Sometime in college I was in a Barnes
& Noble and I came across a volume called The Stephen King Universe. I
was already a huge fan of King so I bought the book which was roughly 450 pages
in length.
The book confirmed what even the
most casual fans of King are aware of: King's novels, short stories and other
works all have Easter eggs (the term that hadn't become part of the cultural
zeitgeist in the early 2000s) that link to earlier King books. The writer
divided King's novels into seven universes most of which escape me but which I
suspect the average King reader will remember.
The most famous of these universes
is of course The Dark Tower series. The series wasn't completed ye (the
first edition of this book wasn't published until 2001) but even then it was clear
that this was the work around which all King fiction centered. It had already
been linked to The Stand, Eyes of The Dragon, Insomnia and one of
the stories in Hearts of Atlantis; after the book was published it would
be linked to The Talisman and Salem's Lot. There was also a category to Castle Rock which was the setting of four
novels, two novellas and several short stories.
Another sub-category were novels centered around 'The Shop', a
mysterious government organization that is at the center of Firestarter and
had already been linked to The Tommyknockers and the short-lived TV
series The Golden Years. You get the general idea.
There was a new edition published
late in the 2000s and it would not shock me if there's even a series of Wikipedia
pages at this point telling us how everything links together. But it does tell you yet another way why King
was ahead of the curve. There had been countless other authors well before King
who built their own stories that had common characters and small towns even
going back into the late 19th century when writers such as Arthur
Conan Doyle started it. But there's an argument that so many other authors in the half century
since King and indeed much of pop culture in the 21st century has
been built on the skeleton of what King began to provide in the world of
horror. It might be a stretch to say
that the MCU and all of ways that Star Wars and Star Trek built
interconnecting worlds couldn't have existed without King, but not a big one.
And its worth noting King was
basically doing this from the start of his work. Right after Salem's Lot was
published his first collection of short stories Night Shift contained
both a prequel of sorts and a direct sequel: Jerusalem's Lot and One
for the Road. The Shining was originally attended to be structured as a five
part novel to mirror the play Jack Torrance was writing and King originally
wrote a prologue titled Before the Play. (It didn't see publication to a
larger readership until it was published in TV Guide in the spring of 1997.) And while it's not a direct link to The
Stand King did write a prequel of sorts in Night Shift that deals
with an America devastated by Captain Trips, the superflu that wipes out
humanity in The Stand.
That said it makes a certain
amount of sense that there have been more movies and TV shows written about
King then perhaps any other living author by this point during the 20th
century and much of this one they've basically been self-contained. You can't
really blame the filmmakers or TV show writers for doing so both in the 20th
century and for basically the first decade of this one: unless a horror film is
a direct sequel (and King didn't officially do one of those until Black
House in 2002) even the best moviemakers didn't want to isolate their
audiences.
Unfortunately this would often rob so many of
the films of their soul. The most obvious example was Hearts of Atlantis. This
story is actually based on the novella Low Men in Yellow Coats and it
tells the story of Bobby Garfield and how he meets Ted in 1960. The story is
linked to the Dark Tower series something that becomes clear to the
reader by the time we reach the end of the book. (The link is made direct in
the final book in the series.) Unfortunately the writers tried to tell this
story and left out the importance of the Dark Tower to it. And without those
elements the story is kind of aimless and the film, while it had superb acting
by Anton Yelchin and Anthony Hopkins, didn't work at all.
Fortunately for filmmakers and TV writers
alike almost all the other King stories can work without these Easter eggs. You
don't need to know that Cujo and The Dead Zone take place in
Castle Rock to appreciate either film for what it works. There's an implication
in Cujo that the dog has been possessed by the evil of Frank Dodd, the
serial killer that Johnny Smith helps Sheriff George Bannerman bring to justice
in The Dead Zone, but the book works perfectly well without it and the
film does too. And while 'The Body'
technically takes place in Castle Rock there are no real characters or settings
that are so vital to it that you couldn't transfer all of it to Oregon as Rob
Reiner did so effectively in Stand By Me and you couldn't make a
masterpiece.
The problem with the less
successful King films I've seen in my lifetime (and there have been some
stinkers out there) is just how long many of his books are. To try and transfer a book that is at least
six hundred or seven hundred pages effectively into a two hour film (as was
horribly done in Dreamcatcher) is asking to much of the best filmmaker. Perhaps
that is why the best film adaptations of King over the years have been of
either his relatively shorter works (Carrie, Cujo, The Dead Zone)
novellas and short stories (Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, The Mist)
or operate in a single setting (The Green Mile, Misery). It also explains
my belief that so many of King's longer works were best done when adapted for
TV in the 1990 to the mid-2000s, most notably ABC's version of The Stand,
The Tommyknockers and King's version of The Shining. (I've made my
opinion on Kubrick's version clear, so I won't repeat myself.)
