Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 18

Free Day:

The Other Christines

on the Assembly Line

Even by the early 1980s, one would have been forgiven for thinking of Stephen King as a fiction factory. Christine was King’s thirteenth published novel to come off the assembly line. Since the release of Carrie in 1974, King had published seven other books under his own name and four under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. 

By 1983, King was a household name, and his brand of horror had changed the literary landscape. The movies hadn’t quite caught up with Stephen’s output, however. By the time of Christine’s (the book) release, Hollywood had adapted only four of his works: Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma), ‘Salem’s Lot (1979, Tobe Hooper), The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick), and Creepshow (1982, George A. Romero).

(Only Carrie and The Shining could be considered true “Hollywood” pictures. Tobe Hooper’s ‘Salem’s Lot was a two-part miniseries for CBS television — which was still seen as “lesser-than” when compared to movies — and Creepshow was an original screenplay written by King for Romero and producer Richard P. Rubinstein’s independent production company Laurel Entertainment. Pittsburgh ain’t Los Angeles, Blog-o-weeners.)

After Christine’s publication, that number would more than double over the next five years. During the 1980s, King was ubiquitous — bookstore shelves groaned beneath the weight of his bibliography, cinema screens ran red with movies that ran in the black. Heck, even innocent TV viewers weren’t safe:

John Carpenter’s career, too, began in 1974 with the release of his science fiction comedy Dark Star. In 1978, he re-wrote the rules of both horror and independent filmmaking with Halloween. His career seemed on an ever-upward trajectory with popular and critically acclaimed hits such as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Fog (1980), and Escape from New York (1981). That is until the release of his remake of Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World (1951). The Thing (1982) was (at the time) a misstep. Deemed to be too downbeat for the audiences that made Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial such a hit, Carpenter’s gory film has since been reevaluated and is now considered to be a classic of the science fiction/horror genre.

Come 1983, Carpenter’s career was a bit wobbly. Two other projects that he had in the pipeline — adaptations of another of King’s novels, Firestarter, and Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja — were delayed. (Neither would be released under Carpenter’s guidance.) Carpenter needed the work; Richard Kobritz (Christine’s producer) needed a director. The two men had previously worked together in 1978 on the made-for-TV movie Someone’s Watching Me.

Along with screenwriter Bill Phillips, Carpenter began the job of adapting a novel that hadn’t even been published yet. The film’s budget was just under $10 million, which was less than what he had to work with on The Thing, but more than he spent on all of his previous movies combined. (The average film budget of an independent movie in the early 80s was around $2-3 million. Even big movies in 1983 — Return of the Jedi, for instance — had small-ish budgets of around $30 million. Peanuts when compared to the dollar-gobbling behemoths of today.) Still, the budget was small enough to allow Carpenter what he values most as a director: freedom.

I think Carpenter’s Christine is a model of efficiency when it comes to adaptation. Anytime you are charged with turning a 526-page book into a 110-page script (following the industry standard of one page equally one minute of screen time), you are going to have to make some hard choices. From the get-go, Carpenter and Phillips show that they are unafraid to make those hard choices. Within the first minute, they clear up the confusion of where the evil resides in the story. Throughout Blog-o-ween, I’ve been trying to figure it out — is it LeBay or Christine? Carpenter and Phillips cut through the knotty issue by showing us that it is Christine herself. To the pulsing boogie backbeat of George Thorogood and the Destoyers’ “Bad to the Bone,” we are shown that even before leaving the assembly line (which was merely an abandoned furniture factory in Irwindale, CA) Christine just ain’t no damn good.

Other scenes, as well as characters, from the book are combined and compressed to fit the film. Arnie’s confrontation with Buddy Repperton happens on the first day of school before he’s even found Christine. (Good work, Buddy, for getting expelled on the first day — that’s gotta be a record.) Roland D. LeBay and his brother George are smooshed together into the actor Roberts Blossom. Leigh’s near death experience happens at the drive-in not on the side of the road. There a more examples I could choose, but it all boils down to Carpenter’s ability to… well… boil down the story to its essentials. I think young filmmakers who are looking to adapt other media into a movie could do worse than study Carpenter’s work on Christine.

