And yet further new tales…

Quick update before bedtime. I’ve just posted another new story. Two in the space of a couple of days – I don’t think I’ve managed that rate of production for about ten years. Anyway, the new one is called ‘The Other One’ and is generally a lot shorter and more successful than ‘Beanfield’.

It came together from a few things – a dream that I had a few nights ago about a large nasty grey cat, which was only referred to as ‘the other one’. I suspect that the malevolent cat snuck into my subconscious as a result of a reading of The Events at Poroth Farm, although I think my use of it is a little different from Klein’s.

In addition, it was interesting to try and write a horror story about something that I love – I believe that whoever called cats ‘nature’s masterpiece’ (was it DaVinci?) was spot on. I’m also quite happy with the development of the subtext came through in the final story – it should be clear what the grey cat and the orange cat represent, other than a big nasty bastard in the former’s case.

Anyway, you can read ‘The Other One’ here if you feel so inclined. Enjoy! But be careful next time you feed that stray cat that’s hanging around…

Recent reading

Since finishing The Ceremonies (see below) I’ve cracked through a few very different pieces of work, all of which have their strong points. For a change of pace I went straight in to Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a work of non-fiction which proposes to be the definitive story of the 1999 school-shooting by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Fascinating stuff from start to finish – challenging even the concept of the crime as a ’school shooting’. It turns out that it was actually a massive bombing gone wrong. Cullen’s been on the story since it happened and it’s hard to imagine anyone approaching the story with the same degree of impartiality and lack of hyperbole. He’s also incredibly thorough and comfortable pricking some of the myths that have built up around the massacre – the ’she said yes’ tale leapt on by the religious is well and truly debunked, as is the notion of the shooters and bullied loners who belonged to some sort of shady ‘Trenchcoat Mafia’. Cullen approached his material even-handedly, building up a gradual portrait of the murderers, and tracing their path to the massacre carefully using the documentary evidence left behind by Harris and Klebold. Cullen’s writing style is clipped and clear; unspectacular, but perfectly suited to the material. It’s a fine piece of journalism, stripping the sensation from the story, leaving only something that looks very like the truth.

After finishing Columbine, I read Michel Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft ‘Against the World, Against Life’. Interesting enough, but it probably told me more about Houellbecq than it did about Lovecraft. It did leave me with a taste for the Weird Tale, though, and so I picked up S.T. Joshi’s anthology American Supernatural Tales. Actually, the main reason for picking it up was to read The Events at Poroth Farm by T.E.D Klein, the story on which The Ceremonies was based. It’s certainly a tighter and more satisfying telling of the tale, although I missed the denseness of Klein’s descriptions of New York, and the deft characterisation of Sarr and Deborah Poroth. The main character Jeremy, however, is far more sympathetic in the story than he was in the novel and most of the key scares were transposed almost directly from the original. I still maintain that Klein is far better with the short form than with a novel, but until he produces a bit more work for us to consider it’s impossible to say. His second novel, Nighttown, is supposedly all but finished, but Klein is blocked at the start of the climax. Maybe one day he’ll find the inspiration he needs to finish it off.

The two other standout tales in the anthology so far (I’m about two thirds through it) are The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber, an effortless take on the long-stale vampire story written in an entertainingly hard-boiled style; and The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury. I’m woefully and embarassingly under-read when it comes to Bradbury, although the first volume of his collected short stories is currently waiting on my bedside table, but if The Fog Horn is anything to go by, I’m in for a treat. It’s possibly the best and saddest short story I’ve read in a long time. A synopsis of the plot does it no justice, as its power lies in the persuasive power of Bradbury’s writing. It’s masterful stuff, perfectly composed, and it makes me realise that I’ve a long way to go before I can even hope to matching the perfect simplicity of The Fog Horn.

New story

I’ve just added the story ‘Beanfield’ to the short stories section of this blog. It originally started off as a riff on the Sawney Bean story, relocated to a modern day housing estate in Scotland. Between conception and writing, however, it’s twisted into something else entirely and, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I’m particularly happy with what it’s become. The original concept had a subtext relating to the control single families of drug dealers can gradually infect an entire town with their product, but that’s been lost. Without that subtext, the story feels a lot less sympathetic to the people of the estate on which it’s set, meaning that it can come across as a bit down on the underclass, which is entirely unintended. I’ve tried to redress the balance slightly, but not too successfully.

