opinions on Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” are very well known by now. Although Kubrick’s film is often listed as one of the scariest horror movies of all time, King objected to all the ways Kubrick and his co-screenwriter Diane Johnson altered his original 1977 novel. King’s book was about a recovering alcoholic tragically losing control, while Kubrick’s movie was about how that same author was kind of inevitably drawn to ghostly evil. In King’s eyes, the film was less humane than what he had written. Many, many of King’s novels have been adapted to film and TV, and he usually prefers — as one might expect — the versions with higher levels of literary fealty.
King, however, isn’t so protective of his work that he wouldn’t mind seeing a striking and daring artist mess with it a little. Cast in point: King has said that he would love to see an adaptation of one of his stories handled by Danish troublemaker Lars Von Trier. He mentioned Von Trier by name in a 2016 interview with Deadline, saying that he would happily step back from anything King-related that Von Trier wanted to do.
At the time, Von Trier had just completed the third part of his so-called Depression Trilogy, which included 2009’s “Antichrist,” 2011’s “Melancholia” (starring Kirsten Dunst), and 2013’s “Nymphomaniac.” His films are hard-edged and often aggressively off-putting; they are meant to shock and disgust audiences. Von Trier is often accused of being adolescent in this regard, but his films also capture — quite accurately — the depths of depressive fantasies and the way depression moves.
Von Trier can also, however, assemble supernatural potboilers from time to time and might actually be a good fit for adapting Stephen King.