Christine did well enough at the box office. It pulled in around $21 million over seven weeks. Good, but not great numbers. Audiences liked it fine. Critics were relatively kind. Carpenter has been quoted as saying,

“I like it. I like it a lot. For reasons like the cast. I really dig them. And the car. It was fun. It’s not one of my favorites of mine, but that’s OK. It’s a good movie.”

Stephen King himself, sadly, said that Carpenter’s Christine and Kubrick’s The Shining were the only film versions of his work that had actually bored him.

Ouch!

There has been talk in recent years of there being a remake in the works, but isn’t there always talk of that? The last time Christine’s name rose from the graveyard of dead projects was 2023. Blumhouse Productions announced that they are developing the film with Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, etc.) as director. Nothing has happened yet. With the new Carrie remake doing well, maybe we will see Christine on the road sooner rather than later.

While Blumhouse gets its act together, we can enjoy other versions of King’s story. Sadly, there is no BBC Radio adaptation of Christine like there is for ‘Salem’s Lot. (I’m not sure how well an audio dramatization of Christine would work.) There is, however, a pretty good audiobook version from Simon & Schuster. (Look for it at your local library!) Holter Graham takes the wheel for the narration, and he does a pretty good job of it. He even attempts a Pittsburgh accent, most notably in the early scene where Arnie and Dennis change one of Christine’s tires in front of a house of yinzers. Not bad… but still not perfect.

I think if another audiobook is produced, then they should give the keys to Curt Wootton, better known on the internet as “Pittsburgh Dad.” He’d nail those accents!

There’s one last “adaptation” I want to talk about before we pull over and call it a night. The Stephen King Book Club has been creating videos on YouTube since 2022. They run the gamut from Top Ten lists to movie reviews to deep dives into characters and settings of King’s novels and short stories. Last year, they released a pair of videos about Christine. The first, entitled “Christine: Solving the Mystery of the ‘Evil Car,’” discusses one of the conundrums that I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of — namely, who is really in the driver’s seat: LeBay or Christine?

It is the channel’s second video that I want to bring to your attention. “A True-Crime Retelling of CHRISTINE: Stephen King's Cursed Car” is a pretty ingenious adaptation of the novel. Formatted as your typical true crime podcast, this video tells the story from outside the narrative of King’s book. I’d like to see more of this kind of approach with some of King’s other stories. One of my favorite audio drama podcasts of all time is The Black Tapes. This podcast had the feel of an NPR show, and it produced a lot of shivers up and down my spine. Man, a true-crime investigation into the events of The Shining, ‘Salem’s Lot, Carrie, or It could be a lot of fun.

You know what else is a lot of fun? Unwinding at the motel after a long day’s driving. I’ll order us food from room service, while you get to work on tomorrow’s reading: Part 2: Chapters 40 & 41. It’s Christmas Eve, and good ol’ Arnie’s luck finally runs out, Blog-o-weeners. That’s what you get, I suppose, for driving hundreds of miles all over the darn place.

That true crime rendition of Christine has me thinking of other pseudo-documentaries. My favorite ever is one that Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel aired back in 2012. Mermaids: The Body Found (and its sequel that aired the following year Mermaids: The New Evidence) follows the story of a scientific team's investigation into the source behind mysterious underwater recordings of an unidentified marine body.

It was all so silly, and I gotta admit that I loved it. (I thought it would make a great remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.) Those who bemoan the lack of skepticism in the culture and the deterioration of scientific eduction didn’t love it so much, however. Many who watched the shows were unable to separate fact from fiction and believed what they were watching was a factual documentary. I often wonder if politicians and the like pay close attention to these historical moments when the population is willing to believe anything so long as it is portrayed in a realistic manner. I mean, for those who are interested in pulling the wool over the electorate’s eyes, it’s a teachable moment and…

Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Nine — Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Well, Blog-o-weeners, we done did it. We made it through another Spooky Season together — albeit a condensed version of Blog-o-weens past. For the previous eight days we have indulged in the creepy confectionary treat that is Nigel Kneale. We’ve read his short stories, listened to his radio programs, and watched his tv series (and the motion pictures based on them). It’s been, I hope, informative and entertaining in equal measure.

