All book-to-screen adaptations face a common creative hurdle during development — the dilemma of remaining faithful to the source. That has always been the case with Stephen King’s work, especially the handful previously deemed unfilmable for various reasons. For example, Gerald’s Game takes place largely in the mind of its protagonist, who was trapped in a room, while The Life of Chuck is told backwards in three parts, its titular character notably absent in the first act. After adapting both to overwhelmingly positive reception, horror icon Mike Flanagan reveals his approach to King’s magnum opus.
Flanagan has so far given four of King’s works the screen treatment: he successfully adapted Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck into films, and his serialized take on Carrie is currently garnering critical praise. He’s confirmed to take on The Mist and The Dark Tower next, the latter being the more ambitious venture because it’s a saga spanning eight novels, a novella, and related works. Flanagan is already on the right track by choosing to bring The Dark Tower to television, and in an interview with YouTube podcast The Process Unlocked, he said he will also adapt the books in narrative chronological order.
“That’s the way to do it. The problem with the other approach is people who try to jump in in the middle, or people who try to jump in at a different point. Because you can’t throw an audience face-first into this huge universe. It’s overwhelming. King did it right, he walked you in starting with two people and nothing else, and walks you one step at a time. So my adaptation was that. It was just doing the books, and doing them in order.”
Flanagan is avoiding the ill-fated 2017 movie’s mistake of compressing well over 4,000 pages of lore into a 95-minute runtime. Instead of focusing on the first book in the saga, The Gunslinger, The Dark Tower movie director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel opted for a loose sequel that lifted characters and plot points from multiple novels, resulting in a truncated plot that stripped away the scale of the source material, trading all of that for a generic chase fantasy.
Flanagan has confirmed his version will be “remarkably faithful” to the novels, though slightly adjusted to suit television. “Stephen King is a genius in how he structures The Dark Tower because he starts this giant worldbuilding with two people in a landscape without detail,” he said. “It’s the simplest start… There is nothing else to look at. It’s so simple and so clean, and on top of that foundation, he adds a universe one brick at a time.”
The Dark Tower is dark fantasy, science fiction, horror, and Western all rolled into a genre-bending saga centered on the last living “gunslinger,” Roland Deschain, who is pursued by the sorcerer Randall Flagg as he traverses a post-apocalyptic landscape to reach the mythical Dark Tower — the center of time, space, and creation across every parallel universe, connecting the worlds featured in King’s other novels like The Stand, Salem’s Lot, and The Eyes of the Dragon.
Flanagan has his work cut out for him with The Dark Tower, but so far he’s four-for-four, and he also has King’s approval. As creator of The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher, Flanagan has also proven he’s more than capable.
