The Only Stephen King Story Hollywood Considers Impossible To Film

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 42 seconds ago

Stephen King is one of the most prolific authors in history, with hundreds of stories under his name, and it seems an equal number of movie and television adaptations. In the last decade, multiple Hollywood producers and writers have attempted to adapt his 2014 novel, Revival. All of them have given up at the same point in the story.

Hollywood turned a story about a killer car and another a killer immortal clown alien into hits, so what is it about Revival that makes it unfilmable? It’s the climax, which takes a turn so wild and bizarre that it can’t be translated to the screen. For a Stephen King story, that says a lot. 

Stephen King Takes On Frankenstein

For starters, Revival is the most religious of King’s works. The horror centers around a Methodist minister, Charles Jacobs, and his perfect family with his wife, Patsy. Beloved by the people of Harlow, a small town in Maine (What a twist!), Charles is the perfect man of God…until his family is killed in a car accident and he suddenly turns against God. The novel then jumps years at a time, as we see Charles fall from grace to a sideshow carnival act and then to a faith healer using electricity to perform miracles. 

James, a young man in Harlow when Charles arrived, crosses paths with the former holy man at different points, and even willingly accepts one of his “cures” to help curb his heroin addiction. Slowly, James realizes that everyone Charles heals has gone mad. There’s no rational explanation for what’s going on, except that in his grief, Charles has become obsessed with the afterlife. That’s the point where Hollywood writers Josh Boone, who helped adapt The Stand (2020), and Mike Flanagan, a modern Master of Horror himself, couldn’t break the script into something filmable. 

Revival is Stephen King’s take on Frankenstein, but even that doesn’t get across how bonkers the third act gets once Charles succeeds in his mad experiment. The best comparison is to H.P. Lovecraft and his take on the Elder Gods, which makes sense that Boone and Flanagan would run into the problem of a gigantic budget to bring the final act of the story to life. Even IT, which includes a giant space turtle, doesn’t reach the level of Revival’s reveal of what happens to humans when we die. 

A Story Too Big For Movie Theaters

It’s now been five years since anyone has publicly talked about adapting Revival into a film or mini-series. IT: Welcome to Derry has turned King adaptations into a hot commodity again, with Castle Rock and 11.22.63 finding new legions of fans in the wake of the HBO series’ success. Someone’s going to take another crack at the faith-based supernatural horror, but unless something dramatically changes with Hollywood budgets, they’re also doomed to failure. 

Horror is wildly popular in Hollywood, not because of a love for the genre, but because it tends to be cheap to produce. It’s why, when a character hits the public domain, the first thing that happens is a slew of cheap horror movies. It’s a shame that to do Revival justice means a significantly higher budget, but it is also King’s best story in years. Until a Hollywood executive throws superhero levels of money at Mike Flanagan, take the time to grab the novel and give it a read. Once the lightning strikes, you’ll know why it’s one of King’s wildest novels and why two of Hollywood’s best minds couldn’t figure out how to bring it to life.