Dozens of Stephen King's literary works have received movie and TV adaptations, but modern horror master Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House) recently highlighted an oft-overlooked adaptation that definitely deserves more attention in all-time great movies, like The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile. Others have been complete misfires, like Silver Bullet or Firestarter. Still others have been reappraised recently and are evolving into cult classics.

Mike Flanagan recently spoke about King's most underrated adaptations, and highlighted four very specific choices, some of which make more sense than others. Flanagan's opinion on the matter certainly means something, given that he has produced some incredible King adaptations himself, including Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game, and the Life of Chuck. Of the four choices he gave, one really stands out as an underrated adaptation that deserves far more attention than it has historically received.

Mike Flanagan Is Right About John Carpenter's Christine

The Adaptation Of King's Famous Car Story Deserves More Love

The four adaptations that Flanagan named were The Night Flier, The Dead Zone, Storm of the Century, and John Carpenter's Christine. The other three choices are debatable, given that The Night Flier isn't widely accepted as a good movie, and both The Dead Zone and Storm of the Century have received plenty of praise over the years. Christine, on the other hand, was legitimately underrated when it came out, and has slowly begun to gain appreciation over the last few years. In that time, rumors have swirled about another adaptation, although nothing official has come to fruition.

Upon its release, Christine had a modest box office take and, while it received decent critical reviews, it was treated as a "decent, but not great" horror movie. It boasts a 72% on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer, but just a 64% on the audience-based Popcornmeter. While Rotten Tomatoes scores aren't the definitive measure of a movie's quality, they do provide a good summary of general sentiment, and for Christine that sentiment is decidedly lukewarm.

However, it is deserving of far more love than that, and its evolution into a cult classic is an indicator of that. Christine received criticism for not being scary enough, and while that might be true, it isn't really intended to be. Christine is less about direct supernatural scares in the vein of Pennywise from IT or Kurt Barlow from 'Salem's Lot, and more a metaphor for obsession and its consequences. The movie is loaded with outstanding visuals from Carpenter, is well-acted throughout, and deserves far better ranking among King's movie adaptations.

Why Stephen King Wasn't A Fan Of Christine

King Found The Movie "Boring"

Stephen King himself would disagree with that assessment, however. Stephen King has notably been a critic of some of his adaptations, perhaps most famously of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining starring Jack Nicholson. Once upon a time, King even lumped Christine in with The Shining when discussing his distaste for the movies. In the Dreamcatcher: The Shooting Script book, King noted:

Several honorable adaptations have come from this thirty-year spew of celluloid... and the best of those have had few of the elements I'm best known for: science fiction, fantasy, the supernatural, and pure gross-out moments... The books that do have those elements have, by and large, become films that are either forgettable or outright embarrassing. Others—I'm thinking chiefly of Christine and Stanley Kubrick's take on The Shining—should have been good but just... well, they just aren't. They're actually sort of boring. Speaking for myself, I'd rather have bad than boring.

King echoed the concerns of several critics about the nightmarish car movie, namely that the movie is actually boring. While King's opinion is certainly worth listening to in regard to any movie adaptations of his works, in the case of Christine he may be a bit too dismissive of an overall high-quality movie.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes, Dreamcatcher: The Shooting Script