Last Updated on July 27, 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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