The Stephen King Trifecta of 1983: ‘Cujo’, ‘The Dead Zone’, and ‘Christine’
The year is 1983. Sally Ride becomes the first American woman to venture into space. The Super Mario Brothers grab their first Super Mushroom, and the Star Wars trilogy comes to a “definitive” end with Return of The Jedi. But it wasn’t all lightsabers swishing and chittering Ewoks in the cinemas that year. One Stephen King had no less than three adaptations of his work unspool on projectors in the latter half of 1983, the most King films in a single year up until 2017 when IT Chapter One, The Dark Tower, Gerald’s Game, and 1922 were all released (albeit two on Netflix).
Stephen King had been a household name since 1976 when Brian De Palma’s acclaimed adaptation of Carrie pushed the already successful novel to four million sales and ensured that everything he wrote turned into literary gold. But it would be another few years before any more of his tales were translated for the screen, big or small. 1979 saw Tobe Hooper’s three-hour miniseries Salem’s Lot traumatize a generation of kids with a floating Ralphie Glick knocking on his brothers’ window in the dead of night.
In 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining arrived with a middling box office, a two-star review from Roger Ebert, and a very lukewarm response from King himself (we all know how wrong they were, although King’s objections are understandable). Now the film is now rightfully regarded as an absolute classic of the genre. All the while, King was knocking out bestseller after bestseller, with The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, and Christine coming in quick succession and cementing his place at the top of the horror heap. In 1982, King’s cinematic collaboration with George A. Romero, Creepshow, brought back the schlocky EC Comics horror sensibility, but only two of the five tales were based on pre-existing King material.
Cujo and The Dog Days of Summer
Cut to 1983, and Stephen King was hotter than the interior of a Ford Pinto on a sweltering summer’s day. While there were various films in development at the time, including Firestarter with one John Carpenter attached, it was Cujo that slobbered its way to screens first, under the steady hand of director Lewis Teague (who actually came on late to replace Peter Medak who left the film after two days on set). Teague was no stranger to rampaging animals, having helmed the John Sayles penned Alligator a couple of years prior.
The novel is one of King’s simplest in terms of plot. Donna Trenton and her son Tad are terrorized by the titular St. Bernard, while trapped in their car on a mechanic’s remote property. He was inspired to write the book after a similar experience when he dropped off his motorcycle to a rural mechanic whose St. Bernard nearly bit King. The author was also inspired by the single location setups of some of the TV movies of the time, a trend that would resurface in the 2000s with James Wan and Leigh Wannell’s Saw (2004).
At a scant (for King) 345 pages, the tale rips along on a tide of unbearable tension, as Donna must fight off the rabid animal and try to formulate a plan to escape and save her son. King does bog down the narrative somewhat with the subplot of Donna’s estranged husband Vic on a sales trip that does little to enhance the story. While King might have seen it as a necessary break from the action on the farm, these passages can feel a bit like filler and if anything, deflate the tension somewhat.
And then there was the ending. In the novel, young Tad dies from heatstroke in the car while Donna fights and eventually defeats Cujo. This came as the ultimate gut punch after all Donna went through to save her son and was controversial among his constant readers, who sent King many letters of complaint. His response was, ‘I’m not God. I just wrote the damned book. He died. I didn’t want him to die.’
Sensing a possible audience revolt, the filmmakers changed the ending so Tad survives. King, who, since his disappointment with the changes made to The Shining, has long since maintained that the books and films can co-exist as different beasts and was on board with the alteration. Donna was played by Dee Wallace after E.T. and The Howling, cementing her place as both ‘80s mom du jour and certified scream queen. The murderous St. Bernard was a combination of live animals, animatronics, and a man in a suit.
Cujo was released on August 12, 1983, a suitably warm time of year. Audiences would have been fleeing the hot summer temperatures in the cool cinema only to be put through another sweaty ordeal and ended up being the fourth highest-grossing horror film of the year. At the time, King said it was his favorite of the adaptations of his work because it was “big and bad and not very bright…it just stands in one place and keeps punching away.”
Welcome To The Dead Zone
The next Stephen King film that year was David Cronenberg’s icy adaptation of King’s seventh book to be published, The Dead Zone. The story is centered on schoolteacher Johnny Smith, who after a car crash, emerges from a five-year coma with newfound clairvoyant abilities. After helping catch a local serial killer and averting the death of an employer’s son, he comes into contact with Greg Stillson, an aspiring politician who, as Johnny sees in a vision, will go on to become president of the United States and order a nuclear strike on Russia, thus starting World War III.
The film had been in the works since the book’s release in 1979, but it wasn’t until 1983 that it came together after changing hands between production companies and various directors. Eventually, Dino De Laurentiis landed the rights and assembled a formidable team to bring it to the screen, appointing horror legend Debra Hill (Halloween) as producer and David Cronenberg (fresh off Videodrome) as director. Cronenberg was known as the cinematic purveyor of body horror, often exploring the fantastical and horrific effects of rage, lust, and technology (among other things) on the human body through films such as Shivers, Scanners, and Videodrome.