Still, it has a certain pulpy charm, and it’s a damn sight nastier than a lot of what I’ve written recently, so it has its place here. I’m glad that I’ve managed to shift the story from my mind and onto ‘paper’ as it frees me up to crack on with some fresher ideas. The next one will be a short (five pages or so) tale called ‘The Other One’, which should benefit from being a lot tighter and more focused. Hopefully it’ll be done and ready in a week or so.

In the meantime, feel free to give Beanfield a read. Comments, as always, welcome.

T.E.D Klein – The Ceremonies

It took me a while to investigate T.E.D Klein’s work in any great detail. I was aware of him, that he was held in high regard and that he’d been around for a while. That last point was what put me off investigating any further. I figured that since he’d been around since the 1970s he would have a vast and dense back catalogue of work for me to work through, and that it’d be a bitch trying to work out where to start. Because of this, I didn’t bother trying.

How foolish of me. And how wrong.

The spur was reading Black Man With A Horn in the Cthulhu 2000 anthology edited by Jim Turner. It’s a fairly strong collection, if you ignore And His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood by the dreadful Poppy Z Brite, but Klein’s story stands out. It addresses the woes of the various contempories of Lovecraft who were relegated by history as nothing more than correspondents of ‘the master’, defined only by their relationships with him; and at the same time tells its own tale of ancient evil come to bear on the modern world. Klein’s collection Dark Gods brings this together with three other long-ish stories and I’d claim it as one of the most complete and masterful pieces of work ever produced in the field.

The Ceremonies is, to date, his only novel (Klein has said in interviews past that he will do “almost anything to avoid writing”). It is, at its heart, an extension of his short story The Events at Poroth Farm – largely considered a masterpiece, although I’ll confess that I’m yet to read it. The story follows the intersecting stories of two New York inhabitants. Jeremy Friers is a slightly down on his luck academic, looking for some much needed solitude to prepare a paper on Gothic Literature. Carol is a slim virginial red-head, not long left the convent life, who is trying to find her way in the city. Both are maneuvered into a supernatural plot to raise one of Klein’s customary ‘Old Evils’ by a sinister old man named Rosie, who dreams of bringing his master back into the world.

Klein conveys a wonderful sense of place and atmosphere – the small religious community that surrounds Poroth Farm (which is where Jeremy retreats to) is very clearly sketched, but it is in his descriptions of the wild woodland surrounding the farm that Klein excels. He is equally strong with his depiction of late 70s/early 80s New York – a dark and dangerous place, nonetheless brimming with life and excitement (Children of the Kingdom, from the Dark Gods collection is similarly strong in this respect). He creates a perfect sense of creeping dream, his writing charged with ambiguity and ’slight of phrase’, those little uneasy hints which gradually make an alarming kind of sense. This is strong horror writing and Klein’s knowledge of the field shines through every line, particularly in the way Jeremy’s summer readings – Machen, Stoker, James (Henry – about whose Turn of the Screw Klein is quite damning) – reflect his reactions to the events unfolding around him.

Klein is equally adept with his supporting cast – the Poroth’s themselves, a young couple recently returned to the bosom of their religious community after some time out in the big bad world and struggling to fit in with the farm life, are especially sympathetic. The rest of the community, and Poroth’s mother, are less convincing, but impact on the story so rarely that it doesn’t detract from the rest of the story.

If The Ceremonies has a problem then it’s the length. At over 500 pages, the story feels stretched. Klein doesn’t seem to have added much to the basic plot of the original ‘Poroth Farm’ and as such what story there is starts to feel a little thin. It’s never a boring book – there’s far too many nice little touches, hints of menace – but you can find yourself hitting a point where you’ve read 50 or 100 pages then looking back and realising that not a whole lot has happened. As I’ve mentioned above, The Ceremonies is Klein’s only novel so far (a second, Nighttown, has been mooted in the past but has yet to come to light), and in comparing it to the tales in Dark Gods it’s easy to reach the conclusion that he’s a lot better with the short form than he is with the long. Until he releases something else, it’s impossible to say for sure. At the moment, the only other book easily available is a recent collection amusingly entitled Reassuring Tales. I’d like to get a hold of it (not least to read the original Events at Poroth Farm), but at the moment it’s only available as a limited edition and I haven’t seen it around for anything less that £40. Shame, because Klein deserves a larger audience, but he’s not going to get it that way!

