It enhances Arnie’s confidence, and even clears up his skin and magically fixes his eyesight, but it also feeds on his soul, and proves to have an agency of its own – expressing envy toward anyone who steals affection away from her (such as Arnie’s first ever girlfriend, Leigh Cabot) and murderous rage toward anyone who might try to hurt her. In truth, Christine is not too dissimilar to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, as it operates as a kind of psychic battery that generates a dark and corrupting energy. It immediately causes a fissure in his relationship with his parents, two college professors who refuse to allow the heap of junk to be parked at their house – but that’s just where things start. The car is in garbage condition, but it technically runs, and the teen decides he must have it. The book also being in part a Stephen King-style romance, the pizza-faced, nebbish Arnie falls in love with the titular 1958 Plymouth Fury at first sight while driving home from school with his jock best friend, Dennis Guidler. As choices are made, formative relationships are bonded, and priorities are ordered, it can be a time of great discovery and painful mistakes. 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. 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.
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