The Ruins: Five Other Horror Adaptations We Want to See
by Tom Burns

BOOK: Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

WHY IT WOULD MAKE AN AWESOME HORROR MOVIE:

While we're fans of the occasional popped eyeball or arterial spray, despite what the Fangoria crowd may want you to believe, not every horror movie has to have Eli Roth-levels of grand guignol blood and gore. The horror genre needs to have some variety in its material - splatter horror, thinking-man's horror, Hitchcock horror, torture horror, monster horror, fantasy horror, and so on and so on. One of the most neglected horror movies avenues has always been young adult horror and, no, just because The Ring or Pulse is rated PG-13, that doesn't mean that they're all-ages horror movies. That means someone wimped out in the editing room because some development douche convinced them to try to appeal to the "widest audience possible." Young adult/all-ages horrors flicks don't need blood and boobs to scare (or titillate) their audiences, but it's a LOT harder to pull off (which is why there aren't many of them). Poltergeist is pretty blood-free (but it's also kind of silly) and classic Universal monster horror definitely qualifies. And anyone who saw Disney's Legend of Sleepy Hollow when they were eight or nine, witnessing the pure terror on Ichabod Crane's face as the Headless Horseman chased him down, knows that even Disney cartoons can be scary if they're made right.

That's one of many reasons why we want to see a movie based on Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, one of his few works for young adults, one of his most critically acclaimed books in recent memory, and possibly the only horror novella that's ever been adapted into a pop-up book (true story). The story follows a young Red Sox fan named Trisha who finds herself separated from her family during a hiking trip and has to survive in the bitter wilderness with few supplies. Plagued by illness, hunger, and thirst, Trisha becomes convinced that she's being pursued by the God of the Lost, a dark spirit of malice, and her only salvation comes from the ghostly presence of her idol, Sox pitcher Tom Gordon. The text does a fantastic job of never letting us know what's real and what isn't, letting us make up our own minds about whether Trisha is hallucinating or whether she's stumbled into something a bit more supernatural. The whole story revolves around Trisha's unwillingness to quit and the terror of being pursued by the unknown "IT", and those universal qualities are what make the novella so damn effective, much more so than a lot of King's recent work. George Romero was attached to write and direct the Tom Gordon adaptation for a while, but Romero almost seems too subversive and too gore-friendly for the material. Give Miley Cyrus some acting lessons (yeah, she’s too old, but think of the box office), throw her out into the forest with Michael Haneke or Mikael Hafstrom for a few weeks, and, first and foremost, keep King-ruining hack Mick Garris 100 feet away from this project at all times, and this could be a big, big young adult hit, the kind that airs on network TV every year around Halloween.

BOOK: James Ellroy's Killer on the Road

WHY IT WOULD MAKE AN AWESOME HORROR MOVIE:

Thanks to daily airings of shows like CSI and Special Victims Unit and big-screen clunkers like Suspect Zero and Untraceable, the serial killer genre, on a whole, is kind of played out, don't ya think? It's gotten to the point where if we see a killer in a movie or TV show only murder one person, it actually seems a bit quaint, almost pedestrian. And thanks to the wink-wink-nod-nod cuteness of recent movie psychopaths like Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman and the de-fanged Hannibal Lecter of the crappy Silence sequels, serial killers are almost funny nowadays, coming across more like brutal little anti-heroes than card-carrying sadists. So how do we make the serial killer genre scary again? By peeling back the gimmicks and the pop psychology and just showing audiences the horrors of what they really do. And THAT's why LA Confidential author James Ellroy's Killer on the Road would make a FANTASTIC horror movie. There's no "I'm having an old friend for dinner" quips, no Huey Lewis '80s trivia B.S. - just pure unvarnished stream of consciousness from the most evil person you can ever imagine.

Originally released back in 1986 under the title Silent Terror, Killer on the Road is a first-person memoir written by Martin Plunkett, a disturbingly savvy and intelligent psychopath who recounts his lifetime of carnage in chilling detached tones. Showtime's Dexter is doing something similar in making a serial killer the protagonist, but while Dexter has a code of ethics and strangely redeeming qualities, Plunkett is just a force of evil, who spends his years just getting better and better at his craft. Ellroy follows Plunkett as he travels across America racking up an unbelievable body count and attracts the attention of two lawmen - both of whom want to catch up with the killer for VERY different reasons. Because CSI and bad movies have made serial killers so blah recently, it's hard to convey how powerful the book is, but Ellroy just really brings Plunkett to life, making him seem so plausible and oddly engaging that it’s downright disturbing. You hate what he does, but you can't wait to see where his story takes him next. And the end of the book revelation of why Plunkett's memoirs are presented side-by-side with the memoirs of the FBI agent who spends his life pursuing him is devastating. Did you think The Mist had a dark ending? Well, Killer on the Road will definitely make you crave a shower as you walk out the theatre door.