going through, I mean, when she brings the sledge

hammer out to smash his ankles, I don't think there's

a person in the world who doesn't tense up.

Kathy, please.

It's just a perfectly paced film.

Almost done, just one more.

In the novel, she chops his foot off.

And I think this was so much harder to watch.

God, I love you.

And Cujo, my God, I read the book in like one day.

And I think he wrote it in two or three.

What are you growling at?

Such an intense movie, it's so brilliant because it

doesn't need to go big.

It's just the simplest thing.

I talk to writing students all the time about the brilliance

of a story like Cujo, which you could just characterize

as a mother and son trapped in a car

while a dog is barking outside, right?

In the novel, Stephen King is a master of characterization.

So you're in the car.

You have no choice but to care.

The film, you don't have that interiority, but what you do

have is some really, really great

performances, including a child actor

I used to watch on soap operas.

Oh, there's no monsters.

I knew that kid from one of my favorite soap operas.

So I knew he was a great actor, but not that great.

So he really is kind of the heart

and soul of this horrible situation that is so mundane.

The car won't start.

We've all been in that situation,

but we haven't been in a situation

where there's a rabid, really monstrous

dog trying to get inside and trying to savage you.

That ending in the novel spoiler, if you haven't read it,

the little boy dies.

He's the cost of the mother's secrets

and the mother's mistakes in some ways.

And I wondered, are they going to do that in the movie version?

Could we sit through a two-hour movie where the little boy dies?

Well, absolutely not.

Baby.

So I'm not surprised they changed that ending one bit.

I hate to be that guy.

There is this-- I do have this one

tiny pet peeve about the fact that, you know,

people say that dog was scary.

It's just like Cujo.

And the film is called Cujo, and everyone in the film

calls the dog Cujo.

In the book, it's made clear that the dog's name

is actually pronounced Cujo, that it's

a Spanish pronunciation.

But I guess it's too late to fix that one.

It's the tiniest little thing, but even

my dad calls the dog Cujo.

Cujo.

Christine was one of the first ones I read.

And I remember it as a ghost story, as a possession story.

That's an aspect that Carpenter completely dropped in the movie.

He kind of changed the nature of the menace, and it works.

And it works partly because he builds Christine

like she is a proper character.

The very fact that I would say she instead of it

instinctively makes you see that this is a person.

And he films her like a person.

It's a John Carpenter film, and it looks it.

It is the most beautifully shot atmospheric

of the Stephen King films. - Come on.

Get it, man.

Christine follows this nerdy student

at this school, this social outcast who doesn't

have a lot going for him.

Stop the car. Stop the car.

Stop the car. Go back.

Go back.

One day he's driving with his friend,

and out of the corner of his eye spots this rusty junker

out in the middle of the yard.

It's the only thing he's ever wanted,

and he's not going to be talked out of it.

So he throws the money down immediately

to purchase this vehicle.

And that becomes his life.

That becomes his passion.

He restores this car to how we saw it come off the line

at the beginning of the film.

Everyone starts kind of looking at him

and getting jealous of the car.

The girl he's with starts getting jealous of the car.

You're mine

And we belong together

Yes we belong together

These bullies that he had who had

threatened his life before in this violent way try

to take the car out.

It's a love story.

It's a love story between a boy and his car.

And it's a love story that has weird moments of, you know,

that moment where he says, OK, show me.

And the car rebuilds itself.

And he's just there watching.

And even the lighting and the way it's filmed,

it all looks like a girl stripping.

It looks like something that's supposed to be teasing

and a little bit sexual, which is

such an interesting idea for a piece of junk essentially.

We watch the car, and these amazing shots

get revenge against the people that attacked it.

There's this incredible scene of the car after killing several

of these bullies in this gas station,

making the entire thing explode.

And this huge plume of fire chases

down the final leader of these bullies

completely just in a blaze.

