Stephen King And Clive Barker Got A Creepy (But Hilarious) Movie Adaptation You Forgot About

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It's a little baffling that Mick Garris' 1997 TV movie "Quicksilver Highway" is as obscure as it is, given its imprimatur. The movie was, after all, a very rare team-up between star authors Stephen King and Clive Barker, two of the horror genre's most prominent figures, and each responsible for miniature media empires unto themselves. 

King was always the superstar, of course, and films based on his work are plentiful and popular, but Barker, the "artier" of the two, was still the creator of "Hellraiser," "Candyman," and "Nightbreed," and still has a very healthy following of fans. And the two regarded one another with respect; the advertising for "Hellraiser" famously leaned on a quote from Stephen King wherein he said, "I have seen the future of horror. His name is Clive Barker."

"Quicksilver Highway" was a two-part anthology series about a creepy storyteller named Aaron Quicksilver (Christopher Lloyd) who told scary stories to the people he met on the road as a traveling showman. The first story he tells was based on the Stephen King story "Chattery Teeth," which is about, well, a set of toy chattering teeth that seem to be able to come to life. The second story he tells was based on Clive Barker's "The Body Politic," one of the tales from Barker's "Books of Blood" anthology. It was about human hands developing lives of their own and wanting to cut themselves free from their wrist-ly masters. 

The TV movie wasn't very popular, and only those of us paying attention to horror TV in 1997 might have noticed it. It might have failed because the tone was a little too whimsical to be taken seriously as a horror series. Living chattering teeth? Living human hands? It was a little cartoony. 

It also didn't help that the main character of "The Body Politic" was played by Matt Frewer, an actor who brings a lot of wild, comedic energy to his roles. Director Mick Garris and Frewer had previously worked together on the celebrated 1994 Stephen King miniseries "The Stand," in which Frewer played the bomb-obsessed Trashcan Man.

As mentioned, the Stephen King-inspired portion of "Quicksilver Highway" was based on the author's story "Chattery Teeth," first published in 1992 in Cemetery Dance Magazine. The story surrounds the well-known wind-up chattering teeth toys invented by Eddy Goldfarb and released on an unsuspecting public back in 1949. Goldfarb's teeth might be considered one of the central images of kitsch, and it's hard to take them seriously as a horror movie threat. In the story, a man buys a pair of chattering teeth shortly before he is accosted by a violent hitchhiker. The teeth spring to life and bite the hitchhiker to death. In "Quicksilver Highway," the protagonist is played by Raphael Sbarge. 

"The Body Politic," meanwhile, features some good hand-acting from Frewer. The original story was silly compared to Barker's usual bloody fare, featuring a revolution story about the hands belonging to a doctor staging a revolution. The hands have personalities all their own. While the thought of being attacked by your own hands might be scary, the image of human hands crawling around is less-than-threatening. One will immediately think of the severed hand Thing from "The Addams Family." "The Body Politic" strains to be about, well, a politic, but it emerges as something out of a sitcom. 

Given the brevity of the movie (it's only 90 minutes), and its anthology structure, one might suspect that "Quicksilver Highway" was a pilot episode for an intended anthology horror TV series. Your instincts would be correct. In the June 1997 issue of Fangoria Magazine, there was a brief explanation as to the TV movie's origin, and it seems that Mick Garris was indeed initially approached about making a TV series based on ghost stories and urban legends. Garris was the one who invented the Aaron Quicksilver character to serve as the Cryptkeeper-like host. The premise was that a guest actor would wander into Aaron's tent, and that same actor would star as the protagonist of Aaron's story. 

Garris wrote the "Chattery Teeth" short, but it wasn't enough to sell the series. When Garris brought the idea to Fox, they decided it should be a two-hour TV movie instead, and that's when "The Body Politic" portion was added on. The version of "Quicksilver Highway" audiences saw was, it seems, not ever going to be expanded into a proper anthology TV series. Frustratingly, when "Quicksilver Highway" made its way to DVD, the two stories were swapped, with "The Body Politic" coming first, and "Chattery Teeth" coming second. Given the larger scale of the Barker segment, this swap feels like it would make the movie anticlimactic. 

Mick Garris was well-known in the horror community, and "Quicksilver Highway" featured a few fun cameos. Veronica Cartwright plays a role, while Clive Barker himself has a cameo. John Landis also has a small bit, as does Garris himself. Is it worth seeing? By all accounts, it's okay. It's a must, however, for Stephen King and Clive Barker completionists.