BEYOND THE STEREOTYPE : Stephen King, Feminist?

With “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Dolores Claiborne” playing on the big screen, the Stephen King juggernaut rolls on. King, who has turned out 29 books and several volumes of short fiction, has now provided the groundwork for a whopping 28 feature films and six TV miniseries.

If lackluster horror films such as “Creepshow,” “Children of the Corn” and “Cat’s Eye” failed to take off, “Stand by Me,” “Pet Sematary,” “Misery” and “The Shining” were certifiable hits. Each of them broke $50 million in domestic grosses, feeding the conviction that King sells.

Recent feature films bearing his name have detoured from stereotypical King--the Oscar-nominated prison drama “Shawshank” is, at heart, a love story between two men, while “Dolores Claiborne,” a psychological thriller about a woman twice accused of first-degree murder, delves not into the supernatural but into the more commonplace terrors of child abuse, battered women, incest and frayed mother-daughter relations. But in the popular consciousness, the author has maintained, he’ll forever be viewed as pulp horror meister--a man who once termed his work “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries.”

Martin Shafer, president of Castle Rock Pictures, which distributed “Dolores Claiborne” and four other King films, recalls a comment King made to him as the author embarked on his first vacation in years.

“Stephen warned me that 35% of the critics will slam the movie just because it’s ‘Stephen King,’ ” Shafer said. “ ‘Remember,’ he told me, ‘it’s not Taylor’s fault.’ ”

“Taylor” is Taylor Hackford, who directed “Dolores Claiborne,” a $26-million movie that drew mostly positive reviews when it was released March 24. Prior to plunging into the project, the director acknowledged, he had little interest in reading King.

“I thought of him as a brand name . . . and phantasmagoric horror is not my metier,” Hackford said. “But in this book King puts the reality--not the fantasy--of horror under a microscope. . . . I found a humanity in King, a sense you could lift up the flesh and see underneath.”

What makes filmmakers snatch up King’s words as soon as they’re off the computer screen? Cineastes chalk it up to the writer’s uncanny ability to identify and zero in on primal emotions.

“King, more than (Tom) Clancy and (John) Grisham, has a sense of what buttons to push in the popular mind,” notes film critic-historian Richard Schickel. “ ‘Carrie’ was not only a story of supernatural telekinesis but every unpopular high school girl’s dream of revenge. ‘Claiborne’ presents an abusive husband driving an innocent woman to a terrible act, a police commissioner forever on her tail, a daughter grappling with repressed memory. . . . The movie is both a modern-day ‘Les Miserables’ and a feminist ‘Fantasia.’ ”

“Dolores Claiborne,” in fact, offered three strong female parts--mother (Kathy Bates), daughter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and mother’s demanding, aristocratic employer (Judy Parfitt)--at a time when such material is sorely lacking. On the face of it, the 1992 novel is a logical successor to the 1990 “Misery” (which won Bates a best actress Oscar) and to King’s 1992 “Gerald’s Game,” a thriller about bondage and child molestation.

“Women are usually presented as soft, romantic and sexy,” Hackford noted. “This shows us three unsympathetic, difficult, thorny, neurotic women . . . and why they are that way. It’s a strong feminist statement.”

Some say that King is locked in a horror mode from which he’s actively trying to disengage. Cosmopolitan magazine viewed his 1994 supernatural saga “Insomnia” as “a tender romance with sensitive and often funny portrayals of the ravages of age.”

A longtime King colleague agrees. “I think that King is a little afraid not to write horror and suspense,” he said. “Like Sylvester Stallone, he’s forced to give the public what it wants.”

Tony Gilroy, who adapted the “Dolores Claiborne” screenplay from King’s first-person monologue, also sees the man as a captive of his success. “King is a pop icon, the most prodigious writer since Trollope,” he said. “The price he pays for being Stephen King is not being taken seriously.”

If King is hoping for an image change, that time may be a while in coming. Late this year, New Line Pictures plans to release a sequel to 1992’s “The Lawnmower Man”--a virtual reality horror tale about a demonic gardener that was so off-putting to the writer he sued to have his name removed from the project.