Martyrs

One thing I don’t want this blog to become is a moan-fest. However dire the current state of horror fiction, both written and filmed, there’s still some great stuff out there. However (and there really had to be a ‘but’ there, didn’t there?), every now and then something comes along masquerading as horror fiction that aggravates me so much I tend to have to vent. Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, which I saw at a small showing as part of the Brighton Shocks festival, is just the latest piece of work to trigger that old annoyance in me.

It was being shown as part of a French double-bill with Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension (or Switchblade Romance, as it was called on its original UK release). I’d seen Haute Tension before, and didn’t get on with it all that well, mainly due to the ridiculous twist at the end of the last act which rendered the whole first hour of the film utterly nonsensical, but it has its fans – a lot of whom drawn by the splattery gore effects by Giannetto De Rossi, favoured FX man of Lucio Fulci (Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Beyond etc).

Martyrs came on the back of some good buzz, considering it the latest in a wave of exciting new horror films coming from France. And, indeed, it started well enough with an atmospheric and intriguing opening sequence showing the two main girls meeting in an orphanage, where one of them is terrorised by what seems to be some kind of night-gaunt. We’re then introduced to a family, and follow them through to a particularly bloody and extreme massacre at the hands of what is revealed to be one of the girls from the opening sequence (now grown). Tough and gritty, it’s a brave opening for the movie, and the continued presence of the shadowy figure from the girls’ past raises the interest. I was engaged, and curious to see where the film went next.

Where the film went next was down torture porn alley.

I’m no great fan of yer Hostel’s, yer Saw’s and yer Captivity’s. They feel like rites of passage movies for 13 year old Americans, but lack the wit and social awareness of their 70s predecessors. Eli Roth is particularly embarrassing, a cut-rate horror Quentin Tarantino, with possibly even fewer original ideas (trust me, that’s saying something). Martyrs, after an interesting first act, becomes the French equivalent of these films – but with added pretension! Long, dull scenes of extended torture – usually consisting of little more than a girl being punched in the face – drag the rest of the film out tediously. There’s no fear, no tension, just dullness upon dullness. The audience around me were either audibly wishing it were over, or laughing at the idiocy of it all. This isn’t horror.

When the full extent of the protagonists plot comes into clarity, the pretension levels shoot through the roof. The gore is upped towards the end in a scene that makes you realise why the director was initially chosen to direct the remake of Hellraiser (a deal which, I think, has fallen through now), but by the good work of the opening 20 minutes was long lost. Martyrs is one of those films that thinks it’s deep, but lacks any and all profundity. It thinks it’s tough and brutal, but it’s just boring. The painful thing about it is that people will consider it a horror film, and it’s not. Maybe that sounds snobbish, and who am I to say what should be classed as horror and what shouldn’t, but when something like this comes along which is made with no awareness or intelligence, it’s tough to do anything with it other than exclude it and hope that it doesn’t start to contaminate anything else around it.

Thieving Fear by Ramsey Campbell – a review, of sorts

I’ll confess, first, to being a bad fan. Coming late to the joys of buying ’stuff’ online, I failed to follow Ramsey Campbell into his wilderness years. For those of you who don’t know, these came in the late nineties when falling sales for horror and some tough times for Campbell in particular ended with him moving (presumably on editorial advice) more towards psycho-thrillers and away from the wonderful brand of psychological and ancient horror which had made him one of the most cherishable of British authors of the 70s and 80s. The move didn’t work, and Campbell found himself without an agent in the UK, his novels only available on import. I hadn’t taken a great deal from the novels he’d penned leading up to this moment – The Count of Eleven (1991), The Long Lost (1993), and The House on Nazareth Hill (1996) in particular – and didn’t have the motivation to seek out those that followed. So it goes, I suppose.

