Stephen King’s Reign of Terror

Like a creature from one of his horror novels, he is both Stephen King and Stephen King Kong. Each of his 21 novels and three anthologies has been a best seller. There have been 17 movies in 13 years; at least five more are in the works. And even after three film flops in a row--”Firestarter,” “Cat’s Eye,” “Silver Bullet”--King still had enough clout that he was allowed to direct “Maximum Overdrive.”

King chooses a couch in his office, and prepares to chat up “Pet Sematary,” the new film he adapted from his 1983 novel. It has grossed more than $24 million since its opening two weeks ago. It has led the box-office race for those two weeks and enjoyed the biggest opening weekend ever for a spring film.

Despite his gangly slouch, his blue jeans and his battered, camouflage-colored sneakers, the interview has all the trappings of a papal audience--strict time limits, nervous handlers and orchestrated replies that thankfully devolve into the kind of spontaneity that drives speech writers mad. When King loudly denounces the interview itself as “a Paramount publicity gambit!” the handlers look as if they have just seen Cujo, or Christine, or It.

The effect is calculated. The 41-year-old King is not the down-home Yankee bumpkin he often presents himself as, but a media-savvy master of sound bites. “Anybody who’s ever worked making a horror film,” he says, “knows that the real bogyman is Jack Valenti,” head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, with which King has clashed over the nature of film horror. (Valenti’s office declined to comment.)

King later calls fellow horror novelist John Saul “schlocky--the Roger Corman of print.”

Some would grumble about the pot calling the kettle black. Yet King--himself often labeled “the McDonald’s of horror”--is more rambunctious than malevolent. Part of this is due to the comfort of his income: According to Forbes magazine, he earned $15 million in 1987 alone. But the rest is from giddiness over “Pet Sematary.”

While King has adapted his own stories before, this latest script was shot closest to the source--both literally and figuratively. “Twenty-four miles from my front door,” King says with a smile. “Twenty-four-point-two, actually.”

That was the distance to Blue Hill, Me., which stood in for the fictitious town of Ludlow, where a supernatural graveyard brings the dead back to life--though as an old local (Fred Gwynne) warns a newcomer (Dale Midkiff): “Sometimes, dead is better.” Directed by Mary Lambert (“Siesta”), the film is as horrific and genuinely disturbing as the book itself, which can be succinctly described as a parent’s primal nightmare.

King is pleased. “You get the feeling a lot of times that (film makers) don’t want you around,” he says, lighting one in a chain of cigarettes. “It’s kind of like: ‘You know how to write novels; we know how to make pictures. They’re oil and water and they don’t mix.’ But with ‘Pet Sematary,’ it was shot up the road and I got to know Mary Lambert and it was great! I was able to sit down with her and say, ‘Look, I don’t want to (mess) you up, I don’t want to hang over you. Just look on me as Mr. Goodwrench.’ ”

King’s conception of fix-it was to push for “the half-humorous spirit in the books. There’s always been a lot of funny stuff that’s played off the horror, because they’re just different aspects of the same thing.”

But film makers, he says, “want to concentrate on the scare element, on the gross-out element, on the suspense element. There are moments in ‘Pet Sematary’ I had to fight to keep in, and there are things in the rough cut that are not in the finished product.”

He describes, for instance, a scene where the newcomer’s 8-year-old daughter (Blaze Berdahl) talks about her departed younger brother (Miko Hughes). “In the final cut she says, ‘I have to keep his things ready for him; I’m gonna carry his picture and sit in his chair.’ But originally, she also said, ‘And I’m gonna eat his breakfast cereal even though it tastes like boogers,’ and, ‘God can bring him back if he wants to--God’s just like Inspector Gadget, he can do anything he wants to.’ I thought they were good lines,” King says energetically. “They were funny, and they gave it a kind of interesting jig-jaggy quality, where you don’t know whether to laugh or not.”

Actually, that has been an element of most of the King movies, though not intentionally. After the huge success of the first--director Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of “Carrie,” budgeted at $1.8 million and earning more than $15 million in domestic rentals--Hollywood began optioning King’s novels almost automatically. Yet after Tobe Hooper’s well-received TV-movie “Salem’s Lot” (1979) and Stanley Kubrick’s prestigious but erratic adaptation of “The Shining” (1980), the trend turned toward King as sausage rather than steak.

The movies, from a variety of studios, became ever more marginal and silly, with genre directors such as George Romero, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, and feature-film newcomers such as Fritz Kiersch, Daniel Attias and King himself generally working with budgets of $8 million or less. Some of the films turned profits--the critically castigated “Children of the Corn,” for instance, had a budget of $3 million and reaped $6.9 million in domestic rentals--but most were critical and commercial duds. The only hit was director Rob Reiner’s “Stand By Me” (1986), adapted from King’s non-horror novella “The Body.”

Still, producers keep coming back to King, knowing that the brand name brings in a pre-sold cult audience.

The novelist has mixed feelings about that: “Horror pictures are traditionally seen, and rightly so, as exploitation vehicles. They’re supposed to go out there, make the large percentage of whatever they’ll gross--word used advisedly--that first weekend. It’s a quick, dirty buck. They’re gonna do it on a shoestring. They’re gonna make what they can. It’s gonna drop 50% the second week. Three weeks later it’s gone. Four months later it’s on videocassette and we’re out, we’re home free.”

He doesn’t like it, but he understands it.

What King understands less so is the MPAA and its ratings board. A few seconds had to be trimmed from “Pet Sematary” in order to stave off an X rating: A scene where a demonic child chows down on the neck of a prone victim. “That’s, OK, I can understand,” says King. “But they made us change the poster.”

“We had an advertising campaign that the MPAA would not let us use,” says producer Richard Rubinstein. “It was a painting of the child, coupled with the line, ‘Sometimes, dead is better.’ We were told that this violates the core of the MPAA code relating to portraying or connoting kids in jeopardy--which is the core of this picture.” They substituted, says King, an adult character “with his brains hanging out. That was more acceptable!”

Bethlyn Hand, vice president of the MPAA’s Advertising Administration office, says that in the original poster, “the child’s eyes are rolled up. His mouth is open. He’s standing, but he looks dead.” In the approved one, the man “looks like he may have been hit on the side of the head, and there’s dried blood, but no gore.

“And,” she adds fervently, “saying that about a child: ‘Sometimes, dead is better.’ When? I want to know. When is dead better?”

Hand isn’t alone in her feelings; ABC-TV similarly objected to the novel “It,” which the network had planned to run as a fall 1987 miniseries. But as King says, accurately enough, “The whole book is about kids getting eaten by monsters!” Both “It” and “The Talisman,” which Steven Spielberg had at one point wanted to direct, are being developed as miniseries elsewhere.

“The Stand,” King’s pet epic about a futuristic plague, has been in development as a film for about six years. “The book’s going to be reissued next year,” he says. “Unexpurgated--400 pages longer. As far as the script, I’ve tried three or four drafts of it. It wasn’t working for me.” Screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg (“The Emerald Forest”) is now giving it a shot. The next definite King adaptation will be the $14-million “Misery,” with director/co-producer Rob Reiner rolling this summer from a William Goldman script.

That seems centuries away, on this spring morning. King is fidgeting, anxious to hop into his Blazer and get back to wife Tabitha and kids Owen, Naomi and Joe, to the converted loft where he does his writing, in the two-story Victorian home that is a Bangor landmark.

“What can I do?” he pleads near the top of his lungs. “I’m in such demand, man!” His tone is one of playful good humor. Like he says, that and horror may be different faces of the same thing.