Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Ranking The King of Horror
posted @11 a.m. by Richard Kelly
We're back - this weekend, anyhow. And Ravi Holy, our most prolific recent poster, is back too, having decided to share with this site his 'Top Ten Movie Adaptations of the Works of Stephen King'. Ravi has been somewhat enigmatic in eschewing any comment on his selections or the ordering thereof, so I'm just going to slap them down for you here as 10:
1: The Shining
2: The Shawshank Redemption
3: Carrie
4: Stand by Me
5: The Green Mile
6: Misery
7: The Running Man
8: Apt Pupil
9: 1408
10: Creepshow
Quite a mix, wouldn't you say? No room, you will note, for 'Maximum Overdrive', King's 1986 attempt at directing his own script, about a crazy truck with a goblin mask on the hood. In the trailer King chose to address the camera direct as master of horror ceremonies, a la William Castle or Rod Serling. But King, though he has always looked a little odd, has never quite mustered a chilling persona for himself, and so his ominous comments in said trailer (the inevitable self-in-third-person 'I just wanted to see Stephen King done right' and the frankly implausible 'I'm gonna scare the hell out of you...') didn't raise much more than a wince in this viewer. No, for me the real omissions in Ravi's 10 are the highly scary 'Salem's Lot' (Tobe Hooper, 1979, for TV) and the very moving 'The Dead Zone' (1983, David Cronenberg, feature). My guilty pleasure vote would be 'Sleepwalkers' (1992), a slightly grisly yet tongue-in-cheek number with the fair Alice Kruge as some sort of lush cat-beast. But enough of me. What say you?
Comments
Richard: I wasn't being enigmatic, I just didn't think there was much to say on this one...
Meanwhile, I put some (in my opinion quite witty!) comments on my 'best black and white films of the colour era' list which I thought was a more interesting list anyway but you haven't posted that one... Did you not get it? Why not replace the (boring) King list with that one...?
Ravi, you know what, I don't think I did ever get that b/w in colour list, in fact I'm sure of it. There may be a relay problem with the site management for anything posted to the What's Your Ten. You could always just post it within a comment to this spiel, and I will then transfer it over as a separate post on the main blog.
I think Ravi and I must be spending too much time together. I came onto the site to see if there was a 'best black and white films of the colour era' list (and if not post mine) and read the above comment. I'm going to go ahead and post my list and you'll just have to believe that I had done it before coming on line!
Richard -
Felt bad about posting my list so I've confessed to Ravi. He hadn't read your comment from yesterday so is going to resend his list.
Though we must have been doing them at the same time please feel free to publish his list instead of mine as he did originally submit it first.
Thanks, Tim!
Meanwhile, as you suggest Richard, I'll post the list here and you can reformat it or whatever. So, Ravi's list of the 10 best black and white films of the colour era (with comments this time!) take 2:
1 Manhattan (1979) Obviously black and white photography (still or moving) looks gorgeous so many of the best modern directors have done a b/w for that reason alone. Woody did it...
2 Raging Bull (1980) Marty did it...
3 Dead Man (1995) Jim did it...
4 The General (1998) John did it...
5 The Elephant Man (1980) David did it for period feel...
6 Ed Wood (1994) As did Tim...
7 The Man who wasn't there (2001) As did Joel and Ethan...
8 Clerks (1993) Kevin did it cos he couldn't afford not to...
9 Schindler's List (1993) Steven did it with one very prudent splash of colour
10 Sin City (2005) And Robert and Frank did it with a few more splashes of colour but not enough to make it a colour film (unlike American History X which would be on this list if there were fewer colour scenes. But the b/w ones are great).
Excellent list Rav
I left off Schindler's List and Sin City because of the splashes of colour. I wondered if you might have gone back further (Dr. Strangelove,Persona) given your remit of the "colour era" rather than my "modern era" but infact I went back further than you (1971).
Well, when I say colour era, I mean the time when basically all films were colour. I mean the golden age of colour was, arguably, 1938-1948 with technicolour classics like the Adentures of Robin Hood, Gone with the wind, the Wizard of Oz and the Powell/Pressburger quadrilogy of Blimp/matter of life/Black Narcissus/red shoes. then you've got all Hitch's gorgeous colour work in the 50s: Rear Window, North by North West and, particularly, Vertigo. So the colour era is, virtually, coterminous with the sound era! OTOH, the majority/a huge percentage of even big films were still made in b/w til the early 60s and even then a lot were b/w: eg Lolita (1961), Manchurian candidate (62). You mentioned Strangelove, and, on reflection, perhaps the switch to colour was complete by then (big US/UK films of the next few years: My fair Lady, Sound of Music, The Bonds, Zulu, The Graduate, Wild Bunch etc). However, since b/w was still the norm until the early 60s, it seemed better to work from at least a decade after that to me. I'll be interested to know what 1971 or other pre 79 films your list had...
Without thinking it through as well as that I think it's the difficulty of deciding when the "colour era" began that made me go for the "modern era" instead. Of course you then have similar problems but as I'm reading 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls' at the moment I've gone for the start of Biskind's "New Hollywood" and so my first film (chronologically) is 'The Last Picture Show' (1971). My other 70's film (apart from 'Manhatten') is 'Young Frankenstein'.
Getting back to the original theme of this thread - I hear 'The Mist' is supposed to be pretty good. I agree about Salem's Lot and as for guilty pleasure, mine has to be Cujo (hilarious!)
Yes, I keenly await The Mist on DVD, though I hear they might have skimped on the horror in favour of contemporary parable... Cujo I would like more if it wasn't full of shots of slobbering mutley choppers...
The Shining as BEST adaptation?????? come on..and Shawshank above Stand by Me?? why not put in The Mangler?? Personally the Mist was a big let down, as it was one of my favourite of his shorts. King has never been served well by the screen...guilty pleasure The Langoliers, awful but compellingly so...
The Shining is imnsho not only the best horror film of all time but one of the best films of all time in any genre. Since it was adapted from a King novel, it is clearly (aimnsho) the best King adaptation. Next question...
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