Stephen King is perhaps the most adapted author after William Shakespeare, and it seems like since the 1970s multiple adaptations of King‘s work have been in the pipeline at any given time. Right now as Universal struggles with its multi-film Dark Tower adaptation, MGM and Screen Gems has commissioned Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (TV’s Big Love, also writer of the “new” version of the Broadway Spider-Man show) to script a new adaptation of Carrie, which was previously adapted for a classic 1976 horror film starring Sissy Spacek and directed by Brian De Palma. King has seen good (Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption), bad (uhhh… too many to list), and really-good-but-King-doesn’t-like (The Shining) adaptations of his work in his career, and as a regular contributor to Entertainment Weekly, the magazine asked him what his take was on a remake of Carrie:
I’ve heard rumblings about a Carrie remake, as I have about The Stand and It. Who knows if it will happen? The real question is why, when the original was so good? I mean, not Casablanca, or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, much better than the book. Piper Laurie really got her teeth into the bad-mom thing. Although Lindsay Lohan as Carrie White… hmmm. It would certainly be fun to cast. I guess I could get behind it if they turned the project over to one of the Davids: Lynch or Cronenberg.”
Reportedly the aim of Aguirre-Sacasa — who has already adapted King, writing a comic book version of The Stand — is to make a more “faithful” adaptation of Carrie, but as King himself said, the 1976 film was better than his original novel (and it takes a lot for an author to admit that). I have no doubt that a Carrie remake could be excellent, but I also can see it becoming one of those crappy horror films that are in and out of theaters and only turn a profit because they were so damn cheap to make. In addition, I don’t see either David Lynch or David Cronenberg directing this, so King’s out of luck there.
So readers… any interest in a Carrie remake?
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