For today, the ninth and final day of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, I’ve scheduled a trick of sorts. You’ll forgive me for my little joke, but it’s that time of year, is it not? The time for tricks? Instead of talking about another of Kneale’s typewritten triumphs, I thought we would discuss something that he considered to be a failure, something of which he was so embarrassed that he had producers remove his name from the script. As we’ve come to realize from having read/listened to/watched Kneale’s previous works, however, the past doesn’t just go away when you tell it to. You may think you’ve gotten rid of it or covered it up, but if you scratch the surface — even just a little bit — you find that it’s still there, waiting to be released.

Such is the case with Nigel Kneale’s work on 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

I’ve talked briefly about Kneale’s connection to Tommy Lee Wallace’s film before. Back on Silver Shamrock Day (23 October, don’cha know!), I gave as the reason for my creation of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale the fact that he was the original scriptwriter on the movie. Hired by Joe Dante (who was to be the director of H3:SotW), Nigel Kneale turned in a first draft that was to take the franchise in a new and decidedly non-Michael Myers direction.

Dr. John Challis is called in to examine a patient who has just been brought into the hospital. This patient, Grimbridge, is very agitated, very disturbed. He seems capable only of muttering the word “Samhain” over and over again. Challis places Grimbridge under hypnosis to calm him and get him to explain what has happened to him. Instead, Grimbridge becomes the locus of poltergeist-like activity and dies from sheer fright.

Challis teams up with Grimbridge’s daughter to investigate her father’s death. Clues lead the duo to Sun Hills, an isolated, self-contained Irish society far from the city. The entire town works for a single toy company, Silver Shamrock, and its charismatic owner, Conal Corcoran. Indeed, Corcoran is treated like a king by the community. Challis discovers that Corcoran is an adherent to pre-historic Celtic ritualistic practices. Corcoran has designed the logo on each Silver Shamrock Halloween mask to be triggered by the company’s television advertisement. 

Triggered to do what and for what end? Well...that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

Fans of H3:SotW will recognize much (if not all) that I outlined above. Indeed, much of what made it to the screen under Tommy Lee Wallace’s direction (and script rewrite) is there in Kneale’s first draft. We can probably go further than that and say that H3:SotW is really a summation of everything that Kneale was concerned with in his writing: the conflict between science/technology and the supernatural (“You Must Listen”, The Stone Tape), ancient practices/places that have survived to the present (“Minuke”, “Murrain”, “Baby”, Quatermass and the Pit). Quatermass II’s Winnerden Flats seems to be echoed in the Sun Hills community. Halloween III: Season of the Witch was to be a capstone of sorts, the culmination of Kneale’s work as a scriptwriter.

So what happened? Why do we not see his name in the picture’s credits?

As is so often the case in Hollywood, production-by-committee style thinking prevailed in the end. John Carpenter (who was operating as the picture’s producer) considered Kneale’s first draft to be just that — a first draft. Changes were asked for. Kneale acquiesced at first, cutting his script nearly in half, but after awhile, as more changes were demanded, he was unwilling to do them. What had been a more measured, psychological approach to the story was changed to reflect the demands of audiences of the time: more jump scares, more gore. As Kneale himself said:

“I asked [co-producer] Debra Hill if she could sell something like Psycho today, and she said, ‘No, the kids wouldn’t wear it. [sic] You’ve got to shock them every two or three minutes with any irrelevant thing, it doesn’t matter what.’”

So, Blog-o-weeners, it would seem that, like in Walt Kelly’s comic Pogo:

As more and more of his ideas were mutated, mangle, or just plain moved on, Kneale got more and more frustrated until finally he asked to have his name removed from the script. Representatives from the Writers’ Guild of America were confused. Normally, a writer will fight tooth and nail to have their name attached to a script — any script — and here was some old fool who wanted his taken off. “What it means is,” Kneale said, “you lose all the residuals, and people don’t like doing that. . .But I didn’t want this to have my name.”

So, in the end, Kneale’s name was taken off of the script and Tommy Lee Wallace’s was put on. Wallace himself has graciously said in many interviews that the final script was something like 60% Kneale and 40% him. It is not easy, however, to find where Kneale ends and Wallace begins. Indeed, what I would consider to be one of the most Knealean tropes in the final movie — the use of Stonehenge to power Silver Shamrock’s masks — is nowhere to be found in Kneale’s draft. Who knew?!