And it's just this incredible, beautiful shot that

looks like something out of like,

you know, any slasher film of this terrifying monster

coming after this potential victim, but it's a car.

Please.

It's played so straight that you

kind of forget how outlandish the subject matter is.

John Carpenter really puts us all into this.

I don't think that Carpenter

was very happy with it at the end of the day.

It's a little miracle that something

so elegant for the subject matter

would come out from a filmmaker who

didn't have full confidence in what he was doing, I suppose.

It's a real testimony to his technical abilities

and to his instinct to find what's going

to make it work on screen.

I want you to feel this on my nose.

Why you look at?

You're the one who looks like he could use a vacation, Doc.

Well, you were having a bad dream.

You must have been a real wowser by the sound.

I'm in the mood for some music, '80s.

I'll make that happen.

You want me to sign it for you?

No.

I didn't like the ending.

When Stephen first appeared on the scene,

horror was minuscule.

Stephen single-handedly popularized horror

as America understands it.

Bill.

I will fear no evil.

And he did it that way by writing about people like you

and me, middle-class people, lower middle-class people,

whatever, working people.

And he made it real and made you feel like, oh my gosh,

this could be happening to me.

The meiosis is the Stephen King's

name blots out everybody else.

The pluses of it are that there's some terrific material

to choose from.

I got offered Thinner.

And Thinner is very odd in the sense

that I thought the story was very--

was terrific and very solid.

But there was something that was also humorous about it.

Usually when you're in a Stephen King story,

you like your protagonist, like you're following them around.

You feel for them.

You want to side with them.

They're-- they're somebody that you feel connected with.

Thinner, not so much.

Just doing my job.

Robert John Burke is the lead and is not playing

it sympathetically at all.

He starts out an absolute shithead.

He's getting a blowjob from his wife and runs this woman over.

And then they tried to, you know,

kind of corrupt the court system so that he gets off.

And then that's what enacts the Gypsy curse.

Sir.

In the film, of course, they do that thing

Thinner where he rubs his face.

Thinner.

I will quote that with my friends all the time.

Thinner.

Why is he saying it? Does he have to say it?

And does he have to rub his face?

I don't know.

He's been cursed to lose weight until he dies.

I've lost 100 pounds.

Before you know it, you'll be able to see your balls

without using a mirror.

You can eat as much as he wants it doesn't matter,

he's going to keep losing weight.

That was one I saw when I was very young,

and it was so scary to me.

Seeing his body actually get thinner as a kid,

I was like, how?

How?

Like, how are they doing this?

I just didn't understand special effects at that point.

And I was like, I--

this is so unsettling.

I'm not a fan.

I'm being erased.

Instead of accepting this curse

or going back and apologizing, he takes violence.

He chooses violence and he goes, and he attacks them.

I curse you and everybody I see

by the light of this fire, the curse of the White man

from town.

And then ultimately under duress, they

tell him how to fix the curse.

You got to give it to this pie.

Then you give this pie with the curse inside to somebody else.

And what happens in the book and I filmed it

and I thought it was great was that Billy

realized his wife was being unfaithful with him

to the doctor.

And he's transferred the curse from himself into the pie.

And he puts it down in the kitchen

knowing when she gets up in the morning,

she's going to have a piece.

And then she'll have the curse.

And so he'll have his vengeance on her for cheating on him.

And then he gets up in the morning--

I'm talking about the book now, gets up in the morning

and he goes downstairs.

And my God, a piece of the pie is gone.

And he's thrilled.

And he turns around.

And there's the only person he really loves in life,

his 17-year-old daughter.

And she's saying, oh, dad, the strawberry pie was delicious.

I love you.

And he is destroyed.

And now he has to do something to save his daughter.

And the only way he can do anything is take the curse back.

And so he eats the strawberry pie.

And the audience absolutely hated it.

They hated that ending.

So I finagled it a little bit to try to give them a little bit

of audience satisfaction.

He invites the doctor in to have a piece of pie in the morning

when he shows up.

