King famously detested Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel about Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer and alcoholic who accepts a job as winter caretaker at the Overlook hotel in the Rocky Mountains, moves his wife and son into his immense, isolated, haunted locale, and proceeds to go homicidally mad. Pop culture might have shifted since Annie’s paperback obsession but the intensity of fan culture remains just as scary. Her seat-edge interplay with a never-better James Caan is a truly terrifying battle of wits, crescendoing in a scene of unforgettably well-orchestrated violence, a “hobbling” made even more horrifying by her profession of love directly after. A perfectly calibrated Kathy Bates, who remains the only Oscar winner for a King movie to date, alternates her romance novel-fixated antagonist Annie between sweet and sour from scene to scene, William Goldman’s canny script adding more complicated emotional texture to what could have descended into cheap hagsploitation. It’s a darkly comic thriller devoid of nefarious supernatural elements that instead weaponises a woman’s extreme loneliness and even more extreme entitlement to tell one of cinema’s most effective, and evergreen, stories of unhinged fandom. Based on King’s own wrestle with outraged fans struggling to accept his swerve away from books solely within the horror genre, Misery is another story that also exists outside of what we might typically expect from him.
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