My favorite moment from H3:SotW comes when Cochran (as he is called in Wallace's film) lays out his plan to Challis (named Dan in the final script). The filmed version of Cochran’s monologue is chilling, but — as evident from this excerpt from Jack Martin’s (psuedonym of writer Dennis Etchison) novelization — there was much more to it. Here, perhaps, one can find more of what Kneale thought made Corcoran/Cochran tick:

“Children,” said Challis, his words slurring. “All the children...” 

“Yes,” hissed Cochran, “the children! A plague is on them. Now think of that in fifty million homes!” 

“Sacrifices,” said Challis. His cheeks were burning and his body quaked. Strong black-gloved hands restrained him. “To what pagan god, Cochran? For what purpose?” 

“God? What a quaint word! I am speaking to you of our way, the one way, the old way, as it was done long before your unshorn carpenter from Galilee chose to destroy himself on that rude cross. Do you know anything about Halloween, doctor?” 

“I do now,” said Challis. His arms nearly broke as he strained forward. 

“Tsk, tsk, my good man! Ignorance is such a convenient excuse for self-righteousness. No, of course you don't know. How could you? You've thought no further than that strange custom of letting your children dress themselves in morbid costumes and go begging for handouts.” 

... 

“It was the start of the new year in our old Celtic lands. We would wait in our houses made of turf. The barriers were down, you see, between the real and the unreal. The dead might look in, sit by our bit of fire. It was our glorious festival of Samhain. The last great one was three thousand years ago...” 

His eyes glazed with rapture, mirroring some previously unspoken memory. He continued in a faraway voice. 

“The hills ran with the blood of countless animals...and countless children...” 

“I don't want to hear this,” said Challis. 

“Oh, but you really should. It was part of our world, our craft.” 

“Witchcraft!” 

“Your term. To us it was a way of controlling our world. The only way. As it is once again.” 

Cochran glowered at the television equipment, the high-tech products which surrounded him. 

“All this has failed you and your kind, hasn't it, Doctor? You can't predict with certainty any event in your world, not even the rudimentary workings of your own bodies. Isn't that so?” 

“We try,” said Challis. “We're getting better at it all the time.” 

“But will time wait for you? I think not. Even my ancestors were left behind by the machinations of history. They had the power. But they lacked one ingredient: the harnessing and storing of that power. Which, ironically, is what you and yours have now provided. 

“Times have not really changed, my friend. The quest for control remains a constant. And now it's time again. In the end, we don't decide these things, you know. We are but a part of the great plan. Today the planets are in alignment, the moon is in syzygy, and it's time. That's all.” 

... 

“Tell me one thing first,” said Challis. “Why children?” 

“Do I need a reason? Oh, I could tell you that they are the easiest prey — and they are, you know. People nowadays no longer listen to them. They provide the easiest entry, the path of least resistance. What better reason, from a purely pragmatic view? But they are such irritating little creatures, don't you agree? You know that you do, deep down. They are as noisy as wretched sheep and twice as dirty, given to us from out of the filthiest part of woman. And you know what happens to dirty little lambs, don't you, Doctor? They are invariably given over to the slaughter.”

In this exchange, one can hear the echoes of Mr. Beeley, pig farmer and believer of the old ways, and Mr. Crich, veterinarian and deliver in modern science, from “Murrain”:

Beeley: All this talk! You’re tryin’ to prove there’s no such thing. Well, you won’t prove it to us. We know there is. They got you trained to thinking nothing’s true if you can’t find it in books or shove it in a bottle and analyze it! You work out the rules, and what the rule don’t fit, don’t happen! Then you find out you got the rules wrong!  

Crich: Then, we change the rules — 

Beeley: Oh, that’s handy! 

Crich: — for better rules. But we don’t go back! 

Chilling, absolutely chilling.

If you want to read more of Jack Martin’s novelization, you can find it here on the Internet Archive. You can also listen to this unofficial audiobook:

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is available on quite a few streaming platforms. You can also probably find it on the shelves of your local public library and — if you are so lucky — your friendly neighborhood video store. (They’re making a comeback, people!)

That’s all for this year’s Blog-o-ween festivities, kiddies. I hope you all enjoyed The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, and I hope that you will seek out some more of his work. I didn’t cover everything — you have to leave some mystery in the world, after all.

