With the airing of last night’s action-packed finale, HBO has delivered a gripping climax to its ten-episode Stephen King adaptation, The Outsider. Focusing on a community rocked by a gruesome child murder, the show, like the book, was something of a genre-buster, tipping from police procedural in its first half into full-blown supernatural horror in its second half. Given its steady ratings climb and the finale’s post-credits scene, it’s possible that HBO will go The Leftovers route with The Outsider and continue the series with new stories beyond the scope of King’s novel. The mythology at play in the narrative might even allow the network to anthologize it, adopting a new cast and setting in its second season, as AMC did last year with its Dan Simmons adaptation, The Terror.
For now, however, the dust is left to settle around a stellar first season with a top-of-the-line ensemble cast led by Ben Mendelsohn and Cynthia Erivo. Developed by Richard Price — the author/co-screenwriter of Clockers and co-creator of The Night Of miniseries, among other things — the show adhered to many aspects of the book while also deviating from the source material in some notable ways. Price penned the majority of episodes, with executive producer Jessie Nickson-Lopez and novelist Dennis Lehane also picking up writing credits. Here, we’ll look back on the season as a whole and examine some of the changes they made in order to bring King’s vision to television.
Major spoilers lie ahead, of course.
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There’s a new Stephen King series coming our way: The Outsider, an HBO adaptation of one of the horror master’s more recent novels. The story concerns the investigation of a brutal murder with seemingly supernatural connections, and since it’s a Stephen King story, there’s a lot of spooky stuff going on. This new The Outsider featurette has the folks involved with the show talking about what makes a Stephen King tale so darn scary.
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Carrie, the first published Stephen King novel, has received several different adaptations, and even a sequel. Now it’s time for a TV series. FX is currently developing a Carrie TV series, but their approach to the material is going to change things up a bit. While all incarnations of Carrie White in the past have been of a cis white woman, FX is looking for a trans performer or an actress of color for their Carrie.
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Stephen King knows horror. He’s spent the last few decades at the top of the bestseller list, raking in mountains of cash by giving readers the creeps. While King’s tales of terror are loaded with the supernatural, the author understands that to make all those paranormal shenanigans truly terrifying, they need to happen to real, everyday people. The otherworldly needs to come creeping into our world, and make us realize there’s a night side lurking out there, full of things waiting to grab us.
Which is what makes King’s novel The Outsider, and its new HBO adaptation, so chilling. Adapted by The Wire writer Richard Price, HBO’s The Outsider is the ultimate tale of otherworldly nightmares creeping into our existence. It starts off seeming like a standard, if particularly gruesome, true crime story. And then the real nightmare begins.
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The Outsider is the latest Stephen King adaptation headed our way, and it looks to be a particularly good one. The HBO series starts off with an unspeakable crime – but a crime that appears to be open and shut. There’s a mountain of evidence pointing towards a guilty party. And yet…there’s also plenty of evidence that seems to point to that same person’s innocence. So just what is going on here? A new The Outsider featurette goes behind-the-scenes of the show with the cast and crew, including Stephen King himself.
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Stephen King‘s The Dark Half is getting a second chance on the big screen thanks to Alex Ross Perry. Perry will write and direct a new adaptation of King’s horror novel, which was previously filmed by George A. Romero. The story concerns a writer whose pseudonym comes to life and starts murdering people. The inspiration came after King’s own pseudonym, Richard Bachman, was discovered.
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Thomas Jane has three Stephen King adaptations under his belt already: Dreamcatcher, The Mist and 1922. Now, he’s ready to add another. Jane has teamed with producer Courtney Lauren Penn to form the content company Renegade Entertainment, and their first project is an adaptation of King’s From a Buick 8. A From a Buick 8 movie was announced last year, set up at Hyde Park Entertainment, but that’s no longer the case.
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Stephen King fans, if you haven’t been keeping up with Castle Rock this season, now might be a good time to do an emergency binge-watch. Like The Leftovers, Hulu‘s streaming series — which is set in the ever-expanding King multiverse — may have alienated some viewers in its first season, even as it managed to serve up episodes of great television like the Sissy Spacek showcase, “The Queen.” In the age of crowd-sourced show-solving, however, having some viewers fall away may have actually primed Castle Rock to do what The Leftovers did and get better and more wildly unpredictable in its second season.
So much of the buzz, these past few weeks, has been circling around HBO’s Watchmen that it feels like Castle Rock has been operating under the radar. The two shows premiered the same week in late October and have been progressing on parallel tracks. Both of them remix pop culture behemoths and they scratch the same itch for twist-filled, character-focused, mythology-rich TV (Watchmen‘s showrunner, Damon Lindelof, also co-created The Leftovers). Yet Castle Rock has been overshadowed at the water cooler by its sexier superhero cousin.
This week, showrunners Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason took advantage of that by springing a whopper of a revelation on their unsuspecting audience. In season 2, episode 7, “The Word,” Castle Rock blew the lid open on its own secrets, offering up the juiciest twist yet in a season full of them. It goes without saying that we are about to enter that camper in the woods, with the chamber known as the Filter, where the Voice of God whispers heavy spoilers.
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Time will be kind to Doctor Sleep, a bold, audacious, unapologetically sentimental horror film. The box office returns are paltry, and the film itself has its fair share of problems. And yet, Mike Flanagan‘s tender adaptation of Stephen King‘s novel shines because it’s so committed to embracing emotion. Stanley Kubrick’s cold, unfeeling, excellent The Shining jettisoned the sentimentality so prevalent in King’s work. Doctor Sleep attempts to reconcile this with Kubrick’s legacy.
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For all of the horrors he’s conjured up over the decades, Stephen King is really a big softie. Yes, he’s written stories about horrible, nightmarish things happening to innocent souls. But in the end, King is a writer who believes in humanity. He believes in hope. He believes in redemption. Which is probably why he was so damn furious when Stanley Kubrick adapted his novel The Shining into a film in 1980. Kubrick, brilliant artist that he was, was also the complete opposite of King. It’s unfair to claim – though many have – that Kubrick was a misanthrope with a disdain for humanity. But it’s fair to say that Stanley Kubrick’s movies were, all in all, unsentimental – an attitude that King has never ascribed to.
With all of this in mind, Mike Flanagan was facing an uphill battle when it came to adapting Doctor Sleep, King’s own sequel to The Shining, published in 2013. King’s Shining and Kubrick’s Shining share a basic framework, and several similar elements. But they’re vastly different works. And King’s Doctor Sleep is a sequel to his novel – not Kubrick’s film. What was Flanagan to do? Ignore one of the most talked-about horror movies of all time and stick with King’s text? Jettison King’s prose to remain true to Kubrick? Or find some sort of middle ground? With Doctor Sleep, Flanagan has opted for the third option. But can the diametrically opposed viewpoints of King and Kubrick truly inhabit the same space?
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