As matter of fact, I was just going to dig into a big slice

of this breakfast pie.

And I think maybe that made the audience

feel a little bit better.

But I felt like I was a whore to the audience.

But I had spelling entertainment,

and I had Paramount standing in my back saying,

do something, do something, do something.

So that's what I did.

Wow, those are your cats. There's a lot of them.

They're strays, but we'll get rid of them.

The first time I worked with Stephen King

was on Sleepwalkers.

It was his first produced original Screenplay.

Sleepwalkers is one of the wackier Stephen King plots.

And it's one of my favorite Stephen King adaptations.

It takes place in a very, very classic Stephen

King town high Americana.

It's an underrated classic most known for a scene

that comes early on in the picture.

You can't hear us.

We have a young boy who comes home and sees his mom.

And the mom seems very close and very touchy.

And end up full-on kissing.

And the reactions that it gets every single time that you watch

that with friends is priceless.

Sleepwalkers are where the vampire myth came from.

They turn into cat people.

And they feed on the essence of virgin females.

The way you feed that essence, you suck it

out of the female virgin human.

And you feed it to the female Sleepwalker sexually.

So you emit that essence into the Sleepwalker.

Pull over, motherfucker.

Everything about this movie is so bizarre.

The makeup that very well known scene where he's in the car

and he turns into, you see a flash of what the cat looks

like.

And it's this demented bizarre, grinning creature.

What the fuck?

It almost makes me think of House, the Japanese movie--

--and those kind of grinning cat in Japanese lore.

They're also deathly afraid

of the fatal scratch of cats.

Stop looking at me, you fucking cat.

And cats can sense them and seek them out.

This is both a horror movie for cats

and a cathartic revenge film for them.

Get that motherfucker.

All right.

Good boy, Clovis.

The town Sheriff had a beloved pet cat Clovis.

Everything's going to be all right.

The demon teenager killed the town Sheriff.

So Clovis has had it with these people who came into the town,

colonized the town, killed his parent,

and now they're going after Madchen Amick who he also likes.

So he knows that they must be destroyed,

but he can't do it on his own.

Luckily, all the cats in the town are sick of this.

So like, a good union organizer, he gets them all together.

And he says, we have to go get these demon fucks.

And in the climax of the film, they

march up to the house where the demons live,

and they attack them.

There were 126 cats in Sleepwalkers.

You've heard the term herding cats?

That's very much what wrangling cats on the sleepwalkers set

was like, although they were very well trained.

Clovis.

It's the kind of story I guess you could only make if Stephen

King's name was on it because it gave people confidence that it

would be something scary.

And then it turned out to be--

I would never say that Sleepwalkers is scary,

but it's very strange and unique and interesting.

And dealing with bizarre themes and kind

of beautiful at the same time.

It's just you and me, Clovis.

Just you and me.

Silver Bullet is such a highly entertaining watch.

I recognize that there's flaws to it,

but I'm really sensitive to that because I really

do love the movie so much.

Silver Bullet's made from Cycle of the Werewolf, which

was actually an illustrated book that Stephen

King did with Bernie Wrightson.

Bernie wrightson is the greatest horror

illustrator that's ever existed, as far as I'm concerned.

I love werewolves.

And something I love about werewolves

is that oftentimes, it's a mystery.

And Silver Bullet's very much a horror mystery.

It takes that idea of every time there's a full moon,

the wolf man is going to show up.

And then little by little, we're going to have clues as to who

it could be in the village.

Hey.

It's mad man Marty in the Silver Bullet.

I loved Silver Bullet when I was a kid because it's

ultimately a kid's tale.

It's Stephen King's kind of classic kids on bikes battling

the evil in their small town, except it's

a kid in a wheelchair.

You always take his side because he's crippled.

Well, it's not my fault he's crippled.

You just want to be quiet or I'm going to smack you now.

I mean it.

