King of Creep in Hollywood

THEY'RE ALL HERE: THE VAMPIRES and teen outcasts, the crazed moms and graveyard kids, the cat carcasses and killer cars. Stephen King's favorite bugbears are on parade in his new horror hit "Sleepwalkers" — feeding, breeding, bleeding, like a family of mutants in the town's ritziest house. In its opening weekend, "Sleepwalkers" nuked the competition to earn $10 million from folks hot to feast on the latest scream dream from the Bard of Blood.

Nobody else has given so many people such potent nightmares since kids got their first traumas from watching "Pinocchio" and "Bambi." In a way, King is the dark Disney; he has the same hold on kids, and nearly the same productivity. "Stephen King's 'Sleepwalkers,'" to give the picture its full honorific, is the first film he has written originally for the big screen but the 21st made from a King story; there have also been three TV movies and a short-lived series, "Stephen King's 'Golden Years.'" Why, it seems like just last month that another feral fantasy, "Stephen King's 'The Lawnmower Man,'" was scaring up robust biz at the wickets. In fact, it was just last month. Soon to come are "Pet Sematary 2," "Children of the Corn 2," "Lawnmower Man 2," "Lawnmower Man: The TV Show."

The prospect of all these sequels is one thing that can make King sick. "I don't want them to make any more movies from my stuff!" says the writer, 44. The "them" are filmmakers who trade on King's name — buying up the titles to old stories whose rights he doesn't control — without being true to his work. "Sleepwalkers" is his picture, and he likes it, but the sequels are "projects I have nothing to do with and will not have my name on."

Traditionally, authors (whether Tom Clancy or Tom Wolfe) get pay but no say in movie adaptations of their work. The unique rankle for King is the possessive credit on films that bear not the slightest resemblance to his stories. The "Lawnmower" movie, for instance, is all about mad scientists and virtual-reality video games. "My 1978 short story," King says, "was about a guy who's too lazy to mow his own lawn, so he hires somebody who cuts the grass by chomping away at it and any living creatures in his path." Typical King trope; typical Hollywood cop-out.

The genial gent from Maine sounds a tad exasperated — like an anxious parent whose children have been kidnapped and brainwashed, then go out on a murder spree and, when they are arrested, cheerfully tell the world, "I'm Stephen King's kid." Sorry, Dad. You will have to take what solace you can in having sold nearly 100 million copies of your books worldwide. And in being the only writer whose novels, novellas, short stories — and story titles — Hollywood wants to turn into movies. Usually they are profitable; consider "Carrie," "Stand by Me," "Pet Sematary," "The Running Man." And often they are dandy: "The Shining," "Christine," "Cat's Eye," "Misery."

This week's King movie fits into the Dandy With Reservations category. "Sleepwalkers" has Dr. King's required dosage of overeager acting, supersaturated local color, pets in peril and shock-for-schlock's-sake maimings (corkscrew in the eye, pencil in the ear, corncob in the back). The core audience may demand these joy-buzzer jolts, but King, who says, "I have never called myself a horror writer," appears trapped by his reputation; he wears a straitjacket with his own designer label.

Here, though, King gives more. "Sleepwalkers" is a meditation, a lamentation, on the tight-knit American family. This Brady bunch — mother Mary (Alice Krige) and her teenoid son Charles (Brian Krause) — can be both admirable and repellent. The Bradys are handsome, even though they are hundreds of years old. They love each other, carnally, with Oedipal intensity. They have the seductive poignancy of King's traditional misfits, though they are not quite human. They bite. Mother needs blood, so son scouts for a virgin sacrifice. Just before the kill, Mrs. B. delicately fixes a red rose in the girl's hair. "It finishes you somehow," she says to her latest victim.

Vampires have a certain sad majesty, and so do these sleepwalkers: half man, half cat. Their genetic code condemns them to dine on the living; their incestuous passion is strong enough to raise the dead. In their solitude they are like any child who feels alien from his classmates, or any fortyish office worker who feels life draining away. They are the creatures we see in the mirror on our darkest nights.

King's art — it can't be mere commercial cunning — is in finding the demon in the mirror, the monster under the floorboard, the stranger sleeping next to you. Toast any domestic dilemma over a campfire and watch the shadows take the shape of your fears. "My mind turns this way," King says. "That's its bent, toward taboos. I ask myself, 'What is forbidden? What can't I write about?' And then I write about it." (At the moment he is considering a story about elimination: all the foul serpents that swirl in the toilet bowl. Let's see somebody make that into a movie!) Above all, King has the storyteller's honorable compulsion to connect with his audience. "I not only want to write it down," he says, "I want people to buy it. And I don't mean spend money for it; I mean get hooked, be thrilled, believe."

King's fiction is rooted in his family: his writer wife, Tabitha, and their three children. He can look around his Bangor home and find the germ of many a King thriller. "I've written about nearly every member of my family," he says. "'Sleepwalkers' came about because my son wanted to date the girl at the popcorn stand."

And so moviegoers keep munching on King's snacks, and the writer keeps waging his long-distance battles with Hollywood. He fights with studio bosses and industry censors; "Sleepwalkers" lost some gore and a lovely love scene before the ratings board gave the film an R classification. And he campaigns to bring his favorite projects to light. One is an eight-hour TV version of "The Stand." The other, an adaptation of "The Dark Half," has been completed by director George Romero, but is in the vault of bankrupt Orion Pictures, still awaiting blessed release.

For all King's success as an inspirer of hit movies, cinema remains just a flirtation, enticing but frustrating. "Writing a novel is like swimming," he says. "You plunge in. Making a movie is like ice skating; everything's on the surface." What exotic depths the novelist has explored. And what pretty figures — Carries and Christines and long-lived Sleepwalkers — he and his most sympathetic film interpreters have described on that frozen pond.