The highly-anticipated Salem’s Lot (2024) turned out to be a massive disappointment for the fans of the horror genre. The movie is actually an adaptation of Stephen King’s same-name novel that’s set in Jerusalem’s Lot in the 1970s. It centers on Ben Mears, a struggling author, who goes back to his hometown in rural Maine — well, of course — in search of inspiration. There, he finds himself on the trail of vampires that are infecting and killing the people of his hometown.
The book itself was a massive success, and it turned many horror fans into Stephen King fans, partly due to King’s ability to take a tired and exhausted trope and turn it into something worth reading. But the most recent adaptation was a major letdown. While the fans expected to be brought to the edge of their seats, many found nothing but boredom and a few cringe-worthy moments throughout the movie. And so, 2024’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot joined the ranks of The Dark Tower, Graveyard Shift, and The Lawnmower Man — all of which flopped hard.
This brings up an important question: why do so many of King’s movie adaptations fail? In fact, it would seem that Hollywood often gets King’s adaptations all wrong. For every major hit based on King’s work, there are just as many misfires, some of which were exorbitantly expensive to produce. For example, the 2017 remake of IT was a massive success among audiences and critics, but its sequel, IT Chapter Two, wasn’t as successful, going as far as to prove that bigger and pricier isn’t always better.
We can argue that many of the flops are King’s Dollar Babies, but those adaptations aren’t distributed for profit in commercial settings, making them irrelevant to this discussion. We could attribute many of the flops to the lack of quality checks associated with low-budget productions, limited effects budget, and even limited special effects technology. Those are some compelling arguments, but they still don’t explain the issues associated with IT Chapter Two, which was backed by an enormous Hollywood budget and all the CGI goodies.
Put simply, many of King’s adaptations have failed to live up to the success of their respective books or stories due to the lack of emotional connection to and deviation from King’s original material. However, the problem is much deeper than that; horror and fiction are internalized, while cinema is an external, sensory experience. King is great at telling viewers what his protagonists are thinking and feeling, which can’t be effectively translated to the silver screen.
In contrast, modern Hollywood horror is nearly completely external; it relies on impactful visuals and sounds and often deals with tried-and-true tropes of murderous dolls and demonically possessed nuns. It’s a well-known recipe in which the protagonist sees a shadowy figure and decides to pursue it despite better judgment, while the whole experience is amplified with jumpscare-inducing sound effects. It’s a really bland type of horror whose terror and dread stop the minute credits start rolling. The implicit horror, the one that leaves you to your own devices, is seemingly dead in Hollywood.
Therein lies the problem with King’s adaptations. Tim Curry and Bill Skarsgard’s respective portrayals of Pennywise made the character into an iconic villain through insinuations and implications. The internal perspective of Stephen King’s work allows him to portray weirder and riskier content than mainstream cinema or TV could ever portray or even get away with — like the infamous orgy scene. Many of Pennywise’s goriest crimes weren’t even shown on film in either adaptation. Instead, they’re implicit, left for audiences to perceive with their mind’s eye.
Pet Sematary is another great example, in which a father brings his two-year-old back from the dead, only to have it return a malevolent being, both in words and action. However, the whole novel would be a poor attempt at horror if King didn’t do such a great job of conveying the father’s feeling of grief, the horror of his child returning wrong, and the anguish he felt knowing that he had to kill the child again. No movie could ever convey that level of emotional horror and overwhelming anxiety, and both Pet Sematary adaptations attest to the fact.
There are also typical Hollywood shenanigans that have ruined some potentially great adaptations. Filmmakers tried to condense the multi-novel narrative of The Dark Tower into 95 minutes of screentime complemented by blockbuster budgets and amazing special effects. The result, as expected, was a massive financial disaster, probably one of the biggest financial disasters Hollywood has experienced in decades.
Over-reliance on King’s name is something that Hollywood usually struggles with, with studios believing that the fans will shove anything with King’s name down their throats without questioning quality, which most definitely isn’t the case. Then there are typical issues associated with poor script writing, underdeveloped characters, miscasting, and a whole bag of Hollywood shortcomings that result in inconsistent quality in King’s adaptations.
On the other hand, The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and The Green Mile are King’s most successful adaptations, but the original works aren’t actually classified as horror. Sure, they contain some scary elements, but even those are sidelined in favor of the emotional journeys the audiences share with respective protagonists. There are a few exceptions to what seems to have established itself as a rule, with The Shining being one among the rare.
All of the above only goes to show that Hollywood is scarcely capable of successfully adapting horror written by King, mainly due to King’s writing style residing in the realms of fantastical and phantasmagorical (which are always stronger in written or verbal forms) and the fact that some things are always scarier in imagination. The mind tends to wander to unsettling places, and when the line between safety and danger blurs, it instinctively crosses into fear, leaving you with the eerie sense of being watched — even when you’re almost certain nothing is there.