Stephen King wrote The running man (published in Spanish as the wantedIn the early seventies (a decade before publishing it under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), he wrote the novel, setting it in the year 2025 in a dystopia where the underprivileged participate in risky television game shows hoping to escape poverty. The most extreme (and lucrative) of these is the one that gives the book its title, turning participants into fugitives who must survive the pursuit of relentless hunters and all the viewers hoping to earn a reward by reporting them. Now that the present has caught up with the chronology of the fiction, the prediction of a society absorbed by a harmful audiovisual culture seems accurate, but not particularly shocking.

The bulk of Francis Lawrence's filmography is monopolized by the franchise of The Hunger GamesAt first glance, no one would think of him as an author with recurring obsessions, but there is a certain poetic logic to his interest in bringing his work to the screen. The Great WalkPublished in Catalan by Males Herbes, an early Stephen King novel, also presents a dystopian scenario where young people are offered as sacrifices. However, in this case, we are not in a fantastical realm, but in an alternate version of the United States (to which the current context lends an undisguised Trumpian air), where an annual competition is held in which 50 young people (one from each state) are chosen for an endurance test meant to serve as an example and moral elevation. It consists of a march with rules as simple as they are merciless: the moment they falter or stop, a soldier will shoot them in the head. Only one walker can remain, who will receive a monetary reward and the granting of a wish.

While they were filming It: Episode 2The second part of the diptych adapting one of Stephen King's most important novels for the screen saw Argentine director Andy Muschietti and Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård begin toying with the idea of exploring the origins of the monster Skarsgård portrays in the film, the child-eating clown Pennywise. "We were particularly interested in his human side," Muschietti explained during the recent Sitges Film Festival. "The book mentions a man named Bob Gray, who would dress up as a clown and become Pennywise. At some point, It decided to take this form to wreak havoc, and that fascinated us." This fascination has now taken the form of a series on HBO Max. It: Welcome to Derry ((available with Catalan subtitles), in which he travels to the 1960s in the small town of Derry to expand the universe of the novel, but starting from "the crumbs that Stephen King leaves in the book for readers to pick up," explains Muschietti. The script is also inspired by "the interludes" written by one of the novel's protagonists, Mike Hanlon, who investigates Derry's history of violence and terror. "They are very enigmatic quests, questions that lead nowhere, but we use them to tell a new, secret story told in reverse," says Muschietti.

First act: The data, just the data (more or less). Chuck's Life is divided into three acts. Each one is of a different genre: an apocalyptic tale, a musical anecdote, and a coming-of-age story. In addition, this film, which adapts a book by Stephen King's kindest and most humanistic author (that of Count on me either The Green Mile) begins at the end: from the character's death to his childhood. And Mike Flanagan, an author accustomed to horror, debuts in a sentimental and fabulous fantastical register, which can remind The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Forrest Gump either Amélie.

As explained in the documentary King on screen, available on Filmin, director Mike Flanagan was very attracted to horror movies but they scared him so much that, at age 10, he decided to try horror books and read Item, by Stephen King. "It was a huge mistake," he recalls. "I didn't want to keep reading because I was so scared and had terrible nightmares, but I cared so much about the characters that I couldn't stop. And I realized that each chapter offered me an opportunity to learn to be brave. Because that's what horror is, a training in exercising courage in two. Horror and Stephen King became my hero," he explains.

When, in one of the first scenes of The monkey, a voice-over refers to the burden of a terrifying paternal inheritance, it is almost impossible not to remember that we are watching the new film by Osgood Perkins, the son of Anthony Norman Bates Perkins. This extra-filmic reading is kept alive when, in their crusade against a mechanical monkey that reveals itself as a messenger of death, the father and son who star in the film visit a motel that recalls the one in Psychosis. Furthermore, it must be said that this plot full of family traumas consolidates the authorial (cult) status of Perkins-fill, who in the magnificent Longlegs He has already composed a satanic fresco marked by the figures of an absent father and a deranged mother.