I would like the latest adaptation of IT to work, I remember the TV serial film trying to make points I remember from reading Salems Lot and also reading interviews with King about his books.
I remember some stuff about how IT was not just a monster, not just the Clown, or the spider, I've not read the book so I dont know if the spider was a case of that popular internet meme "This isnt even my final form" (which I remember from the PS2 video game God Hand but it might have been old by then, I dont know) or something like used to happen in Dennis Wheatley books I read years ago when the action would transfer to another plane of existence, the astral plane, which sounds a little new age but Wheatley was writing during the interwar years and just after the second world war so far as I know.
Yeah, a spider was "as close as our limited human minds could perceive IT" according to the text. Although if anything, the Internet memes came from IT and similar things, since it was published in 1985 and the Internet really didn't start going mainstream until the early '90's and certainly graphic quality was very limited.
Anyway, there was stuff about the town itself, the townspeople, their willingness to be complicit in crime, to look the other way, a lot of failure to step up to the plate when evil or amorality was afoot.
There is a lot of stuff that happens in Derry, which King tracks through the 30 year cycle over a few centuries in the novel, and it's kind of like Pennywise and the town are complicit in some ways... the clown colors the town's attitudes and then natural human evil feeds the clown.
But "the small town going bad / being messed up" is a common theme in his works. every town has its stories and its secrets. So there was Tommyknockers, and Needful Things, and IT, and Under the Dome, and The Mist, and other works of his that hits on the small-town underbelly phenomena.
In Salems Lot King wrote about the idea of the "shunned house" and said in interviews that it was meant to be classic ghost story he was writing or a haunted house story, it was only after that that he became the "vampire writer" or "vampires author", I thought of King that way as a kid and all the book PR was about vampires when it came to King, I think its a little different now but I've seen other authors even continue to reference him as the "vampire author".
Interesting. I mean, King tackled vampires in Salems Lot but he was typically just leaping around from one paranormal/supernatural topic to the next in his books, mainly to explore various themes.
Anyway, King said in interviews that the "shunned house" idea to him was meant to be about why were there buildings or towns even which seemed to be magnetics for evil, was it about people around abouts who tolerated it or made it safe for them to operate, I'm not putting it right because it was something more than what I'm making it sound like because the way I tell it "evil" could be something as mundane as a bunch of hoods deciding the house at the end of the row is a good place to set up a meth lab or something.
yeah, it's not an explicit relationship. I think the "magnets / hot spots" of darkness is one way to refer to the concept. Those locales draw out the worst instincts of people, and our ability to look the other way because we don't want to be bothered or we also are tainted is another contributing factor. It becomes a tacit dark marriage of some kind.
Those are some of the things I like about King's writing that dont translate to well to film I think, besides that he wrote about how he thinks there is such thing as objective evil, I dont hear that often these days, I mean something besides merely human wrong doing or moral ambivalence or moral ambiguity and what I'd call wickedness. I liked needful things' antagonist and his talk about "we'll make headlines" because he was the source but it was people that were doing the evil if you know what I mean.
I always liked that about him -- maybe there are some externally evil things in his stories, things from outside humanity, but evil also comes from within. Good and heroism also come from within, although maybe there are some external sources of good as well (like The Turtle). Typically his characters are all fubar in some way, or at least have some taint -- what otherwise is known as "our humanity" -- but there's also wellsprings of good. Why do some people fight evil and why do others give in or even marry themselves to evil causes? You can even look at the good kids (the Losers club) in it, and the Bullies Club (or the completely fubar psychotic one-man club of Patrick Hockstetter, who is amoral and on his way to becoming a serial killer until IT gets his hands on him). The Losers club kids feel just as lost and victimized as the Bullies, yet they ally themselves with the good and the Bullies use their power to hurt others.
Apt Pupil did not get a good movie translation unfortunately; it was kind of interesting, I feel like Kurt Dussander (the old Nazi commander) gets a little more introspection than Todd Bowden, the young golden child who -- when he pieces together that the kind elderly Denker is actually a Nazi war criminal -- does not turn him in but instead blackmails him to feed his own dark curiosity. I could track Dussander a bit better; but Bowden seems to be a person who feels fair on the surface but is rotten in his core even as a child, and this rot finally grows to swallow him.
I'm watching The Mist, so far I'm not sure about it, I loved the film, absolutely and I loved the moral message about despair, but so far I'm not sure any of it really is transfering well to the TV series.
I was going to look at the show but my enthusiasm was deadened by lackluster reviews. I will probably watch an episode or two anyway.
I thought the film did a decent, albeit imperfect, job of capturing the novella; I just wish the special effects had been a bit better, they looked kinda like "discovery Walking With Dinosaurs" to me. It's really hard to capture King because sometimes he resorts to clichés (like the shrill old school religious nutjob) -- the thing is, those people are REAL, I have known a few in my life time especially growing up in Small Town USA, but King has a talent for writing them on paper that doesn't work as well on the screen if you do a literal transference... they just sound nutty rather than horrifying. It's one of the pitfalls of translating King to the screen, he's just got a way with the pen and he's really a literary, not screenwriting, talent.
[In comparison, a guy like Charlie Kaufman is a writer who works in scripts -- he writes and thinks in terms of script, not book.]