Released in 2024, You Like It Darker is one of Stephen King’s best short story/novella collections (which is saying quite a lot when understanding that his bibliography also includes Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight and Skeleton Crew). Every terrifying tale is captivating in its own special way – but no title is as clearly cinematic as “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” which is why I’m over the moon that it is being adapted by The Rule Of Jenny Pen writer/director James Ashcroft.
I had the chance to speak with the Kiwi filmmaker late last week, and a significant portion of our conversation was dedicated to a discussion of Stephen King – including both his thoughts on “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” and the influence/impact of the legendary author on The Rule Of Jenny Pen (which is an absolutely terrific film and is now in limited release). This portion of the interview is at the heart of this week’s edition of The King Beat, and there’s a lot of good stuff, so let’s dive in!
The Rule Of Jenny Pen Director Is Adapting Stephen King’s Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, And I Couldn’t Be More Excited
When I read You Like It Darker last summer, I remember never wanting “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” to end. It’s a tremendous example of everything that’s great about Stephen King’s recent stories: it sets up a compelling mystery, features fascinating and complex characters, and manages to include a drip of the supernatural while keeping the majority of the tale grounded in reality. I could see the movie adaptation playing in my head as I read the novella, and I got the sense from James Ashcroft that he felt the same way.
News that the filmmaker was developing a Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream film found its way online a few weeks ago, so I felt compelled to ask Ashcroft about it during our conversation. He was upfront about not being able to say too much about project, but he also expressed a passion for the material and an excitement about digging into its themes:
I can't really talk too much about that, but I will say I love that story, as does [The Rule Of Jenny Pen co-writer] Eli Kent, who I work with. And I think it's a really special story. It felt both sort of classic Stephen King and very, very topical, very relevant, and also had a wonderful reflective quality to it. Like all those stories, actually, in You Like It Darker. So I'm very passionate about that story, and I hope to be able to talk more about that soon.
The titular character in “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is a custodian at a high school in Kansas who sees his entire life disrupted thanks to a random nighttime vision. He has a dream about a dead body buried at a gas station, and while he has never had any psychic events in his life, he can’t shake the reality of what he saw. Investigating details he remembers, he is able to find both the gas station and the body, and he does the right thing by alerting the police… but doing the right thing has rough consequences.
Unable to explain how he found the body without referencing the supernatural, Danny becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation, and the lead detective on the case, Franklin Jalbert, is more than a little unhinged.
James Ashcroft is currently working on an adaptation of the Alex North novel The Whisper Man as his follow-up to The Rule Of Jenny Pen, but we’ll hopefully learn more about Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream very soon.
The Rule Of Jenny Pen Director Discusses The Influence Of The Shining And Stephen King’s Response
Stephen King personally reached out to James Ashcroft about his interest in adapting Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, and the reason for that outreach is tied to the author’s love of the filmmaker’s latest feature. King had the chance to see The Rule Of Jenny Pen last fall around the time when it had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest, and he was effusive in his response – Tweeting that it was “one of the best films” he’d see that year and literally urging movie-goers to check it out. Before he took to social media with his public critique, however, he first sent Ashcroft a personal message.
James Ashcroft painted a wonderful picture of how he first learned of Stephen King’s appreciation for his work, saying,
It was uncanny because I was in Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, and I was standing in the horror section probably in front of King's titles along the shelf, and my phone pinged. And an email came up from Stephen, who wrote this very, very complimentary email. I swore really loudly. The woman behind the counter was sort of like, 'What's going on in the horror section?' And then, about five minutes later, my phone started blowing up with people going like, 'Oh, have you seen the Tweet? Have you seen the Tweet?' And I'm like, 'No, what Tweet?' And then I looked it up, and then I swore again.
More than being thankful for Stephen King hyping up his work, James Ashcroft was also generally thankful for everything that the author does to support other creatives. Those who regularly read The King Beat or follow King on Bluesky and/or Threads know that he is regularly posting messages about new movies and shows he is watching or new books he is reading. Ashcroft continued,
Incredibly generous of him, incredibly meaningful being a fan of his work and a long time reader. And what I do admire about King is that he has a long history of supporting emerging artists, whether that's in literature or film or the arts. And that's something he doesn't have to do, but he really does keep his finger on the pulse with what is in the world. And it's a Tweet that I've framed... literally. It's a wonderful endorsement. It's been incredibly helpful and advocating and supporting the release of the film too.
The connection runs deeper than just that, however. If one watches The Rule Of Jenny Pen with the work of Stephen King in mind, one can’t help but recognize overt influence from Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining (I won’t spoil the Easter egg hunt for anybody, but be on the lookout for the number “237” and a sequence involving old photographs). I specifically asked Ashcroft about the influence of the beloved horror film, and he didn’t deny anything:
The Shining has ruined hallways for anyone with a camera. You can't compete. It's a huge, huge influence on me. I remember seeing that when I was about 10 years old. And it was on TV one Saturday night and just sort of probably one of those very early examples where I walked away going, 'What did I just... like, what's this feeling?' It was just like being bathed in this feeling and ambiguity, and parts didn't make sense to me, my 10-year-old brain at the time. And there was the big question mark of what is the ending mean?
In The Rule Of Jenny Pen, Geoffrey Rush plays Stefan Mortensen, a cantankerous judge who lives in a rest home as he recovers from a stroke and finds himself tormented by a psychotic, sadistic bully named Dave Crealy (John Lithgow). Beyond the aforementioned Easter eggs, there are echoes of the infamous Overlook Hotel in the film’s Royal Pine Mews, as Ashcroft explained:
It's one of those enduring films that is so jam packed with a tone that is like stepping into a bath full of tar. There's no way that you can't get stuck. It drenches all over you. And the thing about the Shining is obviously the space and the emptiness of spaces that are usually populated and filled with energy. But when they're emptied out, the tone of those environments become a very, very charged, different thing. And that's what I loved about the idea of the rest home, is something that by day is very banal. It has a very gentile sort of facade to those hallways, those rooms, the environment. But at nighttime, it's quiet, it's deathly quiet, it empties out.
The internet has dubbed this kind of aesthetic “liminal space,” and it’s used with expert finesse by James Ashcroft in The Rule Of Jenny Pen. The world of the rest home feels relatively safe when residents are out of their rooms and in common areas, but those same areas become haunted when they are empty at night… with the exception of Dave Crealy creeping around. The director added,
The residents are very docile, and that is the world of Crealy; that's the world where he takes his docile mask off and runs amuck and knows those hallways inside out. That sort of contrast between lots of life filling a place and then it all being removed, and as that space changes in terms of its feeling and its isolation and loneliness, that's absolutely something that we always wanted to capture a feeling of.
The Rule Of Jenny Pen is now playing in limited release in theaters nationwide, and it will be available to stream for those with a Shudder subscription on an undisclosed date later this year.
Not enough Stephen King for you? Well, you can also check out my reports from earlier this week about the remake of Cujo now in the works at Netflix and Edgar Wright’s comments about Glen Powell’s performance in The Running Man (arriving in theaters in November). After you finish reading those stories, you can anticipate my next King Beat column, which is published weekly here on CinemaBlend every Thursday.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
