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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 8, No. 31 |
 STEPHEN KING |
KING vs. POE |
 EDGAR ALLAN POE |
This is the real showdown!
of TheColumnists.com
While everybody else has been paying rapt attention to Barry Bonds' race to bust the career home run record of baseball immortal Hank Aaron, I've been watching a race of an entirely different order as modern horror author Stephen King slowly starts closing in on the record of horror immortal Edgar Allan Poe.
I'm not talking home runs here. I'm talking screen adaptations of their literary works.
Right now Poe seems to have a comfortable lead. Counting projects now in development, Poe's all-time record stands at 184 screen adaptations.
But King is no piker. He's already standing at 107 and the gap is closing fast.
For example, The Internet Movie Data Base lists seven upcoming productions adapted from works either written or co-written by Stephen King. It lists only one Poe-based production, "The Light-House," scheduled for release in 2008.
Oh, I know there will be lots of spoil-sports who will say, "How could this ever be a really fair contest?" Poe died in 1849, long before they even invented movies or television. During his entire creative life, there wasn't such a thing as a movie. His stories just kind of sat there for 50 years or so before the race could even begin.
But then King fans can argue that Poe's stories have been in the public domain ever since movies and TV were invented, so anybody could adapt them without paying any fees or getting Poe's permission. When King was born in 1947, filmmakers already had been free to make Poe movies for half a century. Is that fair?
But Poe died when he was only 40 years old. King is already past 60. In baseball terms, he's had a much longer season than Poe--and it ain't over yet!
Here's another insidious comparison: Poe wrote only poems, articles, reviews and short stories. Though King writes short stories, too, he mostly writes novels, which take much longer and that has to cut down on his ability to grind out potential fodder for movies. On the other hand, King is so prolific that he often writes books under other names so he won't look like he's competing with himself. Some even suggest he has written the same books several times and just put different names on them.
But then Poe fans probably will complain that the books King writes under his pen-name Richard Bachman shouldn't count. I think that's bogus. Everybody who cares about such things knows Bachman and King are the same person, so can't we presume the movies made from Bachman books are being made by people who know they're really adding to Stephen King's total as he races for the record?
In the category of multiple adaptations of the same story, Poe wins hands down. For instance, there were eight versions of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" made for eitiher TV or movie theaters between 1991 and 2006. On King's side of the ledger, his "Carrie" has been done twice. So have "The Shining," "'Salem's Lot," and a few others. His "The Dead Zone" was turned into a movie and is now a weekly TV series that alreadyhas completed 74 episodes.
But there have been so many versions of Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado" that King probably never will catch up. And there are all those movies that have stolen the plots of Poe stories. How many times have you seen somebody sealed up behind a wall of bricks? Or been driven mad by the sound of a thumping "Tell-Tale"-style heart? Well, a lot, that's for sure.
The first recorded Poe movie was called "Sherlock Holmes and the Great Murder Mystery" in 1908. The plot was based on Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," usually recognized as the first detective story in literary history, but it seems the filmmakers decided to throw out Poe's sleuth, Auguste Dupin, and put in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes instead. In 1909, Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" first came to the screen as "The Sealed Room." That same year, "The Tell-Tale Heart" was incorporated into the storyline for "The Avenging Conscience," a film that still survives. (I have a copy!)
King's first screen adaptation was Brian DePalma's 1976 version of "Carrie," the first novel published under King's real name. Its star, Sissy Spacek, played a high school girl. She now plays grandmothers.
No matter what you may think of him, Stephen King has been catnip to movie companies and TV networks. His name is now a brand name. TV movies and miniseries carrying the Stephen King stamp usually rack up major ratings. Movies from his works have lost a little steam over the years, but they still manage big enough box office returns to keep them coming.
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story to reach the movie screen: The current release '1408' about a haunted hotel room. |
The latest one, still on screens currently, is "1408," which is based on a short work included in a King collection. It's a pretty good picture with an especially strong performance by John Cusack as a King-like horror writer who checks into a hotel room where nobody has ever survived a night. If it has a significant flaw, it's probably the way it ends. I think that's King's great vulnerability: He sometimes can't figure out how to end his stories satisfyingly.
Still, I think King is a brilliant writer. I love the way he uses words and I think nobody distills American pop culture better than he does. Poe's strengths were plot and characterization. If their genetic codes could be mixed, I'm sure we'd have the perfect writer of scary stories.
Will King pass Poe in the next decade? I wouldn't be surprised, but each new generation seems to re-discover Poe, too, so his name keeps re-appearing in movie credits.
For those who need to know, here are the upcoming King-inspired movies and TV shows that I know about so far:
* "The Mist," a feature film based on his novella. In preparation for release this year.
* "Creepshow '08," an anthology of shorter films based on King stories, which would be the third in a series of "Creepshow" feature films.
* "The Talisman," a TV miniseries for the TNT cable network, based on the first novel co-authored by King and Peter Straub ("Ghost Story"). Steven Spielberg is producing. Planned for 2008.
* "Black House," a follow-up to "The Talisman," also set for 2008.
* "From A Buick 8," from the King novel, with his old pal George Romero ("Night of the Living Dead") involved.
* "Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season," a miniseries version of the non-fiction book by King and Peter Diamond, for HBO in 2008.
* "Cell," a Dimension Films feature adaptation of King's cell phone horror story, scheduled for 2009 release.
One advantage Poe has over King in their little contest: The old master's plots are now so well-known that filmmakers are tempted to pick spooky-sounding titles of Poe's poems and turn them into movies that have nothing to do with Poe beyond the title. Should Poe get credit for those? Why not? They're already doing that to King by taking novels and stories he sold film rights to and making unauthorized sequels or remakes.
Even if King stays behind Poe for the rest of his lifetime, he can rest assured that there's nobody anywhere near the numbers these two authors have racked up. If King works steadily for the next 20 years, he may leave behind so many stories that Poe will be eating his dust way before the half century mark.
©2007 by Ron Miller. This column first posted July 30, 2007.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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