I hadn’t watched this when it was in theaters, mostly because I wanted to re-read the novella before seeing it (the last time I read it was in High School, when Skeleton Crew came out). I also rarely get to the cinema anymore unless the movie in question involves muppets or talking cartoon fish.

I never got around to re-reading King’s original story, and it was gone from theaters before I could. The DVD came from Netflix the other day and so I pulled my paperback copy of Skeleton Crew off the shelf (need to get that one in hardcover soon). I read the first bit and then decided I didn’t want to wait to finish the book before starting the movie. So I read and watched in tandem (probably about 20-30 pages at a time before watching its corresponding scenes in the film). Weird way to do something like that, and I probably wouldn’t do it again.

The movie was pretty great, I thought, and some Darabont/King regulars have roles again (most notably William Sadler, who appears to be Frank Darabont’s lucky charm — he’s been in this, The Green Mile and Shawshank). Reading and watching in parallel did give an interesting perspective on the way the written word had been adapted to the screen. Most of the novella made it, including chunks of dialog that were transferred virtually word-for-word. What I found more interesting were the changes: the ending was slightly different from the book in that you got to see more of what happened after the main characters left the store, and a scene of adultery was taken out of the script, probably because it would have lessened our esteem for the characters involved.

There are some truly frightening moments, and they do really well by the tension created so deftly by King in his book.  A lot of King’s work has not fared well in transfers to the screen, or even stuff written directly for the visual media (”Kingdom Hospital” and “Rose Red” were just baaaaad). This one’s a good treatment, and I wish I’d seen it in the theaters.