Brody’s haunted gaze dominates new Steven King adaption
Stephen King’s stories allow a skilled filmmaker plenty of leeway. Jason and Peter Filardi, who have adapted Chapelwaite from Jerusalem’s Lot, prove to be highly proficient on this score.
Adrien Brody as Charles Boone, a 19th century ship’s captain who takes possession of a family home in Maine that locals believe to be cursed. Stan
Chapelwaite is based on Jerusalem’s Lot, a 1978 short story by Stephen King, America’s veteran monarch of horror pulp. Like most bestsellers, King is a patchy writer – but this hasn’t prevented his books from being turned into an endless stream of Hollywood movies, some of them as good as Carrie (1976) or The Shining (1980).
Although King found his first inspiration in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, he has never matched the earlier writer’s ability as a master of the so-called weird tale. Where Lovecraft created an entire mythos of the supernatural, King gives us a comic-book vision of pop culture vampires, ghouls, ghosts and gremlins.
