Stephen King’s Underrated Haunted House Series Only Exists Because Of Spielberg

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 2 minutes ago

Stephen King can pull a horror story out of anything. At one point in the book Faithful, where King and his friend Stewart O’Nan chronicle the 2004 Boston Red Sox season, he casually drops a potential horror plot based on watching a baseball game on TV. That it took him decades to develop a story based on a haunted house makes sense; it’s too obvious.

The 2003 miniseries Rose Red is his take on the classic horror setting, which embraces all the old tropes instead of The Overlook Hotel subverting them. King fans wouldn’t have that if not for Steven Spielberg outright asking the Master of Horror to write a story about a haunted house. 

A Classic Haunted House Story From The Twisted Mind Of Stephen King

The Stephen/Steven connection had been simmering for years when they finally teamed up in 1996 and started hammering out the script for Rose Red. Originally, it was going to be a feature film, and as King has discussed in interviews over the last 30 years, the project fell apart when Spielberg wanted to take the script in a more upbeat, positive direction, and King wanted it to be a terrifying horror movie. Simple creative differences kept the movie from ever happening, but the idea was out there, and through Spielberg’s simple suggestion, King had his haunted house script. 

Rose Red was broken down and rewritten into a miniseries, airing on ABC over the course of three days in January 2002, which is what television events were like back before streaming. The Rose Red of the title isn’t a person, it’s a mansion, think of the Winchester Mystery House if it were built on a large Native American burial ground. A professor specializing in psychic phenomena, Dr. Joyce Reardon (Last Man Standing’s Nancy Travis), assembled a team of academics and psychics (which includes the late Julian Sands, Yellowjackets’ Melanie Lynskey, and Bones herself, Emily Deschanel) to venture into Rose Red and unravel the mystery. 

Over the course of the three episodes, we learn the hidden history of Rose Red, and in typical King fashion, its true nature is revealed because nothing can be only a haunted house, or only a killer clown, there’s more to it than what it seems on the surface. The different investigators all have their own special powers, from talking to ghosts to telekinesis, but that’s little comfort when going up against a cursed building that’s been haunting a family for generations. Watching the ways various members of the investigation die, from encounters with spirits to literally dying of fright, it makes you wonder how Steven Spielberg envisioned the original project. 

The World Is Still Waiting For the Steven And Stephen Collaboration

Though it was considered middling by critics of the time, Rose Red pulled off an 8.5 rating and nearly 20 million viewers. It’s often overlooked today as it’s not the greatest King adaptation, but it’s also not the worst. It’s somewhere in that huge stretch alongside Sleepwalkers, IT: Part 2, and Doctor Sleep. 

To this day, Stephen King and Steven Spielberg have yet to collaborate on a project together. They were close, again, when the Duffer Brothers were going to adapt The Talisman for Netflix. Spielberg happens to own the film rights to King’s series thanks to a sweetheart deal with Universal dating back to 1982. That deal has seemingly fallen through, with everyone involved moving on to other projects, but that’s what happened with Rose Red 30 years ago.

 It could still happen, but for now, Ready Player One’s extended homage to The Shining is as close as we’re going to get. King’s next projects include a Cujo remake, while Spielberg is getting ready to rule the Summer of ‘26 with the alien blockbuster Disclosure Day.

Rose Red is available to stream on Hulu.