Alamo Drafthouse Announces Special Stephen King Season
By Richard Whittaker, June 27, 2019, 6:00pm, Picture in Picture
There's only one reigning king of literary horror, and that's Stephen King, the genre-defining and genre-hopping master of the medium. With It: Chapter Two due this fall, the Alamo Drafthouse has just announced that this will be a King-Size Summer, with a special retrospective of his onscreen evildoing.
It begins in July in Austin with a themed month of Terror Tuesdays, including some films in the series only screening here. Yup, the ATX gets special screenings of The Dark Half (King's own response to being outed as having written several books under the nom de plume Richard Bachman, with an author haunted by his own sinister id); prophetic political horror The Dead Zone, written by King and directed by David Cronenberg; the monster mayhem of The MIst (complete with one of cinema's most astoundingly brutal and mean-spirited endings); King's excursion into chapter book territory with The Green Mile; and Drew Barrymore teaches the world what "pyrokinesis" means in Firestarter.
On top of that, Austin gets one of only two screenings for Brian DePalma's Christine and the original Mary Lambert-directed version Pet Sematary (the others will be at the Drafthouse's Brooklyn location) and feline fearfest Sleepwalkers (also showing in San Francisco). Sadly, we're not getting Carrie: you have to go to Brooklyn or Yonkers for that.
But what if you don't live in Austin? Don't panic. Four of King's cinematic brood will get releases across the entire Alamo empire: Throwback anthology horror Creepshow, with King turning into an alien shrub; The Running Man, the SF media satire starring Arnold Schwarzenegger from one of those Bachman books; coming-of-age drama Stand By Me, taken from the novella "The Body" in King's 1982 anthology Different Seasons; and Maximum Overdrive, King's directorial debut adapting his own short story, where killer trucks take over the world (about which King himself tweeted today, "Not a great movie, maybe, but the soundtrack kicks ass. Hard. AC/DC.") Hey, he ain't wrong.
Tickets and further info at www.drafthouse.com.
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