Not that I was over the moon about this – for a long time I’d felt (as many others do) that Campbell was amongst the very top rank of modern horror authors. Classics of the uncanny such as Incarnate (1983) and The Hungry Moon (1986) remain favourites, but there’s a fantastic amount of equal quality in his canon – Cold Print (1985), a collection of his Lovecraftian tales, remains the closest a modern author has come to true cosmic horror; his ‘chapbook’ of short stories, Scared Stiff (1987), finds the perfect marriage of sex and horror and presents it in an uneasily subtle fashion that contemporaries such as Poppy Z. Brite could never manage. Of the novels, The Face That Must Die (1979) and Obsession (1985) – or, to use Campbell’s preferred title, For The Rest of Their Lives – find acute horror in the most mundane of settings. Then, of course, there’s his fantastic run of award-winning short stories – maintaining a consistency of vision over the years possibly matched only by JG Ballard. Indeed, in many ways, Campbell shares the same truth and honesty when exploring his psyche that Ballard had, a quality that set both far far ahead of their genre peers.

Although I feel that Campbell is more than capable of writing fine novels with no supernatural element – indeed, The One Safe Place (1995) was one of the better mid to late-nineties efforts – it still gave me great cheer to hear that he was returning to horror with The Darkest Part of the Woods (2003), a tale of old evil with much in common with his 1998 novel Ancient Images. It was a strong comeback, playing to Campbell’s strengths and history. He followed this with The Overnight (2004), which drew on his experiences working in Borders during the lean spell mentioned above. The Overnight contained several scenes of slow-burning and subtle terror, although it was somewhat hindered by its large cast, although it’s a testament to Campbell’s writing that he managed to handle such a cast without the reader ever feeling too lost.

Secret Story (2005) came next, a story of a short-fiction writer using his own serial murders as material and what happens when the local arts scene decide to adapt one of the tales. Intended, I assume, as satire, Secret Story’s paragraphs were packed with puns and wordplay, similar to the earlier Count of Eleven. Campbell’s always been good at playing with misunderstandings and double-meanings, and they work well over 30 or 40 pages, but over a whole novel it can get a little wearing. Despite some nice gibes at certain Liverpool art scenesters, Secret Story’s characters were too broad to ever come to life, and the final act descended into a domestic, almost-Coronation Street version of torture porn. It has its fans, but it felt like a mis-step to me, one which I’d hoped he would recover from.

The Grin of the Dark (2007) was almost a recovery. The first two thirds of the novel were fantastic, with one set-piece – a protracted walk through a dark park towards a mysterious circus then the surreal show itself – vintage Campbell. The novel also brought elements of the horror story rushing up to date, finding unease in such modern frustrations as online arguements with faceless know-it-alls (yes, I’m aware of the irony here… but, hey, the name and the picture are on the blog). A bizarre visit to a porn studio in the States harked back to the sexual terror found in Scared Stiff, and the central story was compelling. Unfortunately, the final twist felt tacked on and came almost from nowhere, ending the novel on a bit of a bum note, but there was more than enough there to suggest that classic Campbell was right around the corner…

All of which is a very epic way of saying that I was quite eagerly awaiting Thieving Fear, his latest paperback from Virgin Books. For a while it looked like Virgin could be the saviour of mainstream horror publishing in the UK, not only publishing Campbell but bringing Thomas Ligotti’s work here finally (I’m not a fan, but it was good to see such a strange and singular author on the shelves in Waterstones). Unfortunately, it also meant the publication of Adam Nevill’s Banquet for the Damned, a novel which tries to hard to be well-written that it ends up in terrible knots, and now Virgin have kicked the whole enterprise in the head. Thieving Fear is due to be one of their final horror releases.

To say that Thieving Fear is a slow burn is something of an understatement. Following a camping trip plagued by bad dreams, four cousins find themselves under attack by the supernatural presence of a long-dead warlock (the classically named Arthur Pendemon). The attacks take the form of waking nightmares, each cousin falling into a version of their greatest fear. One loses his way, quite literally unable to find his way around his house; another, the artist, loses his senses. A slow claustrophobia comes over another. To explain the nightmare of the fourth cousin would be to ruin the one moment of genius – a play on a characters perception of herself and others perceptions of her – that Campbell manages. The issue is that each one creeps on the character so slowly, that it feels like almost 150 pages or so have passed before anything of note occurs. While this is undeniably a brave move by Campbell, it doesn’t quite come off, and although the finale – a descent into the warlock’s buried house – is genuinely creepy, it feels rushed. An appealingly ambiguous epilogue ends the novel strongly, but it ends up feeling like you haven’t had a whole lot for your £7.99 or so.

