"The list of novelists turned great film directors is not long - in fact, as much as I love the spectacle of Norman Mailer chewing on Rip Torn's ear and Torn going after Mailer with a hammer in Mailer's directorial effort "Maidstone," I feel pretty confident in saying that if you started counting examples on your hands, you'd run out of names before you'd run out of fingers. There's Clive Barker, whose "Hellraiser" is a straight-up horror movie classic, and William Peter Blatty, whose "The Ninth Configuration" and "Exorcist III" have inspired devoted cults."
"But that's about it - for whatever reason, most novelists who achieve success tend to stay in their lane, selling the screen rights to their material off to others to adapt and, often, mangle. Yet it was probably inevitable that Stephen King would at some point have to try his hand at directing, given both his massive popularity and his own passionate sense of cinephilia. This is the guy, after all, who at the height of his early popularity took time out to write "Danse Macabre," a critical study of the horror genre as a whole that celebrated all the movies King loved."
"By the mid-1980s, King was both a prolific source of inspiration for major auteur"
IndieWire After Dark presents midnight movies that honor fringe cinema in the streaming age. The focus centers on Stephen King’s feature-length directorial attempt, positioned as a “flop” and a genre outlier. The material contrasts the relatively small number of novelists who became notable film directors, citing examples across horror, cult, and international art cinema. It argues that most successful novelists remain in their lane, selling screen rights to others who adapt and often distort their work. King is presented as an exception due to his popularity and his deep cinephilia, including his horror-genre study “Danse Macabre.”
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