Stephen King's Gerald’s Game is reportedly being adapted for Netflix
Good news, Stranger Things fans - Netflix has more retro-laced horror on the way
“How good is Hush? Up there with Halloween. White knuckle time. On Netflix,” tweeted the one and only Stephen King earlier this year in approval of Mike Flanagan’s psychological horror.
High praise indeed, although perhaps we should have read between the lines…
Flanagan, who back in 2014 was rumoured to be making a film adaptation of King’s 1992 thriller Gerald’s Game, is following up his sleeper streaming smash with just that, and has teased that it too will be coming to Netflix.
Speaking to Rue Morgan, the filmmaker (pictured below looking like Jeremy Renner's younger, paler brother) said:
“If you know the source material, you’ll know there are a lot of challenges inherent in that story. Not so much the narrative challenges of how to adapt it; it took me 10 years of constantly thinking about the book to crack the cinematic version. But it’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do. And Netflix, because of how well Hush has done, said, ‘We’re really interested in this, and we’d like to do it the way you want to do it.’ And that eliminated the pressure of having to test-screen the movie and define the demographic that’s going to watch it—all of that stuff that typically comes into the conversation when you’re trying to figure out how to market a film for a wide theatrical release. It just cleared the table, so that I can make the movie I want to make. I’m hoping very much that we can get that movie up on its feet soon.”
Given the runaway success of Stranger Things, not mention the great reception for Hush, we would be mightily surprised if Netflix weren’t already sending the Demogorgon round to make sure Flanagan signs on the dotted line and gets it made. The story would warrant it alone.
Centring on a woman who accidentally kills her husband when handcuffed to a bed in a remote cabin, finding herself trapped and with little hope of rescue, it’s certainly an intriguing-if-lesser-known story by King that should pull in the viewers.
It's doubtful they'll be able to spin a series out of it, but then stranger things have happened.
