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Time - Man of the Year
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1992-09-10
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143 lines
SHOW BUSINESS, Page 62The KING of Creep
In Hollywood the world's top spooky storyteller gets all the
credit -- and no respect
By RICHARD CORLISS
They're all here: the vampires and teen outcasts, the
crazed moms and graveyard kids, the cat carcasses and killer
cars. Stephen King's favorite bugbears are on parade in his new
horror hit Sleepwalkers -- feeding, breeding, bleeding, like a
family of mutants in the town's ritziest house. In its opening
weekend, Sleepwalkers nuked the competition to earn $10 million
from folks hot to feast on the latest scream dream from the
Bard of Blood.
Nobody else has given so many people such potent
nightmares since kids got their first traumas from watching
Pinocchio and Bambi. In a way, King is the dark Disney; he has
the same hold on kids, and nearly the same productivity. Stephen
King's Sleepwalkers, to give the picture its full honorific, is
the first film he has written originally for the big screen but
the 21st made from a King story; there have also been three TV
movies and a short-lived series, Stephen King's "Golden Years."
Why, it seems like just last month that another feral fantasy,
Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, was scaring up robust biz at
the wickets. In fact, it was just last month. Soon to come are
Pet Sematary 2, Children of the Corn 2, Lawnmower Man 2,
Lawnmower Man: The TV Show.
The prospect of all these sequels is one thing that can
make King sick. "I don't want them to make any more movies from
my stuff!" says the writer, 44. The "them" are filmmakers who
trade on King's name -- buying up the titles to old stories
whose rights he doesn't control -- without being true to his
work. Sleepwalkers is his picture, and he likes it, but the
sequels are "projects I have nothing to do with and will not
have my name on."
Traditionally, authors (whether Tom Clancy or Tom Wolfe)
get pay but no say in movie adaptations of their work. The
unique rankle for King is the possessive credit on films that
bear not the slightest resemblance to his stories. The
Lawnmower movie, for instance, is all about mad scientists and
virtual-reality video games. "My 1978 short story," King says,
"was about a guy who's too lazy to mow his own lawn, so he hires
somebody who cuts the grass by chomping away at it and any
living creatures in his path." Typical King trope; typical
Hollywood cop-out.
The genial gent from Maine sounds a tad exasperated --
like an anxious parent whose children have been kidnapped and
brainwashed, then go out on a murder spree and, when they are
arrested, cheerfully tell the world, "I'm Stephen King's kid."
Sorry, Dad. You will have to take what solace you can in having
sold nearly 100 million copies of your books worldwide. And in
being the only writer whose novels, novellas, short stories --
and story titles -- Hollywood wants to turn into movies. Usually
they are profitable; consider Carrie, Stand by Me, Pet Sematary,
The Running Man. And often they are dandy: The Shining,
Christine, Cat's Eye, Misery.
This week's King movie fits into the Dandy with
Reservations category. Sleepwalkers has Dr. King's required
dosage of overeager acting, supersaturated local color, pets in
peril and shock-for-schlock's-sake maimings (corkscrew in the
eye, pencil in the ear, corncob in the back). The core audience
may demand these joy-buzzer jolts, but King, who says, "I have
never called myself a horror writer," appears trapped by his
reputation; he wears a straitjacket with his own designer label.
Here, though, King gives more. Sleepwalkers is a
meditation, a lamentation, on the tight-knit American family.
This Brady bunch -- mother Mary (Alice Krige) and her teenoid
son Charles (Brian Krause) -- can be both admirable and
repellent. The Bradys are handsome, even though they are
hundreds of years old. They love each other, carnally, with
Oedipal intensity. They have the seductive poignancy of King's
traditional misfits, though they are not quite human. They bite.
Mother needs blood, so son scouts for a virgin sacrifice. Just
before the kill, Mrs. B. delicately fixes a red rose in the
girl's hair. "It finishes you somehow," she says to her latest
victim.
Vampires have a certain sad majesty, and so do these
sleepwalkers: half man, half cat. Their genetic code condemns
them to dine on the living; their incestuous passion is strong
enough to raise the dead. In their solitude they are like any
child who feels alien from his classmates, or any fortyish
office worker who feels life draining away. They are the
creatures we see in the mirror on our darkest nights.
King's art -- it can't be mere commercial cunning -- is in
finding the demon in the mirror, the monster under the
floorboard, the stranger sleeping next to you. Toast any
domestic dilemma over a campfire and watch the shadows take the
shape of your fears. "My mind turns this way," King says.
"That's its bent, toward taboos. I ask myself, `What is
forbidden? What can't I write about?' And then I write about
it." (At the moment he is considering a story about elimination:
all the foul serpents that swirl in the toilet bowl. Let's see
somebody make that into a movie!) Above all, King has the
storyteller's honorable compulsion to connect with his audience.
"I not only want to write it down," he says, "I want people to
buy it. And I don't mean spend money for it; I mean get hooked,
be thrilled, believe."
King's fiction is rooted in his family: his writer wife
Tabitha and their three children. He can look around his Bangor
home and find the germ of many a King thriller. "I've written
about nearly every member of my family," he says. "Sleepwalkers
came about because my son wanted to date the girl at the
popcorn stand."
And so moviegoers keep munching on King's snacks, and the
writer keeps waging his long-distance battles with Hollywood.
He fights with studio bosses and industry censors; Sleepwalkers
lost some gore and a lovely love scene before the ratings board
gave the film an R classification. And he campaigns to bring his
favorite projects to light. One is an eight-hour TV version of
The Stand. The other, an adaptation of The Dark Half, has been
completed by director George Romero, but is in the vault of
bankrupt Orion Pictures, still awaiting blessed release.
For all King's success as an inspirer of hit movies,
cinema remains just a flirtation, enticing but frustrating.
"Writing a novel is like swimming," he says. "You plunge in.
Making a movie is like ice skating; everything's on the
surface." What exotic depths the novelist has explored. And what
pretty figures -- Carries and Christines and long-lived
Sleepwalkers -- he and his most sympathetic film interpreters
have described on that frozen pond.