"A new Children of the Corn movie is completed"

"The TV series Chapelwaite, based on Jerusalem's Lot"

"TV series version of Lisey’s Story will air on Apple TV+."

"Overlook"

"Prey for Us"

"Sleeping Beauties"

"The Eyes of the Dragon (TV Series) " (2022)

what Cujo: Canine Unit Joint Operations - IMDb

...what

what coul that even BE

all I can find is this article from 2015 The Cujo Remake's New Title Isn't Going To Sit Well ...

ooh I actually loved The Eyes of the Dragon

me too

CHILDREN OF THE CORN reminder that children of the corn was a very short story, and it's kind of wild how many movies there have been

1408 for my money this is a much better story by King, in the same vein of "short story turned into a movie"

like Children of the Corn isn't........ terrible?

It's infinitely more readable than Carrie, at any rate. (Carrie is really bad.)

But it absolutely has the same... smell as all of the earliest things King wrote, where the characters (the protagonists as much as or even more than the villains) are kind of the worst?

like they're just the most miserable people

and I don't mean they're unhappy, though they absolutely are unhappy. But more miserable in the sense of being infinitely small-minded, petty, selfish.

I feel like Early King is just vibratingly unhappy with the small town he grew up in and with himself. His stories are just about ugly people who make each other uglier to be around. Sympathetic human beings are few and far between.

So, of course Burt and Vicky are in the process of the most miserable dissolution of a marriage that you could possibly imagine, allegedly driving cross-country to try to save their relationship but just simmering with mutual loathing, even before they run afoul of the Children of the Corn.

By contrast, the protagonist of 1408, Mike Enslin, is probably the least fucked of any writer King has ever created, lol. He's made a good career out of writing funny and #relatable accounts of stays in allegedly haunted places, and the worst thing going on his life as the story opens is that he's mildly embarrassed about it all. He wanted to be a poet and

instead he's written three of these formulaic, pulpy books.

Mr. Olin, the hotel manager played by Samuel L Jackson in the movie, is actively well-meaning! His only motivation in the story is to talk Enslin out of staying in the room. King's descriptions of Olin are only occasionally unkind, in a way which reflects Enslin's shifting impressions of him, and even when they're unkind it's only in a "he's kind of meek"

way. It doesn't even extend as far as to portraying Olin as cowardly.

They're still very much products of the same writer at their core, of course; you can see in both of them King's process, the part where he kind of just lets the spook flow freely. I think King has said he doesn't really outline or plan his stories out, and I also feel like you can tell from these stories as much or more than you can with his novels.

But 1408 has the advantage of just being a really spooky hotel room, who knows how it got that way, whereas Children of the Corn actively attempts to explain its "mythos", resulting in a lengthy segment where Burt is just standing in a church he had almost no reason to enter, poring over records he has even less reason to glance at much less read in

detail, and speculating wildly about what a long list of recorded births and deaths "must" mean. While his wife is waiting in the car, terrified and desperate for him to agree to leave the town, Burt is expositing helpfully for the reader: HUH, I GUESS ALL THE CHILDREN IN THIS TOWN UP AND MURDERED THE ADULTS ONE YEAR AFTER A BAD HARVEST. It's the only

logical explanation for this column of names and dates!

like there are no recorded deaths (or births) for the parents, only for the cult of children, and with only 1.5 generations to base his speculations on, Burt also decides the newest name on the list must have been the child of one of the other children, and Burt's fixation on corn starts long before he finds the first actual evidence of a corn-based

religion, and oh yeah Burt also suddenly seems to know an awful lot about Christianity and Christian practices, which would be a lot less weird if Vicky hadn't been established as the one who grew up with it being a major part of her life. But, you know, she's in the car at this point, and Burt's alone with his thoughts, so shrug?????

I don't know. It just feels like King decided on a lot of worldbuilding for his corn cult kids in the middle of the story and just kind of dumped it there, hoping readers would accept Burt's certainty as eerie and somehow just A Vibe You Get When You're In Town, instead of an awful lot of As You Know Bob dialogue only without even a Bob to talk to.

There's a spot or two in 1408 where Enslin also gets a jolt of Eerie Clarity, but the story never tires to explain how 1408 got to be the way it is, and while I'm sure King could explain the significance of the series of numbers the haunted telephone shrieks at him, and I imagine the color of the light in the room is Not Unrelated to King's favorite "dead

lights", Enslin doesn't discover a convenient diary in the room and spend two pages explaining why things in the room are crooked, or why all the surfaces in the room feel the way they do.

anyway

SO MANY

MOVIES

and y, he's definetly...gotten over his need to explain wtf

the movies have not, but.

