Tag: stephen king

When the Movie Outshines the Book

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3–4 minutes

I recently watched two movies. The book The Children of Men was published by P.D. James in 1992, and the movie was adapted by Alfonso Cuarón in 2006; Filth was written by Irvine Welsh in 1998 and adapted for film by Jon S. Baird in 2013.

Upon watching Children of Men, I came away feeling that the movie was better than the book – at least it resonated more to my liking. A person with other sensibilities may prefer the other. Taste is never universal. I understand that some people can actually eat seafood.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The book Filth was more typical in that it was better than the movie, although the movie was interesting in its own right; it still paled in comparison. I also found Trainspotting – another Irvine Welsh story – to be a good movie, but it still doesn’t quite live up to the book.

So where am I going with this?

I decided to consider what movies surpassed their source material. I chatted it up with several colleagues and came up with a short list of titles I suspect many have already encountered at least one or the other. I’ll mention where I disagree with the consensus position.

Here’s my rogue’s gallery of films that managed the rare trick of outshining their ink-and-paper parents. Note that this doesn’t represent the order of importance. It is sorted by IMDB film rating as of today.

Shawshank Redemption (Book: 1982; Film: 1994)

Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is solid, but Darabont turns it into a near-religious fable of hope, anchored by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.

IMDB Rating: 9.3/10

The Godfather (Book: 1969; Film: 1972)

Mario Puzo’s novel is pulpy, uneven, and bogged down with subplots; e.g., a chapter on vaginal surgery, no joke. Francis Ford Coppola elevates it into a Shakespearean tragedy.

IMDB Rating: 9.2/10

Fight Club (Book: 1996; Film: 1999)

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is culty fun, but Fincher sharpens it into a pop-culture grenade – stylistically explosive and endlessly quoted.

IMDB Rating: 8.8/10

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Book: 1962; Film: 1975)

Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is beloved but limited by its narrator’s hallucinations. Milos Forman widens the lens, gives Nicholson free rein, and makes Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched iconic.

IMDB Rating: 8.7/10

Silence of the Lambs (Book: 1988; Film: 1991)

Thomas Harris’s prose is serviceable, but hardly the stuff to haunt your dreams; Demme’s film, on the other hand, gnaws at your brainstem.

IMDB Rating: 8.6/10

Psycho (Book: 1959; Film: 1960)

Robert Bloch’s Psycho is a tidy pulp thriller. Hitchcock elevates it to a cultural earthquake: the shower scene, mother’s voice, the birth of the modern slasher film.

IMDB Rating: 8.5/10

The Shining (Book: 1977; Film: 1980)

Stephen King hated Kubrick’s icy interpretation, but cinephiles generally rank the film higher for its visual dread and Nicholson’s unhinged performance.

IMDB Rating: 8.4/10

Apocalypse Now (Book: 1899; Film: 1979)

Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novella is foundational but slight. Coppola transposes it to Vietnam and creates an operatic nightmare of war.

Apocalypse Now is the consensus masterpiece, and I’ll grant Coppola his fever-dream credentials. But here’s where I part ways with the choir: strip away the meta-theme and you’re left with a bloated war movie that mistakes endurance for profundity.

IMDB Rating: 8.4/10

There Will Be Blood (Book: 1927; Film: 2007)

Upton Sinclair’s socialist novel Oil! is didactic and sprawling. Paul Thomas Anderson cherry-picks a few ideas and creates a volcanic character study of greed and obsession.

IMDB Rating: 8.2/10

Blade Runner (Book: 1968; Film: 1982)

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is clever but meandering; Ridley Scott builds a visual and philosophical cathedral around identity, memory, and humanity.

IMDB Rating: 8.1/10

Jaws (Book: 1974; Film: 1975)

Peter Benchley’s novel is a soap opera with adultery and mobsters. Spielberg ditches the melodrama and delivers pure terror and awe.

IMDB Rating: 8.1/10

Stand by Me (Book: 1982; Film: 1986)

Stephen King’s second entry, novella The Body, is a touching coming-of-age tale, but Reiner’s adaptation injects nostalgia, pathos, and one of the best ensemble casts of the ’80s.

IMDB Rating: 8.1/10

Honourable Mentions

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Ballard’s High-Rise: When Brutalism Meets Behavioural Collapse

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I’ve been reading J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), a brutalist fever dream dressed in concrete and ennui. It’s a story that doesn’t so much depict a descent into chaos as suggest that chaos is the natural state, politely waiting in the wings until the lift stops working and someone pees in the pool.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

This isn’t horror in the Stephen King sense—there’s no room 1408 here, no haunted sheets or malevolent chandeliers. The building isn’t animated; it’s engineered. But like all great systems, it doesn’t need a soul to kill you. The real haunting, as ever, is society itself. Ballard simply does away with the need for ghosts and lets architecture and aspiration do the dirty work.

Compared to Crash—where characters make love to car crashes and each other with equal mechanical indifference—High-Rise has something resembling a cast. I say “resembling” because these aren’t people so much as archetypes on a descent escalator. There’s Laing, a kind of blank-eyed anthropologist; Wilder, who mistakes brute force for authenticity; and Royal, the man literally living in a penthouse and metaphorically in a delusion.

Do I care about them? Not in the slightest. But that might be Ballard’s point. Their motivations are as shallow as a puddle in the car park after the water’s been shut off. Much of the action feels contrived, like a staged rehearsal for an apocalypse that already happened.

And yet—isn’t that precisely what society is? A tepid soup of extrinsic motivators dressed up in motivational posters and mission statements. Nobody in the high-rise acts out of depth or conviction. They act because someone else did it first, because no one told them not to, or because the lift only goes so far down and what else is there to do?

If Crash explored the eroticism of the machine, High-Rise explores the nihilism of comfort. Ballard’s thesis seems to be that civilisation is little more than a thin laminate over our baser instincts—and once it peels, there’s nothing underneath but turf wars and brand loyalty to floor numbers.

The modern reader might recognise the high-rise in everything from gated communities to Meta’s metaverse: sanitised, stratified, severed from consequence. A self-cleaning coffin of convenience.

And, as in the United States today, it all comes heavily medicated and prettily lit—with lipstick, meet pig.