HORROR TEN SPOT: Top 10 Book 2 Screen

Last Updated on August 3, 2021

Got an email from AITH fan Eric Hirschi with the suggestion for this week’s list. It’s a great one, because we’ve all had a favorite horror story make it to the big screen and end up being a gigantic turd. It’s painful, and every time a great novel, novella or short story gets picked up for adaptation to celluloid it’s exciting, but also a little terrifying.
Even though cinema can never capture the depth, scope, and unique richness of literary description, there are films that have summoned the spirit of their source material so well that the result ends up as a damn good time. Hell, sometimes the result is even a classic.
For obvious reasons I held Stephen King’s entries on the list to one, although I applied no such restriction on titles with “psycho” in them. If I’ve managed to egregiously offend your literary sensibilities, then spit some bullets on just what you think got missed!

1. JAWS

Peter Benchley’s novel is very different from the genre classic that Spielberg eventually delivered to us. And y’know what? The movie is better. It gets rid of a variety of soap opera-ish small town sub plots and focuses on what matters – fear. Fear of an unstoppable, unseeable monster that wants nothing more than to chew us up and move on to the next meal. Benchley deserves credit for an interesting idea, but it is Spielberg, with a massive assist from John William’s score, that has f*cked up many a beachgoers psyche.

2. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Much like Nicholson changed the game in THE SHINING, Anthony Hopkins owns this film in a way that few have ever managed. It’s not that Hannibal Lecter was less important in the book, because he’s certainly the major force, but Hopkins does something that is traditionally an impossible task – he deepens the character in such a way that it surpasses the novel.

3. AMERICAN PSYCHO

Thank goodness for this movie, because I find Bret Easton Ellis nearly unreadable, but there’s a lot to like in his plotting and characterization. Since the flick allows those dense passages of obsessive description to become beautiful images of the right clothes, restaurants, and understandable obsession with the perfect business card, the movie works on a level that the novel’s excesses don’t allow.

4. HELLRAISER

You pretty much have to work from a Clive Barker short story or novella if the goal is to bring his writing to screen successfully. The depth and breadth of his novels simply does not suit itself to a single film. While the focus on Frank gets shifted, and his sexual exploration is kind of glossed over, the movie does an admirable job of capturing the soul of Barker’s prose, even if it does cut the heart out of the title.

5. PSYCHO

A victim of its own success, PSYCHO launched the slasher genre as well as hitting every one at the time of its release with a twist ending unlike anything horror fans had seen, but now is hard to enjoy because its famous scenes have been so thoroughly copied, satired and retread. The fact that it still retains any of its original power is a testament to both the strength of the source material, and of course, Hitchcock’s genius.

6. THE EXORCIST

Loosely based on an overheard “true” story, the movie manages to pace the book fairly well. Not all that surprising since author William Peter Blatty also penned the script. The downside is that a lot of the exposition in the film probably would have been cut by another adapter, so there are passages that drag a bit. But overall any fan of the book has to be thrilled with the cinematic result.

7. THE SHINING

Here we’ve got the most famous Stephen King adaptation from the most admired director that has tackled any of his work. CARRIE is a better movie, but with a flick as iconic as THE SHINING it’s tough not to give it the nod. True the movie itself is little more than a by-the-numbers ghost story with multiple plot holes and an absence of the character depth developed in the novel. However, Jack Nicholson is a force unleashed in this, and it appears Kubrick knew what he was getting and what he was doing. He can be forgiven for only taking the framework of a beautiful house since he purposely brought in a hurricane to destroy it.

8. BUBBA HO-TEP

Gotta love a Bruce Campbell starring cult classic born from a short story whose author didn’t even get his name on the cover of the original anthology it was published in. Oh, and writer Joe R. Lansdale ended up not liking what he’d written anyway. Which is too bad, because not only was the novella a great read from a sickly creative mind, but the film from Don Coscarelli captured the dark, quirky vibe perfectly.

9. ROSEMARY’S BABY

This is a great example of how some things that work on the page really don’t translate to film. Certainly the overall creepy sense of distrust that the movie captures through looks and environment is in some ways more viscerally satisfying than what’s in the book. On the other hand, the big reveal that Rosemary got knocked up by Satan is one of the more ridiculous scenes in horror movie history. Not JAWS IV ridiculous, but still.

10. THE BIRDS

Hitchcock took the birds run amok concept of Daphne du Maurier’s short story, but little else in bringing this classic to the screen. While the book is largely focused on a single farmer, the movie features a female protagonist, a host of supporting characters, and even an exploding gas station. All of which was pretty necessary, since no matter how cutting edge the filmmaking was, there’s only so much you can do to make birds scary.