By the time you’re learning how to drive, you’re making the decisions about where your life is going to take you and the kind of person that you’re going to become. How does it compare to the novel, and how has it held up over time? Those are the questions revving the engine of this week’s Adapting Stephen King.Ĭhristine is the quintessential coming of age horror story, its vehicle – both literally and figuratively – being the great symbol of maturity in American culture. He had been given a manuscript for Christine and began talking about it with Phillips, and while the scenarist initially laughed at the idea of a story centered around a haunted car, he didn’t end up needing to finish the book before calling the Halloween filmmaker and confirming his interest in making the movie.Ĭhristine has a powerful legacy, what with it being a collaboration between two of pop culture’s great Masters Of Horror… but one could make the argument that makes it particularly open for scrutiny and reexamination. This quest for beauty comes at a price with the purchase coming across like a pseudo-Faustian pact.Carpenter originally had his eyes on a different adaptation, collaborating with screenwriter Bill Phillips to try and make a feature film version of the 1980 novel Firestarter, but when the vision for that project fell through (more on that in a couple weeks) it didn’t take long for the director to take a swing at a different Stephen King book. Deflated on the drive home he spots a car wreck of something that was once beautiful, something with potential, he sees himself when he sees Christine for the first time which was writer Bill Phillips intention as he states in the documentary ‘Christine: Ignition’, 'what Arnie gets from Christine is that he can make himself beautiful by making her beautiful'. At school he has an unsavory encounter with quintessential King bully, Buddy (played by William Ostrander that Nicolas Cage had auditioned for) who threatens him with a knife. When we first meet him he speaks with his unlikely (and only) friend Dennis (played by John Stockwell) on the way to school about how hard it is for him to get a girlfriend (in the crudest way possible).

In the film this lost soul is none other than Arnie Cunningham (played by Keith Gordon in a role or iginally offered to Kevin Bacon), a shy h igh schooler with zero confidence and a controlling family.

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