Stephen King on Screen: a gushing tribute to King

Daphné Baiwir’s documentary is a study of Stephen King film adaptations, anchored by interviews with Hollywood directors. There is no Brian de Palma or David Cronenberg, but Frank Darabont, director of three major King adaptations, is an engaging presence and given lots of space, while others whistle by in a montage of sound bites and clips. 

Baiwir in part crowd-funded the film through King fandom, and there is an air of fan devotion throughout. There is footage of King’s cameos and on-set visits, and many accounts of primal childhood encounters with the books that foster lifelong obsessions. Josh Boone, who was involved in the 2020 miniseries of The Stand, has a startling account of his Christian parents burning his Stephen King books when a teenager. When he wrote to the author in anguish, King posted replacements.

The film is a relatively unadventurous set of talking heads, and not always with a clear line through the industrial quantities of King adaptations produced since de Palma’s Carrie (1976) boosted King into the best-sellers. A protective King brotherhood emerges across the interviews (of almost exclusively men), a deference that in an intriguing way wants to signal distance from the giant elephant in the room, Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick’s disinterest in King’s screenplay for The Shining, and the writer’s profound dislike for the finished product, is baseline knowledge in this field. 

Kubrick is portrayed cruelly; here the insistence is on fidelity to the emotional integrity of King’s characters, plots and screenplays. A telling moment is when Mike Flanagan explains that his premise for adapting Doctor Sleep, King’s late and underpowered sequel to The Shining, was that if King “didn’t like anything, I wasn’t going to do it.” Such fidelity doesn’t always lead to strong adaptations. Indeed, when King’s screenplay for The Shining was eventually made into a TV miniseries by Mick Garris in 1997, the result might be politely described as unfortunate. Garris gushes on screen, nevertheless.

This hints at the judgement-free exploration of the oeuvre offered by Baiwir’s documentary. There is no sense of separation between the major successes (Stand by Me (1986), Misery (1990), 1408 (2007)), or failures (the disastrous Cell, 2016), or that Darabont’s The Mist (2007) could end up being sort of both. We needed more of a distinction between mainstream and pulp productions, the grindhouse horrors pumped out just because they bear King’s name.

Only over the credits do we get to coverage of the further boom of King on streaming platforms, which arguably get closer to King’s expansive narratives. It is, overall, an uneven experience, slightly too dependent on benign or hagiographic anecdotes to generate many acute insights. 

► Stephen King on Screen is available to stream now and will be available on Blu-ray from 18 September.