Everyone's talking about an interview given by Stephen King to the Los Angeles Times, in advance of today's opening of 1408, a thirller starring John Cusack and based on King's short story (David Hudon rounds up reviews here). In the interview, King has big praise for so-called "torture porn" auteur Eli Roth, as well as some pretty harsh criticism for the highest-brow film adaptations of his work. To quote extremely liberally:
Eli Roth is a tremendous talent...There's something going on in "Hostel 2" that isn't torture porn, there's really something going on there that's interesting on an artistic basis. Sure it makes you uncomfortable, but good art should make you uncomfortable.
[..]
If you've got a movie where some girl gets cut in half, like in Hostel 2, here's the thing, we don't want that to happen to her. We get to understand a little bit about who she is, the character is pretty well drawn, she's lonely, she doesn't really know how to make friends and somebody's nice to her and she ends up in that situation and is going to be killed by somebody who's paid to do it. But we don't want it to happen. And if you put us in the situation, here's a chick in a slasher movie and we know she's going to get carved up and that's what we came to see, well, that puts you in the same position as some psycho out there cruising the interstates of America looking for road kill And that to my mind if immoral.
[...]
I don't like movies that are cold. I don't like movies that approach it like an exercise. A movie, for instance, where say Jack Nicholson and his wife are trapped in a hotel and you don't feel any love between them, you don't feel any caring, it just becomes sort of an exercise. And that bothers me. I think things should be hot, they should be involving, and you should feel a real sense of love and caring for the characters and want them to get out of there. It goes back to the slasher porn thing, I don't want to go to a movie and root for the people to die. I want to go to a movie and root for them to live.
The author himself might rank The Shining towards the bottom of the roughly 12,000 Stephen King cinematic adaptations made over the past 30 years, but I'd imagine that most film fans would disagree. To that end. IFC's Alison Willmore has mocked up this handy chart. Iinspired by New York Magazine's Approval Matrix, it places 20 King films (including a certain Kubrick flick) in the proper quadrant based on its overall crap factor in relation to the director's artistic aspirations.
In terms of convergence between art and brilliance, Willmore places The Shining on top, while King's sole directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive, lands squarely in the realm of unambitious crap. But it's not all bad news for Uncle Stevie (as King obnoxiously refers to himself in his Entertainment Weekly column)--at least his movie beat out all seven Children of the Corn flicks.
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