What worries me about this novel is the heavy reliance on wordplay and puns Campbell’s prose has. This has always been a factor of his work, and it often works very well. But in Thieving Fear it feels as if every single exchange between characters hinges on a misunderstanding, no one seems capable of communicating with one another. In interviews, Campbell has expressed his love of these games, but when every character uses them and speaks in the same way, it leaves them sounding one note and lacking any individual characteristics. I feel the same way when I watch some of Joss Whedon’s work – when everyone’s a smart-arse, no one is.

Campbell has always been quite vocal in his annoyance with the changes editors have wrought on his books, but now it feels like he could do with being pulled back from the onslaught of puns. Thematically, they don’t fit with the book and often it feels like show-boating, an insecure writer trying to convince the reader of his quality. It’s unnecessary – Campbell does what he does, often, fabulously well. He has nothing to prove. All he has to do is write with eyes away from the market (referring to The Count of Eleven, Campbell once mentioned that he was asked to turn a minor character into an American because ‘Americans like to read about Americans’ – almost every novel since has featured  a prominent secondary American character) and with confidence in his own, decades-honed abilities, and horror will one day have another masterpiece to join its ranks.

Stephen King movies – some thoughts…

Uncertainty.

If there’s one emotion guaranteed to be elicited in your average horror movie fan on seeing the words ‘Based on a novel (or, indeed, short story) by Stephen King’ drift past during the opening credits, then this must be it. Since the success of his first novel CARRIE in 1974, his name has appeared on over sixty adaptations of his work, a tide of movies and TV mini-series as daunting and threatening as the wave of blood that gushes from the elevators in one of the more striking images in THE SHINING (1980).

Some of these adaptations have been very good, others have been… less than good. Some have been faithful, some have shared little more than a name with their source material (one to the extent that King sued to have his name removed from the credits). Others have contributed some of the finest cinematic scares of our generation, some are simply laughable. And it’s this inconsistency that leads to that gnawing sense of uncertainty – are you in for a treat, or are you about to lose 90-odd minutes of your life to some straight to DVD hell of clumsy CGI and pedestrian direction?

We all know the obvious ones, of course, such as CARRIE (1976), THE SHINING (1980), and MISERY (1990) as well as the acclaimed non-horror adaptations of STAND BY ME (1986) and – inexplicably popular, to this writer at least – SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994). But what about the rest? Where’s the golden skulls in this particular graveyard? And which ones should you, under no circumstances, waste your time with? Here’s five of the best, and five of the very worst. By no means the definitive list, but enough to keep you on the path and out of harms way…

Five to view

‘Salem’s Lot (1979)
It’s no surprise that four of the five films in this list pair King with a renowned horror director. This first brings King’s New England Vampire novel together with Tobe Hooper, director of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Filmed for TV, it’s toned-down from the original novel but nonetheless manages to build an impressively sustained sense of foreboding and the gradual takeover of the town is well rendered. Helped by an appealingly panicky lead performance from David Soul, and a suavely menacing supporting turn from James Mason as the vampire’s keeper, Hooper builds a tale of cumulative horror. He makes sparing use of Reggie Nalder’s NOSFERATU-influenced lead vampire to unleash a few good shocks, and brings some of TCM’s charnel house atmosphere to the bone-strewn Old Dark House of the climax.

Each version of ‘SALEM’S LOT has its plus points. The full three-hour TV version is a slow burn, but fills out the fates of various supporting characters. The shorter version is a tauter version of the tale, and includes additional violence that Hooper filmed for the theatrical release (in the TV version a character is told to hold a shotgun up to his face, the the theatrical release he’s made to put both barrels in his mouth).

Creepshow (1982)
King and George Romero have shared a long friendship which so far has only resulted in two full collaborations – this, and Romero’s reasonable adaptation of THE DARK HALF in 1993 (plans for Romero to film King’s 1979 plague epic THE STAND never came to fruition and it was eventually made by hack extreme Mick Garris for TV in 1994). CREEPSHOW was born from both men’s love for the EC Comics of the 1950s, short gruesome anthologies, usually with a twist ending. King pens five short tales in the EC tradition, and Romero directs with lurid splashes of technicolor and animated frames which reflect the cheap printing techniques of the originals. The stories themselves are a mixed bag, The Crate, in which Hal Holbrook attempts to do away with his shrew of a wife (John Carpenter regular, Adrienne Barbeau) using a recently unearthed monster from an old Antarctic expedition, is probably the best of the bunch. Although Something to Tide You Over, where Leslie Neilsen is stalked by the soggy zombies of Ted Danson and DAWN OF THE DEAD’s Gaylen Ross is also of note.