It's about that brother-sister relationship

where you get on each other's nerves

and where adults won't believe you,

but kids believe each other.

And that's what's always important in horror films

that kids believe each other.

And there's nothing scary in horror films that bump off kids.

Has anybody in here seen my son?

Brady.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee.

You know, because when you bump

there's no rules because, you know, everybody could get it.

So you have a werewolf

literally attacking a handicapped child,

like young teenager.

I mean that's horrific in and of itself.

That's just my little brother gets me so mad sometimes.

love the villain, too.

Well, Jane, brothers sometimes do that.

It's perhaps the person you expect nowadays,

but at the time, I felt like it was a surprise.

The movie gets schlocky, and I recognize that.

But don't we love that, too?

Don't we just love it when things get schlocky sometimes?

It's one of the best Stephen King adaptations to me

because it captures the essentials

of what he likes to do.

He loves kids living their life.

He loves these small communities that

are living kind of peacefully and have this entity come in.

And then how do they react?

How do they lose their humanity?

Or how do they retain being a community?

Holy jumped-up Jesus palomino!

You know, in the end, he's always on the side of the kids.

And then the monsters can sometimes be sympathetic.

Do you know why I can stay in your spooky

old room, Mr. Olin?

Because I know the ghoulies and ghosties

and long-legged beasties don't exist.

Hey!

Will you help me, Delores?

Bring him the blood of the Outlander.

All: Praise God.

Praise the Lord.

Praise God.

Many people have tried to adapt Stephen King novels.

And people always ask like, what is the reason

some work and some don't?

And I don't really have a good answer because you think,

oh, let's just hew very closely to the novel.

Check!

But then you think about the changes that

are made to these books when they

make it to the silver screen, they are successful.

The Dead Zone is an example of an adaptation

of a Stephen King novel where so much is stripped out.

And it's leaner, it's clearer, and it's

more compelling because you're not changing

perspectives all the time.

There's less digression.

That's just the nature of filmmaking versus literature.

Literature is all about the digression.

And filmmaking is all about getting

to the next exciting moment.

So when you have a great filmmaker,

like a David Cronenberg, they know

how to make a movie out of it.

And the vision there was something missing.

It was something I couldn't see.

How do you mean?

I don't know.

It was like, a blank spot, a dead zone.

The Dead Zone doesn't have the signature body horror

of a Cronenberg, but it does feature a lot of very

cozy-looking sweaters being worn by Christopher Walken,

which is kind of why I like it.

There's something very wintry and nice about this movie,

even though it does deal with a possible inevitable

nuclear holocaust.

The Dead Zone is a Stephen King

adaptation about Johnny Smith played by Christopher Walken.

He's just a regular guy.

He's happily in a relationship, gets into a car accident,

goes into a coma, wakes up, and now he has psychic abilities.

Baby.

Because that's what happens when you go into a coma

is you get super powers.

And he can see things before they happen.

He has a premonition about bad things happening.

The ice is going to break.

So it's that cost of having second sight

of having lost everything.

He loses the love of his life.

He's debilitated by this accident.

And he's saddled with knowing things he shouldn't know.

Johnny is brought in by the police

to find this serial killer.

And then the third part of the movie, the end of the movie,

he has a premonition of the end of the world.

Hey.

How are you?

Good to see you.

Hey.

Thanks very much for coming.

He sees Martin Sheen's future where he is this cartoon

villain president who has the suitcase

with the nuclear button in it.

Do it, Joe.

And it's just so maniacal and over the top.

I think that's something I like about it

is it almost feels like a weird satire of politics

and political imagery.

He has a choice to make.

Is he going to allow this to happen?

Or is he going to assassinate a candidate for the Senate?

It's a movie about duty in a way.

What do you do when you have power?

There's a lot of that in King's work.

It's what do you do with power, and how do you wield it?

How do you choose not to or choose to use it?

He chooses to sacrifice himself for the greater good--

--which is the most heroic thing you can do.

