Stephen King is terrified of being called corny

Master storyteller Stephen King and his go-to filmmaker, Mike Flanagan offer insights into their new film, The Life of Chuck.

Stephen King and Mike Flanagan at the premiere of The Life of Chuck during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024. Picture: Mathew Tsang/Getty Images.

‘From the hearts and minds of Stephen King and Mike Flanagan.”

That’s the feel-good hook being used to market a collaboration between the biggest names in horror. Based on a novella by King, The Life of Chuck is a movie written, directed and edited by Flanagan.

Its centrepiece is an exuberant five-minute dance sequence. And yet – being a Stephen King story – the R-rated movie’s message about embracing life involves a locked attic door that hides horrific things. There’s also a world-ending disaster mysteriously tied to a guy named Chuck, played by Tom Hiddleston.

The Life of Chuck was picked up by the Neon studio after it had won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

King, 77, has seen his stories adapted for the screen dozens of times. This year alone brings four movies and two TV series. Flanagan, 47, emerged as one of the author’s most trusted interpreters with the 2017 movie Gerald’s Game, a take on King’s 1992 novel about a woman who finds herself trapped under her dead husband.

“Mike was one of my go-to guys at that point,” King says of the filmmaker, who followed up with the 2019 film Doctor Sleep, based on King’s sequel to The Shining.

Now Flanagan is shooting a Carrie television series set in the present day, and he’s in the development phase of a TV adaptation of King’s epic book series, The Dark Tower. In a joint conversation on Zoom, King (who asked to be called Steve) and Flanagan discussed the risks of positivity, new varieties of fear and their mutual sobriety.

The Life of Chuck is being promoted as a life-affirming story. Is it nice to take a break from being masters of horror?

King: It’s not like I’m saying, “oh, people are gonna see Stephen King in a brand new light!”. The thing is, I’m terrified of reviews that say, “this is corny”. But I have a strong belief that joy is also a valid exploration. In the story, there are a lot of things that are very unpleasant, including a man’s decline from a brain tumour. But you have to understand that moments of joy are also a part of the human experience.

Flanagan: I think a lot of people are on guard to positivity because the world is scary and cynical, and happiness has been very artificially manipulated for advertising.

King: You can see a movie like Taxi Driver, which shows the very bottom part of human nature, and that gets fantastic reviews because people say, “oh, it’s a slice of life!”. But there are slices of life that are sweet as well. And I should know, because I’m just lucky to be here.

Do you still have flashbacks to your near-death experience? (In 1999, King was struck by a vehicle while walking in Maine.)

King: It’s really hard to remember serious pain and trauma. If you believe in God, then it’s God’s mercy that we forget what it’s like to feel pain. I can remember coming to in that ditch and seeing the side of my blue jeans poking out because a bone had come through my leg. When I wrote about the accident in On Writing(published in 2000), it was very clear to me. Writing opens a door inside to your memories.

The dance scene between Tom Hiddleston’s Charles and Annalise Basso’s Janice is the centrepiece of the 2024 film The Life of Chuck. Picture: Dan Anderson/Neon

Steve, you’ve written extensively about primal human fears. Are new kinds of fear being created in the 21st century?

King: There is a certain amount of real fear now, I think, about the end of everything. In The Life of Chuck, there’s a character who says “We’ve been through the five stages of grief, and we’ve gotten to the final stage, which is acceptance”. That was new for me. It wasn’t like there was a monster or something to fight. It’s the numb feeling that everything is unravelling, and in response you just kind of go, well, what the f..k.

Flanagan: I read The Life of Chuck in April 2020, right when it came out, a month after the lockdown. The first part made me incredibly sad and anxious, because I felt like the world was ending outside my window. While Steve is always writing about different kinds of horrors – existential, human, supernatural – he’s also writing about the people who stand up to them. The book It isn’t just about this shapeshifting demonic clown, it’s about the friendship between the children who band together against it. I think his readers understand that these aren’t horror stories, they’re stories of courage.