Christine (1983)
Often dismissed as ‘the haunted car’ movie, CHRISTINE is a victim of its own concept. Looking beyond that slightly hoary Herbie notion reveals a fine movie about the friendship between its two teenage (well, the characters were at least) leads. John Carpenter returns to the suburban streets he terrorised with HALLOWEEN (1978) and brings with him the eye for character drama which drove much of the first half of that film. Lead actors Keith Gordon and John Stockwell craft a believable friendship which results in a true sense of tragedy when things start to go south for them in the second half of the movie, and the car attack scenes are directed tensely by Carpenter, helped along by a trademark score.

It’s true that the film occasionally struggles with its main conceit – why, for example, do characters who are being chased by a killer car run straight down the main road? But strong performances, some fine set-pieces and a great soundtrack ground the action well, meaning that the suspension of belief required is minimal.

The Dead Zone (1983)
King’s novel about a young man who develops premonitions of future calamities after waking up from a coma is an episodic work, taking its main character from saving a child from a fire, to catching a serial killer, to saving the world from nuclear holocaust. So it’s no surprise that it was later made into a moderately successful TV series. Before this, however, David Cronenberg took a stab at adapting the material, assisted by a typically twitchy performance from Christopher Walken as the heroic and doomed Johnny Smith (not one of King’s more inspired character names).

This is strange material for Cronenberg, lacking the savage and perverse body horror of his earlier work, but he handles the direction well despite being somewhat hampered by the unfocused nature of the source material. Not a violent film – although one suicide by scissors is guaranteed to get a wince out of you – it is carried along by a strong mystery and, in the latter half, Martin Sheen’s quiet menace as the presidential candidate who may bring on the apocalypse – another of King’s trademark religious nutters.

Pet Sematary (1989)
PET SEMATARY is arguably one of the most faithful adaptations of King’s work. With a script by the man himself (no guarantee of quality, mind you, as SLEEPWALKERS (1992) and the later TV version of THE SHINING (1997) testify), it doesn’t sanitise the events of the book at all – children die and are resurrected only to have to be killed again, and there’s no cop-out happy ending. Director Mary Lambert – who appears to have done naught of interest since, except a guff sequel in 1992 – doesn’t shy away from the tough subject matter and handles the scenes of grief believably and sensitively, making the horrors to come all the more difficult to watch.

Five to miss

Graveyard Shift (1990)
Based on a fairly inconsequential short story about killer rats attacking workers in a Maine steel mill, GRAVEYARD SHIFT marks the beginning of the deep plumbing of King’s early work for a series of barely-related straight-to-video disasters. Ralph S. Singleton, whose only previous direction credit of note appears to have been an episode of Cagney & Lacey, ineptly guides a selection of Z-list actors through a wooden murk to their doom in the jaws of a hokey muppet rat. Additional hilarity comes with actor Stephen Macht as the villainous Warwick attempting to do a traditional Maine accent. To his credit, he was the first (and last) actor to bother trying to get the accent right in a King movie. But it doesn’t really come off when none of your fellow actors are bothering.

IT (1990)
The controversial decision perhaps. Tim Curry’s performance as the evil shape-shifting clown Pennywise is the root of a certain generation’s fear of clowns, and there’s no denying that he brings a malevolent and evil relish that’s perfect for the part. The problem is… well, everything else. One of King’s strongest and densest (over 1,000 pages) works, IT is a vast story, spanning years. Condensed into a three-hour TV movie, most of the mythology King builds up around Pennywise is jettisoned leaving only the core story. The scenes in 1958 are fine – the young actors making a decent stab at their characters. But the older versions are played by assorted stalwarts of American TV who convince on no level, and the brutality of the child-killing clown is toned down for the network audience. What could have been a fantastic horror epic, becomes mired in soap-opera sub-plots and dull, weak horror. And, alas, they keep the one bit of King’s novel that everyone groans when they remember – the final incarnation of Pennywise as a giant animated spider.

