Tom: I confess I didn’t make it through this. With Salem’s Lot, the first post-Carrie attempt to film King, they tried that latter approach, turning it into a two-part miniseries for CBS. They’d be required to either significantly adapt the work for the screen, or make 3 hour films. King’s later works would nearly quadruple that word count, making adapting for the screen a problem for the studios.

As a novel, Carrie comes in at under 200 pages, and not a lot happens between a couple of big events. One of the problems with doing that–setting aside creative issues–was the sheer length of King’s other works of that era. The film version of his first novel, Carrie, had been a tremendous success with critics and at the box office, and so adapting more of his work for the screen was a no-brainer. His run of work in that era–The Stand, The Shining, and a short fiction collection–made him a household name.

Tom Chick and Chris Hornbostel, October 22, 2013Ĭhris: By 1979 there was no bigger name in horror in any media than Stephen King.

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