As we've entered the world of Peak
Limited Series in the past ten years it hasn't come as a shock to me that so
many of King's latest and even earlier novels have now been adapted in that
form. These included the adaptations of Mr. Mercedes, Hulu's 11/22/63,
The Outsider and MGM+ 's The
Institute. Telling stories in these
formats is the best way possible to get to the deeper parts of the universes
King has built. And it's for that reason I am so looking forward to Welcome
to Derry.
The Muschietti brothers absolutely
nailed the best way to adapt the magnum opus that is Stephen King's IT. You
make two separate films: one telling the story of the Losers as children, the
other doing so from adulthood. I had no problem with the time jump of starting
the novel in 2017 and the childhood in 1989; by this point King adaptations
have been moved to contemporary settings multiple times and while I did have issues with some of them, the
themes in many of King's books are universal enough for it to work. (I'm
looking forward to Mike Flanagan's limited series of Carrie for that
very reason.) There were quite a few changes that really did have to be made to
make it palatable (and no I'm not just talking about the excision of 'Love and
Desire').
So much of IT took place in
the sewers of Derry and there's no way that could translate well to today's
audience. (It actually kind of bothered me when I was reading it as a child.) There's also the fact that quite a bit of both
final confrontations are unfilmable. In 'The Ritual of Chud' the Losers end up
going into the sewers to fight It and they go so deep underground that
they seem to be journeying to the center of the earth and it gets bigger the
deeper they get. Perhaps this could have been done with CGI but not
convincingly. And I have to say considering that so much of the confrontation
in both versions is both mental and seems symbolic (honestly in the 1958
section I had no idea what Bill and the Losers had done to make it sure they'd killed
IT) that there's no way this could translate to the screen at all. (The 1990
miniseries managed to do a more visual version that was still flawed.)
All and all I came away from both
films with a satisfaction that the general story had been told. That said, I did
come away somewhat disappointed though I wasn't surprised the brothers hadn't
tried it.
In King's original novel,
somewhere between 200 and 220 pages take the form of a diary told by Mike
Hanlon as an adult. In these passage, which he acknowledges may be notes for a
history he doesn't expect to live to write, Mike tells the story of the sordid
history of Derry with all of the ugliness laid bare - and all of the monstrosities that Pennywise
has been responsible for. This is not a story Derry wants told and there's an indication
that the story itself has dangers. We learn that one historian who gave even a
hint of what was happening would later commit suicide.
In it Hanlon tells us some of the
stories that make up Derry's bloody and violent past, some of which goes back
even to the town's original founding. It's not just that children disappear at
a horrible rate during Mike's childhood, they happen every year. And he notices
the cycle that is critical to IT; every 27 to 28 years there is a huge
spike in disappearances and the murders of children. And every year, a
sacrifice and bloody event opens the cycle and another one ends up closing it.
If you've seen the movie you know
that in 1990 the cycle begins with the disappearance of Georgie Denborough. (There's
no pretension as to his survival in King's novel; Georgie's arm is ripped off by
Pennywise in the sewer in the first chapter.) By the time the books ends Bill
is aware of what the pattern is supposed to be: the Losers are supposed to be
killed by Henry Bowers and his gang and that will bring a stop to the violence.
They thwart the cycle by stopping IT.
In the 'Interlude' segments of IT
Hanlon mentions more than a few of
these rituals and sacrifices, some of which he has learned about from those in
Derry who are still alive and who are willing to talk with him. (There are not
that many of the latter.) The ones we hear about in great detail are ones that
happen in the cycle between 1929-1931 and 1904-1906.
The former begins with the massacre
of the so-called Bradley Gang. In it the good people of Derry arm themselves
with every gun possible and kill the gang in broad daylight in the street,
including two relatively innocent women. ("Couple of whores', a survivor says
casually.) The cycle comes to an end with a fire at The Black Spot, an night
club for African-American soldiers in Derry that is burned down by the white
populace. Will Hanlon is one of the few to survive – though he had help that wasn't
entire natural. (Readers of the book will know who and you may be seeing this
man again very soon.)
In 1904 a group of lumberjacks who
are responsible for massacring a bunch of men trying to unionize are massacred
by the sole survivors in a local bar called the Silver Dollar – while it is
full of customers who don't seem to notice people being chopped up not ten feet
away from them. In 1906 this cycle comes to an end with an explosion at the
Kitchener Ironworks while the Easter egg hunt is going on. Children's bodies
are found in a mix of blood and chocolate. No one can explain how even though
everything was turned off, the boiler still exploded.
All of these stories when they are
told by Hanlon are riveting on their own but it is logical that a film would
not touch on them. I didn't think even a TV series would do so. And that's why
I'm so looking forward to Welcome to Derry, which debuted last night on
HBO.
I won't be reviewing the series
here (stay tuned for the official review in the weeks to come) but the very idea
of it thrills the King fan in me to its core because in decades of watching adaptations
of King's work I don't know of anything like this that's been attempted before.
