Friday Night Double Feature: King's Characters

1408 is looking to be one of the better Stephen King adaptations in quite a while. The story of a haunted hotel room is eerily similar to King’s early tale, The Shining but with a different twist to it. It just goes to show that a good author can manage to go back to the well and still turn up with something different.

Despite his reputation, King isn’t only a master of horror stories. While almost all of his stories still maintain a supernatural bent, sometimes King can be at his best when he’s not terrorizing his characters. That’s because King is good at developing characters, not just stories. I maintain my strong belief that once you have strong characters, the stories will follow.

Adaptations of King’s horror stories can sometimes lose sight of the importance of developing characters – especially these days when the next PG-13 thriller is right around the corner. It seems more important to deliver quick scares and gore, sometimes without any real rationale to it. Characterization gets thrown to the wayside. Perhaps this is why the author’s non-thrillers manage to make better movies. More people are familiar with Shawshank Redemption (#72 on the AFI’s recently updated 100 movies list) than the film adaptation of Thinner.

With characters, not genre, in mind – here’s a double feature of some of King’s best, or at least most interesting. Rather than get bogged down in heavy drama, we’ll continue to go with the quasi-guilty pleasure on Friday nights.

Misery

When we interviewed 1408 director Mikael Hafstrom, he admitted one of the difficulties in making the movie was telling a story with one person alone in a room for the bulk of the film. Misery isn’t that far of a departure from that. Instead of one person, the majority of the film is two people – captor and victim. It’s easy enough to make an audience sympathize with a victim. Lock him up, cuff him to a bed, and have the aggressor wail on him every so often and you have instant sympathy. But to create a captor who people sympathize with simultaneously – that takes talent. In King’s original novel you get the feeling that Annie Wilkes could be a normal person if she just got a little more love and attention. Instead she’s captivated and enthralled by the stories written by Paul Sheldon. But in the novel you get that inner voice – those added details to help direct the reader where the author wants. Kathy Bates manages to bring all of that through in her performance as the crazed Annie, while James Caan’s reputation as a tough guy makes the decision for sympathy a tough one for viewers to make… until Annie goes absolutely insane. Up to that point, however, Misery is beautifully complex with character.

Secret Window

Secret Window was perceived by many to be a step backwards for actor Johnny Depp. After all, he had just hit the mainstream attention with Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. Now he was going to return to a quirky, offbeat character? You betcha. Depp’s Mort Rainey is one of my favorite characters for the actor (although my vote didn’t get him into our Top 5 Depp character list). Here you have the epitome of the flawed man. Mort is a tortured writer who is so out of control of his own life he can’t even write. He loves his ex-wife. He hates her new husband, and somewhere in between he’s accused of stealing another writer’s work. Watching Depp’s character attempt to justify his own writing and figure out how to beat a threatening figure who seems to know Mort better than he knows himself is intriguing as well. Watching Secret Window in theaters kept me on the edge of my seat with anticipation and watching it again has been fun – discovering something new about the story or Mort every time I see it.

Other excellent Stephen King character tales: Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Stand By Me, Carrie (1976), The Shining (1997 miniseries)

Enjoy our Double Feature suggestions? and maybe we’ll use them in a future column.