But this is not really a movie about heroism necessarily.

It's a movie about a curse.

Who are you, you son of a bitch?

Who sent you?

This poor man is cursed with this knowledge,

with this understanding.

Telekinesis thought to be the ability

to move or to cause changes in objects by force of the mind.

I think Carrie is the most authentic

to King in terms of the transposition of the book

to the film.

De Palma's Adaptation of Carrie

shows someone that has a true respect for the genre

and the source material.

Oftentimes, filmmakers will approach something like horror

as campy or soapy or something to kind of push limits with.

Creepy Carrie.

Ha, ha, ha.

But De Palma clearly respected

the character and the story.

And you see that in the filmmaking.

Hi, Carrie.

I love that lush opening theme where the camera's

going through the showers.

And, you know, Carrie's having a moment of just

relaxing in the hot shower.

And it's just kind of this beautiful dream-like music.

Then she has her period, and she doesn't know what's happening.

And she becomes terrified.

It's so brutal.

It's the understanding that a woman can bleed for five days

every month and not die.

We all accept that as reality.

But when you consider it, that's magical.

That's horrific.

Help me!

That was a very interesting point of view

through de Palma's lens about how terrifying female sexuality

can be.

Can I talk to you?

Right now?

It's real important.

All right.

The women in Carrie, the young women,

not only come into this place of power with their sexuality,

but their brains come online with manipulation

and using men as tools for the cruelty and the power.

It's kind of a flip of what you encounter a lot in the world.

And when you become an adult, you're

very familiar with the trope of men manipulating young women.

But this kind of off-putting manipulation

of young men by women is disturbing in a unique way.

Billy, I hate Carrie White.

Who?

Carrie is a nasty story.

It's a heartbreaking story.

It's so unfair, but that's what makes it such a lasting horror

movie and why there have been so many remakes because you want

to just put that lightning in a bottle

that unfairness of life when you haven't had a shot and you

haven't been popular and people have misunderstood you

and you finally have a chance to shine.

And you end up with a bunch of pig blood on your head.

It's satisfying on one level to see her light up that place.

I never get tired of that scene.

But it's such cost.

I saw the movie, and then I read the book.

And the book is so good.

I just didn't realize like how, like bad ass

Carrie was because in the movie, she

like does the whole gym thing.

But in the book, she's like messed

up the whole town, like she just-- she leaves the gym.

And she's like going just walking home,

just being like blowing everything

up, burning everything down.

And there's just so much more details in the book.

He's such a personal writer.

There's so much of him in his work.

It's very hard to transpose that to the screen well.

So you live in a Stephen King book

in a way you'll never live in a Stephen King movie,

in my opinion.

I just have not had that experience yet.

The Shining is probably the most revered

King adaptation while also being the adaptation

he likes the least.

The Shining is a complete reboot of the book.

I mean, it's a complete departure.

It just works.

And it's great, but it's not the book at all.

I almost don't think of it as a Stephen King movie.

It's just it's so Stanley Kubrick and Jack

Nicholson's movie in that way.

It changed a lot of King's intentions.

Jack is going to take care of the overlook for us this winter.

Jack Torrance is kind of him.

And he related to Jack.

And Jack was an avatar for his fear

of being a bad parent, of being an alcoholic, being violent

or, you know, unhinged--

--and the solitary nature of being a writer.

But the movie turns Jack into a slasher

villain in a lot of ways.

He's not sympathetic even at the beginning.

I'm not one of those directors

that dies over Stanley Kubrick.

I see The Shining, and I see all the bad things

Stephen King says.

There's no transition in that character.

It's only Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson with his psycho

face there.

Here's Johnny.

And you're like, well, who thought about putting

this guy in this place?

But it just-- it's just great.

It's great filmmaking.

Jack gets this power.

He starts to feel powerful through the course of the film.

And that leads him to become a killer

trying to kill his own family.