Cronenberg may have seemed like an odd choice for this film, but he nailed it, bringing a mournful sense of inevitability to the proceedings. Another interesting choice was the casting of Christopher Walken as Johnny. Walken was not quite classic leading man material, more prone to intense performances (The Deer Hunter), but he gives an empathetic performance as a man who wants to escape from his powers but finds out not only that he can’t but his collision course with Stillson is not only essential but also dooms him.
Despite the snowy climes and sinister goings on, there is a real heart beating there at the center of the film, and the audience feels Johnny’s plight, even as he morphs into a (well-meaning) lone gunman in the climax. The tragic nature of the lead character carried over into Cronenberg’s next film, The Fly (1986), with Jeff Goldblum’s doomed scientist Seth Brundle.
Martin Sheen pre-empts his West Wing days as a presidential candidate, but here with a real sense of menace. Despite all his smiles and handshakes, Stillson is another fearful bully hungry for power. In the end, Johnny fails to assassinate Stillson, but the wannabe president dooms himself by using a child as a human shield when the bullets start flying. Johnny dies but so does Stillson, by his own hand, having revealed himself to the world as the monster he truly was.
The Dead Zone was released on October 21, 1983, just in time for the Halloween season. While it received mostly good reviews (including a thumbs up from Ebert), the film didn’t make a huge splash at the box office. King said of Cronenberg that he “did one of the great jobs of his life. He got tremendous performances out of people.” The Dead Zone would be re-adapted as a TV show in 2002, with Anthony Michael Hall as Johnny Smith, running for six seasons.
Baby You Can Drive My Car
Then there was Christine. The novel was released in April 1983, thus making it one of the fastest to-screen transitions, if not of all time, then definitely for Stephen King projects. In fact, filming began days after the book’s release. On Stephenking.com, King talks of the inspiration for the book:
“One night as I was turning into my driveway, I saw the odometer numbers on my car turn from 9999.9 to 10,000. I found myself wondering if there might not be a story in an odometer that ran backward. The car, I thought, would get “younger” instead of older, finally collapsing into its component parts. The next day I started writing it.”
John Carpenter had been attached to the Firestarter adaptation for a while, having lined it up as his next film after The Thing (1982). But with that film doing poor business at the box office, Carpenter found himself out of a job. As if he was on some sort of Stephen King merry-go-round, the script for Christine ended up in his lap, care of producer Richard Kobritz (who worked with Carpenter on 1978’s Someone’s Watching Me! and produced Hooper’s Salem’s Lot).
But what seemed like a director-for-hire gig became a keenly felt teen drama mixed with the supernatural, as the nerdy Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) finds a new lease of life under the influence of the titular Plymouth Fury. The car’s origin story was changed from being possessed by the original owner to a fairly vague manifestation of evil upon its construction, with Christine injuring a factory worker and killing another.
Carpenter resisted the studio’s desire to cast Scott Baio and Brooke Shields in the lead roles, instead opting for the lesser-known but experienced Keith Gordon (Jaws 2) and Alexandra Paul. Kevin Bacon was also in the mix but was cast as the lead in Footloose instead.
One of the major set pieces in the book and film is Christine’s regeneration after being vandalized by the school bully Buddy and his gang. What could have been a silly effect in lesser hands, is a remarkable thing to behold on screen, with Carpenter employing a crumpling car chassis that was then reversed to create the illusion of a car magically repairing itself. Like the majority of his other films, Carpenter also scored the film with longtime collaborator Alan Howarth, layering their signature moody synths beneath Arnie’s downward spiral.
Christine was released on December 9, 1983, and was a modest success, grossing $21 million in North America and getting three stars from Roger Ebert, who was notoriously fickle when it came to horror films (he famously rallied against Silent Night Deadly Night but was a fan of Carpenter’s Halloween). What might have initially seemed a minor film in Carpenter’s filmography, Christine has risen in estimation in the years since. Carpenter was on a hot streak (in terms of craft if not box office success), putting out a film a year in the early ‘80s, and Christine benefits from his sure hand behind the camera. King himself was rather cool on the film in his assessment, saying of a screening he attended, “People just sat there. Nobody cat-called or laughed. It was like this dead engine. Every now and then it would cough and sputter a bit.”
1983: The Year of Stephen King Adaptations
In hindsight, 1983 can be seen as a banner year for Stephen King adaptations, with the three films here all managing to capture some of the essence of what makes his books so popular – realistic settings populated with earthy characters that have to deal with a force of evil (or nature in Cujo’s case). And with the quality dipping a bit in 1984 with Firestarter and Children of the Corn (both films are not without their charms but not to the standard of the previous year) they can be rightly held up as three of the best in a filmography that has since stretched to nearly 50 films and 30 odd television adaptations.
Long live the King!
Categorized:Editorials