In the meanwhile, until next time remember:

Oh...and one more thing...

Blog-o-ween 2023: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

It’s time! It’s time! That’s right, kiddies, it’s that time again!

Well, maybe not quite that time yet. But it is time for another “Long Form Friday” (I think that’s the name we’re going with?) here at Blog-o-ween 2023 HQ. Time to dig into a slightly longer story in the form of a novella or novelette or novelinho or whatever cute diminutive you want to tack onto the end of the word “novel.” But not to worry, the stories we pick for Long Form Fridays (are we really sticking with that name?) are still of a manageable length so that you can get through them in a single, drawn-out reading session or over a couple of days. I mean, what else are you going to do this weekend? Chores? Exercise? Go out with friends?

C’mon! Who you foolin’?

Today’s story is about a group of friends who probably should have stayed home in bed reading. Instead, they head off to their local multiplex movie theater to pull a prank on a friend. Only they end up being the butts of their own joke. And now no one’s laughing.

Today, let’s grab some popcorn and a drink and sneak into the back of the theater to enjoy Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones.

“So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, we thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.”

Our intrepid (and just maybe unreliable) narrator, Sawyer, along with his friends Danielle, Tim, and JR, sneak a fully-clothed mannequin into the movie theater to fool their friend Shanna. Manny, as the mannequin is known (natch), was rescued from a creek bed years before by the group when they were in elementary school. He became just one of the gang, you know? But now it’s almost time to graduate from high school, time to grow up, time to be adults. So, the friends decide it’s time for one last blast for ol’ Manny. One last goof.

Only their goof doesn’t come off as expected. People don’t react to Manny sitting by himself in the theater like Sawyer thought they would. In fact, Manny doesn’t react to being in the theater the way Sawyer thought he would. At the end of the movie, Sawyer watches Manny get up and leave the theater with the rest of the crowd.

Uh-oh.

And thus begins the true terror of the novel as Sawyer takes it upon himself to be the hero of his story and “save” his friends. Yeah, there’s a reason why that word is in quotes. And I’m not going to tell you the reason. You’ll just have to find out for yourself.

Heh-heh-heh!

(Augh! Jeepers, that's creepy!)

Night of the Mannequins is a fantastic — in all senses of the word — story told in the slasher tradition. (Or maybe that’s should read the "slasher vein”? Heh-heh-heh!) We can talk about the slasher being a tradition now, can’t we? I mean, it’s been nearly fifty years since John Carpenter’s Halloween.

(And, yes, I know there are some of you out there who have a different idea of when the slasher began and who was responsible and you’re pushing your glasses up the bridge of your nose right now and scoffing, “Well, actually...” Can it, will ya? I gotta paint in broad strokes here, alright?)

I love when writers play with a genre the way a really great football team plays with the ball. Someone like John Carpenter sets down the size of the field and the rules and what not, and then along comes someone else, and they do things with the ball that you wouldn’t have thought possible.

Hmm...well...believe you me, when I say author Stephen Graham Jones is a baller. The man is well-versed in what makes a story a slasher. He writes a column about the genre’s “final girls” for Fangoria, for cryin’ out loud. He knows the rules. And, more importantly, he knows how to push against them, when to bend them, and when to break them. He’s like a horror version of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.”

Stephen Graham Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana, was born in 1972 in Midland, Texas. He is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

While earning his Ph. D. from Florida State University in 1998, Jones met a Houghton-Mifflin editor at a writers’ conference. Jones pitched her a novel, and The Fast Red Road became his dissertation and was published in 2000. Jones has since gone on to win many awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Bram Stoker Award. Currently, he is in the midst of The Indian Lake Trilogy, a series of books that follow the (mis)adventures of a young, half-Indian woman named Jade Daniels, who believes that her deep knowledge of the tropes of horror movies is the only thing that can save the people of her town.

Both the print and audio versions of Night of the Mannequins (and many other of Jones’s excellent books) are available at your local library. Check ‘em out!

Meanwhile, Blog-o-ween will be back here tomorrow with more seasonal stories for you to slash your way through. Although, if we’ve learned nothing else from horror movies, the characters who announce to the party, “I’ll be right back!” never seem to be right back, do they? At least not alive. Or in one piece. So, instead, maybe I’ll just say...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!