Have you ever thought for a single solitary moment

about my responsibilities to my employers?

This corrosive self-hatred, I think,

is at the core of the film.

I think it's probably also in the book a little bit, too.

It's why do we lash out?

Why do we become violent?

Why is Jack violent towards his son?

Why is he violent towards his wife?

Why is he not successful?

Why is he miserable?

Why are all of these things?

And it comes back to not having any faith or belief in yourself.

The Shining has really transcended from just being

a Stephen King adaptation and become more of like a canon

of classic film cinema.

It is considered to be art in itself.

It is something that is revered, that

is taught now in film classes.

There's so much iconic imagery-- the elevator

doors with the blood pouring out,

the twin girls standing in the hallway, the bar.

Everything looked exactly the way

I pictured it, except there was this one

major change from the novel.

And that is Dick Hallorann who was the Black character who

survived the novel and literally ends up with an axe in his chest

as soon as he walks through the door.

Now from a story standpoint, I get it.

It's like you want to show this is a dangerous situation.

You want to surprise the viewer.

Especially if you read the book, you weren't expecting that.

And it also raises the stakes for Danny and his mom.

But it's such a tired trope that sacrificial negro.

And to take Dick Hallorann and Scatman Crothers who's

such a legend and lose him that way,

that's just one thing that just really, really bothers me.

And I'm so, so glad that Mike Flanagan corrected

that when he made Doctor Sleep.

The overlook it was always just pictures to me.

But I didn't shine like you.

Nobody shines like you.

Yes, Doctor Sleep, the beautiful child of two

divorced parents.

I'm thinking about my dad.

I was initially surprised at how I was really

drawn in to this sequel to see what happened

to Danny as an older man, how the trauma has

sort of gone through his life.

That theme of alcoholism is always coming up,

the alcoholism of Danny's father and the first movie

and now it's sort of that unhappy curse

that the son is still carrying.

Danny, you can't get away.

There's no more extreme trauma than having your father chase

you and your mother around with an axe like poor Dan

did when he was a child.

So now he's grown, and he is trying so hard

to rid himself of the psychic infestation

that has taken over his mind.

If he could just cut through the noise,

maybe he could help end this needless suffering

that is happening at the hands of these terrifying people.

Well, hi, there.

Doctor Sleep, I think, is at least as good as the book.

The book wasn't what people expected.

You know, you expect a really claustrophobic

ghost story, like The Shining.

You expect it to be The Shining 2, and it's not.

With Doctor Sleep, it becomes a sprawling story that

involves a lot more people.

I think Mike Flanagan when he fused the Stephen King

vision and the Kubrick vision, it was walking a razor

wire between two things.

And Mike somehow got to a place where both things lived

in harmony not only simultaneously,

but they elevated each other.

If you read the novel, they don't go back to The Overlook.

The Overlook's burned down.

And so I think audiences would have been rioting

if the overlook wasn't there.

And if you go to The Overlook, obviously you have

to go to Kubrick's Overlook.

And so threading that needle took great skill.

For someone to take the source material that

comes from Stephen King and then bring

it into the cinematic realm--

Go.

--requires artists of the caliber

of the Flanagans who can understand tone, theme,

understand the spirit of the story,

and know that sometimes breaking it loose of the world in which

it was constructed within the narrative of the book

is going to be necessary as well.

From The Shining to the Dead Zone,

bad things happen to good people.

And they have to react to it a particular way.

And in the end it may be unfair, but that's how it works out.

And it's always a darkness to him.

There's something that might be out there.

And if you leave it to chance, you might find out.

And that's Stephen King in a nutshell.

I asked my dad once if he was scared of AI.

I said, you know, what if people start using AI to pump out

bad Stephen King imitations?

He said, "People have been pumping out bad Stephen

King adaptations for 40 years.

I haven't let it bother me yet."

The ice is going to break.

This is what you're looking for?

Great party, isn't it?

Thinner.