I have no doubt this wouldn't even
be tried were it not for the massive successive of Game Of Thrones and HBO's
attempts to replicate it with multiple prequels. (Yes I saw the trailer for Seven Kingdoms in the moments
before the series premiere.) To be sure trying to make TV series that involve
IP has been the kind of thing that HBO has been doing (and doing well) over the
last year. The Penguin was by far one of the best series of 2024 and while
I didn't see Dune: Prophecy there were enough good things told about it.
But even by those standards Welcome
To Derry is trying to be radically different. For one thing, this is going
to be a horror story above all else. More to the point, it's going to be one
that we know in advance is going to end badly and with nothing changing. Whatever happens to the young people in Derry
in 1962, they are going to fail and fail badly. They have to, otherwise the action in the film
is impossible.
You might think this would doom
the project. On the contrary I think its freeing. As I've written in some of my
television reviews prequels have the potential for a kind of greatness because
they have a fixed endpoint that most series just don't. And as a result they can create characters who
aren't part of the conventional narrative and whose fate we can become invested
in even if it ends badly. This worked brilliantly in Better Call Saul but
I've seen it work just as effectively in Bates Motel and Smallville and
its one of the reason I took the cancellation of Dexter: Original Sin so
hard.
There's also the benefit that
because of the sprawling nature of King's universe, both in this book and
beyond, characters that are relatively minor in some stories can become more
significant in other ones. In a sense this actually works better in IT because
of the nature of Derry. Because so many of the cycles involve families who've
lived in the town their whole lives you constantly see references to people
knowing they've lived through this before and keep seeing it.
There's actually an example of
this in King's book. George Denborough's body in found in 1958 by Bill's next
door neighbor, Harold Gardener. In the next chapter, 27 years later, Adrian
Mellon who is killed by gay-bashers is first found by Dave Gardener, a police officer
and Harold's son. There are other examples of this in the book, some in the
action, some in the Interludes. I can see this played out well in a prequel series.
Then there's the most daring and
original part of the plan for Welcome to Derry. The writers are moving backwards.
Season 1 is taking place in 1962, Season 2 (if it happens) will take place
in 1935 and Season 3 (the planned end date) will take place in 1908. Each
season is scheduled to end with a horrific event that is canon in King's books
though none have ever been filmed.
This experimentation in format is
unlike anything I've seen on television in my years of viewing and is
likely unparalleled in the history of the visual medium. And it's particularly
fitting for HBO which has done this thing multiple times in so many of the
dramas that made it great. David Simon famously said the main character of The
Wire was Baltimore and the camp was as much a character of Deadwood as
Al Swearengen or Seth Bullock. And
considering that King originally considering titling IT Derry it's
particularly fitting for a TV series to try and do so, particularly because at
one point Bill actually says: "Derry is IT."
And as we saw in the films there's
a larger truth to that. All of the horrible things that happened to the Losers
both in the past and the present were basically done with the larger citizenry
letting it happen. Welcome to Derry offers a chance to do something I'm
not sure any series has done before, even in the age of Peak TV: show how
monsters are passed down from generation to generation. Considering how much of
today's dialogue about America is about the evils of the past playing out in
the present, it will be fascinating to see this play out with a visual manifestation
of that evil.
And it's not like the underlying
themes of IT aren't relevant today even if you put nothing political in
it at all. Racism was, if anything, a bigger factor in King's novel then it was
in the films and to be clear parental abuse and bullying were even more
foul-mouthed and blatant then in either of the films. Indeed early in the book Henry
Bowers father carves a swastika on Mike Hanlon's door and while one sheriff
forced him to back down, local law enforcement lets his behavior pass.
If
anything the filmmakers toned down the menace then Henry Bowers and many
of his friends represented in the movies. In the film Henry only starts to
carve his initials on Ben Hanscom's belly and is egged on by his friends. In
the book, not only does he get the H on there but his friends are horrified by
how far he's gone and they actually seem relieved when Ben escapes. And in the
novel Henry engages in horribly racist and behavior that shows how insane he is
becoming with each passing year. We see another example with Patrick
Hocksetter, briefly seen in the film but a quick casualty. In truth, he's a psychopath
who has already murdered his baby brother and is keeping animals in a refrigerator
to watch them die before he is finally killed.
Child abuse is far more blatant in
King's novel. One of the characters is suspected of being murdered by his
father who regularly beats him and who has beaten his younger brother to death
before IT gets him. He is called one of
the missing because he disappears without a trace and his murder is blamed on
his father.
You could argue that King could
have been using the evils of Pennywise to talk about the real life horrors in America
in the 20th century. It's a stretch to go from saying that racial
attacks and gay-bashing can be influenced by an evil monster that manifests as
a clown but considering the world we live in today, again it's not much of one.
Again all of this is speculation
and I don't know the kind of reaction Welcome to Derry will cause. (I
have reason for optimism after the season premiere but I'll get to that later.)
I hope it does mainly because I am such a fan of King's work and because I do
believe that these kinds of series are the best way to tell the stories he's
been churning out for half a century.
Just as in the town of Derry itself, there's always something deeper lurking
just below the surface.
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