LIKE

I'm not against explaining wtf, I'm really not. But Burt's inexplicable psychic knowledge takes up a lot of space in the story

No, I get what you mean

AT LEAST IT GAVE THE MOVIES MATERIAL TO WORK WITH lol

without the inexplicable log (kept in a church the kids considered false, by the way), almost none of the kids would have names

and it sure is lucky that the kids had a radio station broadcasting their gospel, even though they definitely would have had 0 reason to do that

because without the creepy radio station, Burt and Vicky wouldn't have had any reason to start talking about religion!

and again Burt, who doesn't seem to be all that familiar with Christianity unlike Vicky who apparently grew up in a culty fundamentalist sect, wouldn't have been able to start up all that internal narration about Christianity

Indeeeed.

so much exposition

(a bunch of the story would've been more natural if told from Vicky's third person perspective instead of from Burt's, but that's another thing about early King, he was really uncomfortable with female characters)

LIKE

I kind of want you to re-read both stories X333

1408 is very good, imho. It COULD be even better, but like as far as internal narration from someone who's kind of losing it goes, I think it's pretty deft and certainly better than the Lovecraft I've read

I will, maybe later though bc tiny headache, but i will!

i do like 1408, though I think I liked the movie better

(I think it would be better if we'd had a segment that was just kind of, SUPER detached, like a transcript of Enslin's microrecorder tape, described by either Mr. Olin or like, a detective.)

Stephen King Cinematic Universe in the 2020s? lol

because that is a lot of adaptations

not only are there a lot of adaptations, King would absolutely lend himself to a cinematic universe; a tooooon of his early works are explicitly interconnected.

oh yeah, otherwise you wouldn't be able to nearly die every time you play the Drinking Game

there's a fuck of a lot happening not only in Maine but in Derry specifically

/nodnodnod

(BUT LIKE, instead we get some more kind of confused and increasingly jumbled narration from Enslin, which is ALSO good, but I think the detached microrecorder description would've stood just fine on its own.)

also I'm sorry about the headache ;;

It's been a long time since I saw 1408. My main sense is that it's very DIFFERENT. Not so much before Enslin gets to the room as after.

The way in which 1408 is "haunted" would never have translated well to film at all

y, most of his stuff is connected via flagg or the DT

I think the use of the radio made the movie version work really well

that song still creeps me out

like, things that are haunted about the short story room:

1. the door to it is subtly crooked

2. three paintings inside the room are all crooked

3. the third painting is a still life of fruit, which becomes increasingly ugly in coloration

4. the light and objects in the room become increasingly orange-yellow in a way that upsets the author

5. the air in the room is stale

6. everything he touches feels gross: increasingly like dead skin, also increasingly moist

7. eventually the paintings in the room go explicitly horror-ish and things start melting! this, you could actually convey in film.

8. finally, the attempt to call downstairs which gets the aggressive and violent quasi-nursery-rhyme

like, MOST of that just could never be conveyed properly on film.

The bit where the carpet especially becomes, like. hard to traverse. like he's sort of sinking into it or sticking to it but not really. This shows up on the microrecorder, maybe, as an audible squelching??? sound???

I remember "Five. This is five. Ignore the sirens. Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room. Eight. This is eight. We have killed your friends. Every friend is now dead." but I can't remember if it was the book or the movie

Yep

probably both?

It's definitely from the short story

probably

That's the phone. I bet in the movie it was part of the radio.

probably, that'd make sense

Also a bunch of what's happening is in the narrator's head. Like there's an increasing anxiety attack where he's getting kind of hysterical. I like how initially he's able to close his eyes and breathe deeply and be fine, but after that point closing his eyes just makes him feel worse! It's a nice escalation.

yeah when he tried to call out the phone operator read off the numbers

like there's a bit where he thinks, very clearly, I have to get a hold of myself right now, and he's dissociating enough that he's not completely sure why he had that thought.

the movie wasn't necessarily "scary" but it did convey the sense of hopelessness well... like, it's impossible to escape

although I only saw one of the endings, so I'm not sure about the alternate endings

It SORT OF comes out of nowhere to slap you in the face as you read but SORT OF also feels like a completely understandable reaction to what he's feeling and it does a good job of conveying his emotions and distorting thought process.

The alternate endings are generally "worse"

(I was reading wikipedia heh)

~We've only just beguuuuun~

anyway I should obviously rewatch the movie \o/

but not the children of the corn movie(s), because those were pretty bad iirc

some King movies are so bad they're good though

like all the mini-series they used to run on SciFi all the time

heh, it opens with Cusack basically listening to the children of the corn preacher on his radio lol

like, don't ever remake my chompy flying ball monsters

lol the end of the langoliers movie

is so weird

I wonder what the new children of the corn movie even IS

"A psychopathic twelve-year-old girl in a small town in Nebraska recruits all the other children and goes on a bloody rampage, killing the corrupt adults and anyone else who opposes her. A bright high schooler who won't go along with the plan is the town's only hope of survival." ....huh

uh

weird

since the short story is pretty explicit that all the ringleaders of the cult were boys

Vicky mentions some little girls who were manipulated into being faith healers and preachers in her speech about the horrors of Christian cults but the children of the corn have only ever been led by boys

two leaders and two "seers", all boys

man the children of the corn movies are bad

/makes a separate plurk

they ARE

<3