It’s that special time of year. There’s a chill in the air, pumpkin spice flavoring is being pumped into all matters of food and beverage, and people everywhere are spending their evenings and weekends watching nightmare-inducing cinema. I am, of course, referring to Spooky Season – and if you find yourself presently on the hunt for movie recommendations, a legend of the genre has a killer one for you, as Stephen King has named what he sees as being the scariest horror movie of all time.
That’s just the lead story of this week’s edition of The King Beat, however, as this feature also digs into thoughts about diversity in Stephen King’s stories from Salem’s Lot star Alfre Woodard and news about stars who have joined Glenn Powell in director Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man – the latest upcoming Stephen King movie set to go into production. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s dig in!
Stephen King Argues For George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead As The Scariest Horror Movie
For years, Stephen King and writer/director George A. Romero were wonderful creative partners. Not only did their collaboration yield some excellent genre fare (including 1982’s Creepshow and 1993’s The Dark Half), but fans will forever be able to speculate and wonder about the adaptations they wanted to make together but couldn’t make work – including visions for The Stand, IT and Pet Sematary. There is a forever link between the legacies of the two men, and it got a bit stronger this week, as King has named Romero’s seminal film, 1968’s Night Of The Living Dead, to be the scariest horror movie of all time.
In advance of Halloween, Variety is publishing a series of features from guests writing about their favorite scary films, and Stephen King selected the title that reinvented the cinematic concept of the zombie. In his piece, he argues that picking a “scariest” movie is subjective based on age, as he felt that superlative belonged to director Robert Wise’s The Haunting when he was 16, and as an adult, he fondly remembers being freaked out by The Blair Witch Project (highlighting the work’s “building sense of doom and those truly horrible last 35 seconds”). When it comes to the “overall” perspective, however, his choice is Night Of The Living Dead.
Made independently with a shoestring budget, Night Of The Living Dead was George A. Romero’s first feature film and a title that has gone from being a controversial release to being considered a cinematic classic. The story centers on a group of strangers who find themselves holed up in a farmhouse when dead people mysteriously start getting resurrected and attacking the living. The film famously features a combination of shocking horror and smart commentary on race and capitalism, and it has long been considered a genre staple.
In his piece about the film, Stephen King argues that time and pop culture have sucked some of the scariness out of Night Of The Living Dead, but it’s nonetheless a title that left him with indelible memories thanks to its grimness and minimalism. King writes,
In the end, no one survives. This movie has lost its elemental power over the years — has become almost a Midnite Madness joke, like ‘Rocky Horror’ — but I still remember the helpless terror I felt when I first saw it. And now that I think of it, there’s a real similarity to ‘Blair Witch,’ both with minimal or no music, both cast with unknown actors who seem barely capable of summer stock in Paducahville, both with low-tech special effects. They work not in spite of those things, but because of them.
If you have never seen Night Of The Living Dead, perhaps Spooky Season 2024 will be remembered as the holiday when you changed that. For what it’s worth, it’s exceptionally easy to find, as a mistake with the copyright in the development of the film has left it forever in the public domain (you can check it out right now on everyone’s favorite streaming service, Wikipedia). That being said, should you wish you watch the best widely available version of the movie, you I would recommend you pick up the 4K UHD release from The Criterion Collection.
Salem’s Lot’s Alfre Woodard Discusses Diversity In Stephen King Stories And Increased Diversity In The New Adaptation
To be frank, racial diversity has never been a particular strength in Stephen King’s writing. He does include some minority characters in his books, but the vast majority of his protagonists and antagonists are white, and there are multiple examples in his bibliography of him leaning on the Magical Negro trope (such as Mother Abigail Freemantle from The Stand, Speedy Parker in The Talisman and John Coffey in The Green Mile).
