Stanley Kubrick’s only horror film The Shining may famously have been disavowed by Stephen King for the liberties it took in adapting King’s bestselling 1977 novel, but those deviations are part of what makes the film so effective (leaving aside the shrill edge-of-madness performances, the exquisitely over-designed mise en scène, the unnervingly mobile camerawork, and…
Mike Flanagan is not only one of our finest living horror directors, but has also proved, with Gerald’s Game (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2009), a sensitive adaptor of Stephen King. These two interests intersect with his latest tripartite feature, which begins near the end of its narrative – and of the world, and indeed of the universe. As a…
The Boogeyman first published by Little White Lies, 30 May 2023 Stephen King’s 1975 short story The Boogeyman blurs the psychological and the supernatural. Unfolding entirely within the confines of a psychiatrist’s office, it purports to be the story that distraught patient Lester Billings tells about his three children’s deaths – and while Lester insists…
There is a scene early in Chain Reactions where Patton Oswalt illustrates his thesis that “everyone watches a movie differently” with an anecdote about how, while in college, he went to the cinema with his then girlfriend and her mother to see Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991), and discovered that even though her…
1408 first published by EyeforFilm, 7 Aug 2007 “Hotels are a naturally creepy place, don’t you think?”, asks Mike Enslin (John Cusack) in Mikael Håfström’s 1408. As a limbo-like resting spot between one place and the next, the roadside inn has long been a staple of the classical ghost story, and its modern equivalent the…
Six home releases from June 2023 first published by Little White Lies as entry 177 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Includes capsule reviews of: The Lighthouse, Red Sun (Rote Sonne), Revenge (Adauchi), Stephen King on Screen, Lady Reporter, Le Mépris (Contempt) The Lighthouse (2018) “I’m probably a figment of your imagination,” observes Thomas Wake (Willem…
It Chapter Two first published by Little White Lies In Derry, Maine, time works in mysterious ways. It seems like only a couple of years ago (in It, 2017, retroactively titled It Chapter One) that it was 1989, and Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), Beverly (Sophia Lillis), Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), Richie (Finn Wolfhard), Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), Stanley (Wyatt…
Doctor Sleep first published by Little White Lies Let’s call it the battle of the SKs. In 1977, Stephen King publishes his best-selling novel The Shining, translating into the allegorical language of horror fiction the toll that his own alcoholism was taking on his professional and domestic lives. in 1980, Stanley Kubrick turns that novel…
Pet Sematary first published by VODzilla.co True story (with an old spoiler or two): in Stephen King’s best-selling novel The Shining (1977), the hotel chef Dick Halloran is summoned from his Florida vacation by the psychic powers that he shares with Danny Torrance, and rescues little Danny and his mother Wendy from terrifying supernatural events…
Carrie fist published by Little White Lies, as entry 48 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Red. I might have known it would be red.” So says Margaret White – note the colour-coded surname – a sexually repressed religious zealot (played by Piper Laurie) under whose rigidly controlling single parentage teenaged Carrie (Sissy Spacek) has been brought…
First published by Sight & Sound, September 2016 Review: Stephen King famously objected to the liberties taken with his 1977 novel The Shining in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation. Yet in co-adapting (with Adam Alleca) his own 2006 novel Cell to the big screen, King has licensed himself to introduce substantial changes to the original,…