20 Years Ago, Stephen King Wrote This Criminally Overlooked Series Inspired by Lars von Trier
This project became a link between two different but brilliant masters of the horror genre.
Stephen King is known as the author with the most film adaptations, but he has another, lesser known side to his work – television. A significant number of King's shows have no literary source, as the author wrote them directly as scripts.
While working on the TV adaptation of The Shining, King and ABC producer Mark Carliner came across a disk in a video store of Lars von Trier's miniseries The Kingdom, about a Danish hospital where terrible things happen.
The Kingdom Is Lars von Trier's Cult Supernatural Horror Series
The first four-episode season was filmed in 1994, the second in 1997, and the third 25 years later in 2022. Among the characters are ordinary doctors, otherworldly forces and even Lars himself, who addresses the viewers in the credits.
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If you've ever dreamed of a surreal horror comedy that's a mix of Grey's Anatomy and Twin Peaks, The Kingdom fits the bill.
King Traded One of His Novels for the Rights to Adapt The Kingdom
King and Carliner decided the show needed to be adapted, but Columbia Pictures had already bought the rights. They didn't relinquish them until five years later, when they decided the story wasn't suitable for the two-hour movie they had planned to make.
In the end, King exchanged The Kingdom for one of his novels, which was later made into the movie Secret Window.
The author himself sat down to write a script, which he called a novelization for television, and with the help of Richard Dooling and his wife Tabitha, wrote 13 episodes, mostly keeping both the names of the characters and the dark humor of the original.
One of the Characters in Kingdom Hospital Is Based on Stephen King Himself
The most notable innovation was the character of Peter Rickman, based on King himself: the pilot episode, in which Rickman is hit during a morning jog by a careless driver distracted by his dog, details an incident that happened to the author in 1999.
The Kingdom Hospital's first episode was very well received. The action was moved from Copenhagen, Denmark to Lewiston, USA and revolved around the New Kingdom Hospital, built on the site of a burned down textile mill and inhabited by the ghosts of the people who died there.
Kingdom Hospital Is Almost Forgotten Now, but It Is a Unique Horror Project
Conceived as a miniseries, Kingdom Hospital was picked up for a full season, but its ratings dropped so disastrously that the project never saw a second season.
But even after more than 20 years, Kingdom Hospital still deserves attention – not only as one of the most unusual representatives of the mystical horror genre, but also as the product of a collaboration, albeit not direct, between King and von Trier.