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)
Followed by sequels SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK… AGAIN (1996) and SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK AGAIN… FOR MORE (1998), this disaster comes from the same pad-out-an-old-short-story school of Stephen King adaptations as GRAVEYARD SHIFT. Schoolteacher Tim Matheson is bullied from beyond the grave by assorted greaser zombies. Utterly inconsequential in every way, the only joy to take from this film is making up new sequel titles for it. How about ‘Sometimes They Come Back… for Dinner’, or ‘Sometimes They Come Back… Then Leave Again’?

The Lawnmower Man (1992)
The king of all clunkers, this is the one that was so bad even Stephen King sued to have his name taken off it. Having nothing at all in common with the King story, with the possible exception that they both have lawnmowers in them, it instead conjures up some bollocks about Pierce Brosnan’s experiments with virtual reality on slow-witted gardener Jeff Fahey. Via the exciting medium of then-cutting-edge computer graphics, 007 somehow turns Fahey into some kind of super stud God-like being. Nonsense on stilts from start to finish, this was a real low in King adaptations, taking a five page story about a possessed lawnmower and grafting it on to an existing screenplay in an attempt to hang on the coat-tails of the King brand. It’s probably not the worst ‘King’ film out there, but in terms of the outlandish gall of the producers, it deserves its place on this list.

Anything with ‘Children of the Corn’ in the title, with the exception of ‘Children of the Corn’ itself. (1993-2001)
The first CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984) is actually a pretty decent little film, with Peter Horton and a pre-Terminator Linda Blair trying to escape a cult of eminently spankable children who have murdered all of the adults in their small Nebraska town in sacrifice to the barely seen He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Alas, He Who etc etc was not finished and has, to date, influenced his way through six (six!) sequels of varying degrees of failure. 1993 brought CHILDREN OF THE CORN 2: THE FINAL SACRIFICE – a title with about as much accuracy as FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984) or the Final Fantasy series of console games (thirteen main titles and countless spin-offs so far). This sequel was more or less a remake of the first. CHILDREN OF THE CORN III: URBAN HARVEST (1995) attempted to shake things up by having the exact same thing happen, only in the city. CHILDREN OF THE CORN IV: THE GATHERING (1996) sounds like it should be a crossover with the HIGHLANDER series, which raises images of a creaky Christopher Lambert beheading children.

Soon afterwards we received (no, really, you’re too kind) CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR, a title which vies with the immortal BABY MONITOR: SOUND OF FEAR (1998) as the most un-terrifying horror/thriller title ever. Clearly the filmmakers couldn’t resist CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666: ISAAC’S RETURN (1999) which brought back the evil brat from the first film (although the title may leave simpler viewers wondering how they missed the 660 films between this and number five), and finally the series was rounded off by CHILDREN OF THE CORN VII: REVELATION (2001) which, to date, has been the last of the series; although a remake is threatened for 2009.

It’s this maze of sequels, TV remakes and straight-to-video quickies that have tainted concept of the Stephen King film. King himself is hardly blameless, of course, as he’s taken the money and run on all occasions apart from THE LAWNMOWER MAN. But then, who wouldn’t? In the right hands, great movies based on King stories can still be made as THE MIST (2007), slightly over-played ending aside, shows. Despite his talk of retirement following his critical collision with a van a few years ago, King continues to produce novels and short stories of varying quality at a remarkable rate, and the films keep coming. 2009 may well bring films of BAG OF BONES, CELL and OF A BUICK 8, with rumours of a production of his epic DARK TOWER series and a remake of IT also floating around. As horror fans we’ll be stuck with King adaptations until there’s nothing left to adapt, so we may as well get used to the uncertainty that comes with them. And when there’s nothing left to adapt? Well, there’s always the sequels, and the remakes. You know, he was right all along, sometimes they really do come back…

The Rapid Eye

Short stories

The Feeding Process

The Green Clearing

A New Europe

Exclusion Zone

Stare

The Rapid Eye

Where Giants Go

Fragments

Milk & Sugar: A Controversy

The Ascendancy – a fragmentary history

The Weight of a Carrot