Stephen King Clarifies His Relationship With Mike Flanagan's Dark Tower Series After Reports He's Working On The Show

When it comes to adaptations of his books, Stephen King could be said to have two modes. The most common can be described as a hands-off approach: while he may be called on to approve certain decisions, he usually likes to keep at a distance – understanding his stories and the movies/TV shows based on them are independent entities. Other times, however, he gets directly involved by writing screenplays and teleplays personally. This week, there were reports that the Mike Flanagan’s The Dark Tower is a project that fits into the latter category… but sadly, we now have an update that that’s not actually the case.

An update about the developing adaptation of the western/sci-fi/fantasy epic is the lead story of this week’s edition of The King Beat – but it’s not the only headline, as I also have a special treat for all of you in the form of my recent interview with The Monkey writer/director Osgood Perkins. Without further ado, let’s dig in!

Big Bummer: Stephen King Says He Isn’t Actually Working On Mike Flanagan’s Dark Tower Series

As ever, it can be said that Stephen King has been active in recent years adapting his own books. For the 2020 remake of The Stand, he teamed with his son Owen King to write the finale (providing some closure to the story of Fran Goldsmith), and he also wrote all eight episodes of the AppleTV+ limited series Lisey’s Story. This history added credence to reports in recent days that he is taking an active role in the development of Mike Flanagan’s developing adaptation of The Dark Tower – but sadly, those reports have been revealed as inaccurate.

After headlines popped up all around the web this week sharing the “news” about Stephen King’s return to storytelling in Mid-World, the author took to his personal Bluesky account to explain that there has been some confusion about recent Dark Tower comments. King wrote,

The confusion can be traced back to comments that Stephen King made this week in an interview when he was asked about Mike Flanagan’s upcoming adaptation of The Dark Tower. Trying to play his cards close to the vest, King said of the project, “All I can say is it's happening. I am writing stuff now and I think that's all I want to say because the next thing you know, I'll stir up a bunch of stuff I don't necessarily want to stir up yet.” Ironically, that statement ended up accidentally stirring things up.

So, if Stephen King doesn’t have a hand in writing The Dark Tower adaptation, what do his comments mean? While I don’t want to be too presumptuous, I get the sense that the work he was referring to in the interview is the fact that he is currently working on a new sequel to his books The Talisman and Black House. While those tomes have nothing specifically to do with the adventures of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy, they do partially take place in Mid-World, and I believe that is the source of confusion from his brief statement.

Is this a big bummer? Most definitely… but I also won’t say that it’s the worst news in the world. After all, the situation remains that Stephen King is writing an ending to one of his best book series, and Mike Flanagan is still hard at work finally making an adaptation of The Dark Tower that is worthy of its source material. Constant Readers can be extremely happy about both of those things, and I’ll even put this out there: with The Dark Tower still very much in early development, it’s not too late for circumstances to change and for King to come aboard to do some writing on the series. Fingers can be kept crossed.

An Interview With The Monkey Writer/Director Osgood Perkins

In last week’s edition of The King Beat, I shared a portion of an interview I did with writer/director Osgood Perkins – specifically quotes about the original title of The Monkey, why the setting of the story changed to become contemporary, and the filmmaker’s personal history with the works of Stephen King. Now that the new movie is in theaters everywhere, please enjoy reading the rest of our conversation!

(The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

I felt like when I first heard about this movie last year, it was like, 'Oh, Osgood Perkins is making an adaptation to The Monkey and it's going to the Cannes Film Market.' And then it felt like the next day it was like, 'Oh, by the way, we finished production with this absolutely incredible cast and we're gonna be coming out in a few months.' Can you kind of just take me through the process of how the film came together and if that secrecy was on purpose?

