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?
