Latest film based on King novel has pedigree ‘Dreamcatcher’ trip blends horror, humor

The cinema often has been a chamber of horrors for Stephen King, and not in a good way.

How about these gems from a filmography based on the Bangor author’s writing: “Night Flyer,” “Needful Things,” “The Dark Half,” “Sleepwalkers” and “Graveyard Shift”? Talk about frightening.

But over the past 27 years, some quality films have shown through such dreck: “Stand by Me,” “Misery,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile.” One thing all these movies have in common is a production company: Castle Rock Entertainment.

Castle Rock, which takes its corporate name from the fictional Maine town that serves as the setting for several King stories, is about to release its eighth movie based on a King work, “Dreamcatcher,” which opens Friday nationwide.

“Dreamcatcher,” based on King’s best-selling 2001 novel, is a film with pedigree. Respected director Lawrence Kasdan (“Body Heat,” “The Big Chill”) was at its helm. He co-wrote the script with two-time Academy Award winner William Goldman, who also adapted King’s “Misery” and “Hearts in Atlantis.” Cast members include Morgan Freeman, Tom Sizemore, Jason Lee and Donnie Wahlberg.

The novel tells the story of four young friends who perform a heroic act – and are changed forever by the uncanny powers they gain in return. Years later, the friends, now in their 30s, return to a cabin in the northern Maine woods for their annual hunting trip. They, along with a fifth friend with Down syndrome, end up battling the invasion of a body-invading alien parasite, in the midst of a blizzard, with dire consequences for most of them.

In the novel, one of the friends, history professor Gary “Jonesy” Jones, had earlier been hit and badly injured by an elderly driver suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, a none-too-veiled reference to King’s own life-threatening accident on June 19, 1999.

“Everything he thinks, I thought about [my accident},” King said in a 2001 interview with the Bangor Daily News. “The circumstances were different, but I too was hit by someone who didn’t mean to hit me. I was left to cope with feelings, to integrate it into my philosophy of life, and to deal with the pain on some level. But this was a chance to exorcise some of my feelings.”

In “Dreamcatcher,” the readers and viewers are taken into the last frontier: the bathroom.

“There’s no taboos anymore,” King said in that same interview. “Everything sexual has come out of the back room. But the taboo is part of human nature, so I asked what is it we don’t want to talk about. It’s what we do in the bathroom. Whether it’s a growth or a mark that wasn’t there before, or something that looks strange in the toilet bowl, we get a lot of our bad news in the bathroom. So that was the impetus for this.”

The film, which was shot in the woods of British Columbia and on Vancouver soundstages, brings together two men who are fans of each other’s work: Kasdan and King.

Kasdan, known for such personal, humanistic films as “The Accidental Tourist” and “Grand Canyon,” saw in “Dreamcatcher” the chance to do something new.

“In my movies, I’ve always tried to find the most potent metaphors, and one of the things Stephen King does really well is find interesting, extravagant metaphors for things that embody our deepest fears,” said Kasdan on the film’s Web site. ” ‘Dreamcatcher’ is about controlling our fear of the chaos that’s out there, whether it’s something in the universe, outside in the dark, or in your body as it begins to rebel against you. Then there are all the things I’ve tried to deal with in my other movies, the relationships between characters, friendships, issues of loyalty and redemption; but as with a lot of King’s writing, they’re married to an exotic, horrifying action story. That’s something I’ve always wanted to try.”

King returned the praise.

“Larry Kasdan is a storyteller with a fabulous sense of humor and an instinctive ability to make dramatic choices,” he said on the Web site. “He’s not afraid to work on a big canvas with a lot of characters. I think that he may have been attracted to the idea of making ‘Dreamcatcher’ because it’s a story that goes back and forth between humor and horror.”

Authors often lament about how much a film diverges from the source material. But King, who’s been in Los Angeles this week dealing with professional commitments, seems happy with the finished film.

“The biggest problem with an 800-page novel like this is that you almost never get a decent adaptation,” he told The Boston Globe in a recent interview. There’s no nuance, no sense of character – it’s all story onscreen. [However], I’m still amazed so much of what I wrote is there. It’s like this really good magic trick. I’m still not sure how Kasdan and Goldman did it. … I’ve never been treated that way in a film before. My stuff is there all the way to the corners.”