Steve, what was it like to see the dance scene you wrote in the story on screen?

King: I just love dancing. I was a big Fred Astaire guy and, Mike, I think I sent you a clip of all these people dancing to Footloose. It just always makes me smile.

Flanagan: The success of the entire film hinged on that sequence. If we didn’t deliver a dance number that truly was explosive with joy, the movie wouldn’t work. So we gave it the first five days of the shoot and made sure to get a terrific choreographer in Mandy Moore. Tom and (co-star) Annalise Basso would run the whole sequence with our drummer, Taylor Gordon, then change out of their sweat-soaked clothes, put on dry ones, and do it again. Annalise lost a toenail on the third day and didn’t tell anyone because she knew we would stop. After doing it for days, they probably danced it 100 times, and at the end something happened that never happens – a perfect take.

Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise in the 2017 film It.

Mike, you’ve been sober since 2018. Steve, your family had an intervention for you in the 1980s. Have you discussed sobriety as something you have in common?

Flanagan: A year after I had gotten sober, I texted Steve to let him know that his Doctor Sleep in particular had really helped me finally get there. If The Shining is about alcoholism, Doctor Sleep is about recovery. And he said, “Oh, what a coincidence”, because it was his 30th sober birthday.

King: In October of 1988, I was watching the Red Sox in the (Major League Baseball) playoffs, and I thought, well, nobody’s here in this hotel room except me, I’ll get a six-pack. I drank half of a beer and I put the rest out in the hall, and that was my last drink.

Being a writer means having to silence the negative voice in your head. Steve, does that hypercritical voice still talk to you? And if so, what does it say?

King: It says a lot. I just finished a book, the third book in the Talisman series. As soon as I sent out the draft to the readers I trust, I regretted it because I was convinced that somebody would call me up or send me an email and say “Steve, this is gibberish. This doesn’t make any sense at all”. I’m also afraid, as I get older, of (losing) the ability to communicate, and I really don’t want to continue in decline. So, yes, there are fears, there’s insecurity, there’s always a sense that your work is not good enough and that you’re not living up to your abilities. And there’s always this feeling, too, that time is getting shorter. You only got so much, so please make it worthwhile.

Your fans would be mad if I didn’t ask about the status of the TV adaptations of Carrie and The Dark Tower.

Flanagan: For the Carrie series, I spent yesterday dumping buckets of blood on to people to see which were too red or too orange or too syrupy or too light. And then I came home and opened up the Dark Tower scripts. Steve and I have been back and forth on drafts of numerous episodes of the show. That’s in a good place, but The Dark Tower is an oil tanker of a project.

Mike, what does Steve say when he pushes back on something you’re doing? 

Flanagan: I don’t think we’ve really hit that crossroad. I had nightmares about how Steve could potentially feel about what we might do to Doctor Sleep, because he had such a storied history with (Stanley) Kubrick and how The Shining came out.

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining (1980).

Shelly Duvall as Wendy Torrance in The Shining. "

Steve, your dislike of that movie has attained mythical status. Have your feelings about it been blown out of proportion?

King: I think I’ve said all I have to say. I don’t like (Jack) Nicholson in it. Shelley Duvall turns into this sort of scream machine, and it’s very misogynistic. Man, I guess you could just say I didn’t like the movie. I think it’s cold.

Flanagan: The first time Steve and I met in person, I sat next to him in a theatre in Bangor, Maine, watching Doctor Sleep, which was one of the scarier days of my life. But Steve seemed so pleased with it, and he said it actually kind of warmed up some of his feelings about The Shining. Then Kubrick’s estate got in touch and said they also loved the movie. I said to my wife, if they’re all happy, the movie could crash and burn at the box office and that’d be fine – and then it did. I jinxed it completely. But Steve wrote to me that Monday to help put into perspective the difference between success and an opening weekend box office ­report.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Life of Chuck will be released in Australian cinemas on August 14.