I had this history in mind late last month when I did the virtual press day for writer/director Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot and spoke with actress Alfre Woodard. In the new movie (which is now available to stream with Paramount+ subscription), Woodard plays Dr. Cody, who is a white male character from the book that is race and gender swapped for the film, and I used part of my interview time to ask her about the lacking diversity in the King canon. She acknowledged that the author’s heart is in the right place politically-speaking, and pointed to the fact that his writing very much reflects the environment in which he grew up:
This would be a thing for Stephen to comment on, but I'm just gonna say, because we are the same generation, and I know Maine – there weren't a lot of people of color in Maine. There are more now just because of some immigrant communities that come in, like to Lewistown and other places… I have a history in New Hampshire, and I think it might be 1.2% in New Hampshire. So, we write out of what we know. But this is the thing: I follow his politics so I know, you know, he's righteous.
Stephen King has long been directly associated with Maine, and Alfre Woodward makes a strong point that King’s book’s reflect the state’s demographics. According to the 2020 census, the population of Maine is 90.8 percent white and the Black/African American population accounts for just 1.9 percent.
Alfre Woodard’s Dr. Cody is one of two prominent Black characters in Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot – with the other being Jordan Preston Carter as young horror-obsessive Mark Petrie. Woodward had great praise for the energy her young co-star brought to the film and also spoke to the value of adaptations enhancing diversity among the characters:
One of the things that I liked about this, I thought of this as inclusive, this vampire story – the way it's cast, not about me, but about the young people, how they are vicious little Fs, even before they turn into vampire [killers], there are bullies… But I think that's why we tell stories, when we allow people that have the intelligence, the creative intelligence, to turn the Earth in a different way towards the sun. So we see the same Earth and the story is universal, but there's always so many aspects, if somebody has the intelligence creatively in this case, cinematically to do it.
Salem’s Lot is now streaming, so you can add it to your Halloween watch list along with Night Of The Living Dead.
Katy O’Brian And Daniel Ezra Have Joined Glen Powell In The Cast Of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man
It was all the way back in April during CinemaCon 2024 that Glen Powell was announced as the lead of Edgar Wright’s developing remake of The Running Man, but he remained alone on the cast list for a very long time. That being said, we’ve been expecting casting news ever since word came out during the summer that the project was aiming for a fall start of production, and we finally got some this week. There are still a lot of roles to be filled, but we learned in the past few days that the upcoming film will include Katy O’Brian and Daniel Ezra in its supporting cast.
Technically a remake of the 1987 movie of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the new adaptation of The Running Man is set to be a much more faithful adaptation of the book it’s based on (which Stephen King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman). The dystopian tales follows a man named Ben Richards who is desperate to find a way to make money so that he can support his wife and sick child. With no options available to him, he ends up volunteering as a game show contestant for the government-sponsored TV network, and he is selected as the newest “star” of The Running Man: a show that turns him into a targeted fugitive and sees his potential prize money go up the longer he can stay alive.
The Hollywood Reporter says that Katy O’Brian will be playing “one of the contestants on the show” – though it’s not entirely clear how that will work, as The Running Man only features one contestant at a time in the book. Deadline reported the Daniel Ezra casting, but the report doesn’t mention what role he landed. O’Brian just recently worked with Glen Powell in the new film Twisters and her other standout credits include Love Lies Bleeding starring Kristen Stewart, the Star Wars streaming series The Mandalorian and Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania. Ezra is best known for playing the lead in the football-centric CW series All American.
Filming on The Running Man is set to start soon, so we can expect more casting news in the weeks ahead. Paramount Pictures has announced that the movie will be arriving in theaters in a little over 12 months – specifically on November 21, 2025. It is one of three Stephen King adaptations currently set to appear on the 2025 movie release schedule (the other two being Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey and Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck), but we’re also still waiting for Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk to get a release date after completing production in recent weeks.
That wraps up this latest edition of The King Beat, but I’ll be back next Thursday here on CinemaBlend for a brand new roundup of the latest news out of the world of Stephen King. In the meantime, you can explored the history of King in film and television with my series Adapting Stephen King.