I was given the opportunity to write the movie by the producers. They came to me. They had the property and they had a script that they didn't think was working very well. I read the script. I agreed; I felt like the script was very sort of serious and sort of somber. And that didn't ring true to me based on the Monkey's leer, right? Just the face of the monkey, which automatically kind of evokes in the viewer this uncanny sense of like, 'Oh, there's something weirdly funny but gross about this. I don't know how I feel about this thing.' So I wanted to go that way with it. I wrote it. I wrote it before I wrote Longlegs. It sat around for a while. It was at a studio that kind of didn't really fully... I don't think wanted to do it that way. They didn't want to do the version that I had. They kinda wanted it to be, I think, a little bit more serious or something. And so it just took a minute to find its home and its people. And once I'd made Longlegs with all these great folks, we just kind of said like, 'Well, shouldn't we just go and do that all over again? And we have this wild other trip, which is so different. Let's kind of keep running the table a little bit.'

How much did your adaptation kind of change over time? Is it something that you move away from the source material with each draft, or do you already have a firm idea of how you're moving away?

I would say that the finished movie is more or less the first draft of the script. And I'm happy to say that given that I connected with the material on a personal level, and I could see it clearly from early on. That's not always the case. Anybody who tries to create knows as many things or more end up on the floor or in a drawer and just don't happen and can't find themselves. But every once in a while things align really pretty well, and energetically they work, and what you see is what I had. I found it early and I stuck with it.

I may be reading too much into it, but for example the lawnmower kill; I just immediately thought of Maximum Overdrive. Are there little sprinkles in there of other references…?

I think there's no such thing as reading too much into it. You're reading into it what you see, which is the point. I make a movie and I give it away to the audience and then it's yours to do what you want with. The lawnmower may have been Sinister instead of another Stephen King thing. Names of everything were Stephen King things; the relationship with the babysitter was a Stephen King thing; and just the texture of families, fathers and sons, a lot of it came out of Stephen King's On Writing more than anything I think. I was writing about King as opposed to his characters.

I also like the girl bullies. I thought that was just a fantastic touch.

Girl bullies in the bathroom, that definitely was Carrie for sure.

I'm curious about just the construction of the monkey itself. How many were there and were they fully functional?

We had, I think four monkeys. One was fully animatronic – did everything, is controlled by a professional puppeteer with like a Sega Genesis remote control kind of situation where it can do all the various things. It can spin the drumsticks, it can smile, not smile, half smile, big smile, play the drum at different speeds, one arm up, all that stuff. That was our precious hero monkey that we shot the out of from all angles at all times. Then there was one that was sort of tossed around-able, and then there was one that we could bash around, one that we cut up, right? One that kind of came apart. Its arms were magnetized to its body, so you could pull those off and parts of them. So I think there were three in total. It might have been a fourth kinda shitty, shabby one that we might've burned or something. But there were three, and we just designed it... I wanted it to have the classical look. I didn't think it made any sense to go away from that thing that that I feel like people see and automatically feel this weird feeling about – this uncanny kind of fear of this toy monkey thing, which I think for some reason is in the collective unconscious. So we wanted to be honest to the classical rendition. And then I just had brilliant people build it.

Given that this is such a departure from the previous work you've done, what other like exploration are you interested in, both within the horror genre and beyond it? And also, would you be interested in tackling another Stephen King story?

I think if I was gonna do something Stephen King, I'd wanna do something like Creepshow that sort of is like a anthologized little blips, little short stories, little moments, little kind of gags that feel playful. I love the construction of something like Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt and things like that. I think that's hard to do and has been done badly or just kind of missed a few times by people. And I think I'd like to try that. And then otherwise I feel like what's happening is we're sort of getting back – we, me and my collaborators – we're sort of zooming out from horror a little bit, right? Like Longlegs is kind of like horror central, but it also was sort of funny. And now we're in this thing where it's like this absurd surrealistic comedy, and then the next movie we have, Keepers, is this sort of like very small personal almost for grownups horror movie. And so I feel like we can kind of continue to boom out and kind of distance ourselves from like pure horror and start to wonder how it mixes with other genres and sort of wonder how it can be more expansive. Because it's a pretty expansive genre. It's sort of the most expansive that there is.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of The King Beat, but as always, I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next Thursday with all of the latest news from the world of Stephen King, so stay tuned.