The teacher of teachers gives for much more than his mere novelistic work. And today I want to talk about the best movies about Stephen King. Because although it is almost never he who directs, his narrative imprint makes him unmistakable as soon as the intense load of his stories is transmitted.
The powerful imaginary of Stephen King it has always been a fertile field from which to end up harvesting for film and television. When the stories of an author like King achieve that visualization of each scene and manage to maintain the narrative tension even from the seemingly inconsequential dialogue or the necessary prodigiously enriched descriptions, the result is always a kind of covert script full of action and suspense, with the drops of that psychological thriller (when not terror) under which this author is always labeled but surprisingly not always the main notion of every story.
The extraordinary from the common. The description of the bland, of the stereotypical to make him blow up moments later. Or the fantasy displayed from the first moment, only infused with characters with a shocking mimicry to make each plot feel like the reader's own.
Thus, it is not surprising that small and large screens have always had this author as a primary provider of great stories. The novels of Stephen King taken to the movies they are already a whole video library to which they have succumbed great directors like Kubric or Brian de Palma and that even today are still revised and recovered from any previous moment of their novelistic production.
But the best of all is that, beyond the labels, some of those films have served to offer an approach to the creator par excellence, with his terrifying stories, his mysteries, his fantasies and that strange magnetic humanism that emerges from some characters exposed to extreme situations.
Common places in which there is no other than to recognize that kind of gift of Stephen King to paint an exuberant psychology typical of someone gifted to tell about the divine and the human, even with the feet of his characters on the edge of the precipice.
3 best movies based on books by Stephen King
Cadena perpetua
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:Do not miss the title or the successful plot adornment that Darabont made to end up presenting one of those eternal films.
This is a story of the idolized teacher. When I read the volume "Four Seasons", where it was inserted the short novel original from which this movie came out, (probably the least disturbing of the volume but certainly the most suggestive), I had that feeling that, despite enjoying the stories, the only thing that linked them was that strange seasonal assignment.
God knows why I would. Probably in such a lavish creativity, King had to gradually release his works. The point is that behind the cameras of Darabont the story gains more the notion of vital epic of the story than any other aspect.
Of course, the inner universe of the prisoner Andy Dufresne with his vertigo over a murder that he never carried out, also flying over with the feeling of vital defeat that guided him through dangerous labyrinths in the novel, are simply intuitions in the film.
What prevails in the 142 minutes of the film is that depth of the man who houses secrets and plans. Either that or end up hanging from his cell.
As much as King is called sinister, few works better than this to face this overcoming that came from fiction as a placebo. A story that fascinates anyone and that moves in a defeatist lyricism that only at the end of the muddy tunnel, glimpses a last shred of hope. Phrase from the movie: «Do you know what the Mexicans of the Pacific say? That he has no memory.
The green Mile
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:Who doesn't remember Tom Hanks' cystitis? The good of Paul Edgecomb suffers from that ailment that makes him turn pale when faced with a simple urination. It is just a detail, one of those that I previously indicated as brought from the everyday.
And yet that grief that has the Cold Mountain prison officer gripped ends up becoming the bond that takes us out of reality. It happens when the black John Coffey takes him by the balls and extracts all the concentrated evil in his urinary tract.
That is the turning point in which fantasy ends up soaking up the squalor of a last mile through which men travel towards finalist justice.
Between the death announced in each new execution «... the current will go through your body ...» to a new current that the sentenced Coffey generates to eliminate any evil, despite the fact that evil has set a trap for him by placing his virtue on the mace of justice of men, charged with shitting from Jesus Christ to John Coffey.
King's ability to offer us intense profiles in each of the internees, from the cuteness of Delacroix to the dementia of Billy the child, through the personalities of the prison guards, is maintained in a movie that ends up working better thanks to that scope of the particular of each person.
A soap opera and a film that achieved the same end. Phrase from the movie, by John Coffey: «I am tired of the pain that I feel and hear from the world every day, there is too much pain, they are like pieces of glass in my head that I cannot remove, can you understand? »
The Shining
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:For the most purist moviegoers, this is the best of the adaptations. It could be none other than Kubrick (After his adaptation of the Space Odyssey that overshadowed the original story of Arthur C. Clarke,en), who could balance with the weight of his scenography the immeasurable power of a narrative about the entrance into madness.
The two geniuses made this story one of the most iconic horror stories, with a multitude of scenes replicated around the world. Corridors through which blood flowed, twin girls offering games in some dark dimension, Nicholson's unbridled psychopathic gaze on the other side of the door, the labyrinth in the cold night through which death seems to appear at each new turn ...
Perhaps the film loses the weight of the traffic there a bit. Jack was just a writer looking for a refuge to find inspiration and enjoy his family in his spare time.
The film focuses more on the game of prisms about the origin of Jack's madness. It was his thing or it was the hotel that pushed him to that longing for the death of his loved ones.
About this movie it has even been said that Kubrick had to convince the author about the convenience of the changes. And even an alternate end was finally set aside forever. Myths of the great movies. Phrase from the movie: «Flattery is what greases the wheels of the world«.
Of course, later we can find more brilliant cases of adaptations to cinema or television through series or films that have not been on the big screen.
Cases like that of It, which changed the paradigm of the clown towards a dark role thanks to that game between opposite poles in which Stephen King is the best. Or even Salem's Lot, which you will find a new version in a few dates. But for me the 3 above are the best.
The best series adapted from Stephen King
22/11/63
With special affection, now put into series, I remember the deliveries of 22/11/63. Because beyond the fact that the book always wins, the scenarios of this adaptation end up taking you to that threshold of time between present and past with the same enjoyment that leads you in reading it between disparate moments in History.
An adaptation of 22/11/63 that takes care of the details to convey the essence of the novel to the maximum. Characters like yellow card appear as if they had really been imported from your reading imagination. Romances between inhabitants of different historical moments that gain the same intensity as when they were read...
The streets of Dallas waiting for the unfortunate moment of the assassination, the bar from whose storage room you go from present to past. Everything is very well done to compensate for the harmony with the psyche of the characters, which is always deeper when read.