I Hate the Book It, but Love the Mini-series

When I was about nine (give or take a year) some cable channel or other was re-running the 1990 It mini-series over the course of a week leading up to Halloween. My mom hadn’t seen it since in released the first time and thought it would be fun family TV. Now this might be horrifying to some people. This was, however, the 90s. A different time. You can’t really get into too much trouble with basic cable in the grand scheme of things, and it’s super easy to veto a Blockbuster pick or simply just not go to whatever movie.
It was an era that didn’t require quite the same level of hyper vigilance in terms of monitoring what your kids watch, so you just kind of didn’t. Like it was weird if your parents were even a little strict about your media when I was a kid. On top of that, I was precocious, so my parents were a little more loosey goosey with what was permitted.
So as a kid my mom were watching X-Files, Outer Limits, and Twilight Zone every week. I looked forward to The Simpson’s Tree House of Horror every year. I read and watched Goosebumps. I stayed up late reading and re-reading The Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. By the time I hit double digits I had seen Frighteners, Cat’s Eye, Creepshow, Tommy Knockers, and Village of the Damned. My mom had accidentally exposed me to the horrors of the dismembered cat head sequence of Sibyl and the nuclear shadows of The Day After.
Suffice it to say, a prime-time, network TV mini-series wasn’t really that big of a deal.
And I loved every second of it.
When I rewatched it as a young adult curled up in my bed in my college apartment, I loved it. Now, at this point, that was almost twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen it since. Maybe if I watched it today as a person in my thirties who’s consumed so much more horror, I wouldn’t feel the same. Knowing me, though, I’d still have a very good time.
While my memory isn’t the most sharp, I remember being compelled by the tension of potential. I felt like at any moment, something would shift. That fucking clown would show up and say something out of pocket. But then of course, it was never actually the clown, it was things like the roaches coming out of the Chinese food. It was the creeping sensation of the unreal. It was the fear of fear itself.
Which, as I understand it, was supposed to be the point.
So tell me why I hated the book?
Admittedly, I was twelve, closing in on thirteen at the time. Perhaps you could blame it on an unrefined palate. Maybe I would feel different if I read it as an adult. I don’t have time for that. I have too many other books I actually want to read.
Now, with two decades of time, my memory is also fuzzy here. Maybe my interpretations of the text are not super accurate through the fog of nostalgia. But that’s not really the point. How I felt, at the time, is the imporant part. And I remember thinking “wow, this is so boring” and “what was the point of this sex scene” and “why is this clown yelling slurs in all caps, you look like someone having a temper tantrum in a AOL chatroom” and “I’ve heard worse from my own grandfather.”
The textual buildup was just…nothing to me. I couldn’t take any of the threats seriously. While I thought there was a lot of potential right at the end (I really started to feel it) it was completely ruined by the tunnel scene.
And that doesn’t mean I think the book is worse than the mini-series (with the exception of the tunnel). I’ve always thought it has way more to do with the way the book adapts. Because this is a pattern with King books for me. I consistency prefer the adaptation over the book. Like I stopped trying to read King books because they never quite did it for me. Because the pattern is so persistent, and I seem to be in the minority, I’ve attempted to figure out why, and I have a few theories.
For some of his books, The Shining and The Mist are the first things that come to mind, the adaptor/director takes the initial book concept and just runs with it in a totally different direction or makes a major narrative adjustment that changes the mood of the story. It just sort of happens that I tend to prefer what the adapter did vs what King originated.
For some of the cocaine era books, going through the synthesis of a screen-writer and director has a net-positive effect. Even if they end up changing things or drifting from faithfulness, they shore up the rougher parts.
With other books, it’s simply that the original can’t be faithfully adapted in its totality. You are never going to see an It adaptation that actually covers everything word for word. That would never fly with any audience at any point. So you have to remove stuff. And the stuff that ends up getting pulled is the shock content. When you remove shock content, you have to the restructure the horror narrative. Since I find shock for shock’s sake boring, I end up liking the restructured narrative more.
And I can’t even say whether it’s good or bad. It’s just a quirk of adaptation. Tension just builds differently in text vs visual media, so you have to make those changes.
But there’s a similar issue even moving between two visual mediums. I’m comfortable saying that a large chunk of horror graphic novels and manga end up transitioning extremely well into either live-action or animated media. And even if there’re major narrative changes, they manage to strike the right visual cues.
Except for Junji Ito.
Ito is my favorite mangaka and one of my favorite horror writers. He has this extremely distinct style and method of putting horror stories together. Over the years, there have been a number of live-action adaptations. Some are better, on their own, than others, but there’s just something missing. And that translation is from the illustration to the live action. When you divorce Ito’s storytelling from his artistic style, you lose something existential to the work. He would really benefit from animation.
Problem is the few animated adaptation have had other problems. Gyo makes some very poor narrative changes and still doesn’t quite his the visuals. There’s an animated show that gets really close to style and pacing, but the actual quality of animation leaves a lot to be desired.
After a four year delay, we almost had the perfect Uzumaki adaptation. The first episode hit almost every single note just right, but production issues mean the rest of the series is failing to live up to the bar the first episode set.
Compare that to Stephen King, and it’s a fascinating phenomenon.