Quentin Tarantino Hated This Stephen King Adaptation: 'Turned It Off After 25 Minutes'
Tarantino shared which King of Horror story had him disappointed beyond measure.
Stephen King live-action adaptations are almost a genre of their own with how many of them there are — but while abundant, they’re not always great. Sure, we have some timeless classics like Carrie (the original) or The Shining, but there are also countless failed attempts at bringing the King of Horror’s stories to the silver screen.
And Quentin Tarantino would never have passed on an opportunity to point that out.
What King Movie Did Tarantino Hate?
Originally released in the form of a novel, Salem’s Lot by Stephen King follows a man returning to the town of his childhood to discover that the grim house he unfondly remembers from those days has new owners, and dark things are happening around it. As the townsfolk begin disappearing and being turned into vampires, he decides to act — and save the remaining people from this grim fate.
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Salem’s Lot live-action adaptation premiered as a two-part movie in 1979 and didn’t exactly become a banger. Still, to this day it holds a reasonably middling 6.7/10 IMDb score… But for Quentin Tarantino, it could have never been good enough.
“When I finally saw [Salem’s Lot], I was prepared for something great… And man, was I disappointed. To me, it just seemed like a stretched-out TV movie done in a very TV style (and I like TV movies). I tried to watch it again a couple of years ago and it was just too dull. I turned it off after about 25 minutes,” Tarantino wrote in his book Cinema Speculation.
King and Tarantino Are No Friends
Notably, Salem’s Lot was directed by Tobe Hooper, the man famous for his instant cult classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Quentin Tarantino admitted that he was a fan of the director’s work, but still, Hooper’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot never quite did it for Tarantino. Perhaps, his review also had to do with the novel’s author?..
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Despite both being widely-acclaimed juggernauts of their crafts, Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino have never been on particularly friendly terms. The director’s move on King’s adaptation isn’t the first time one of them was criticizing the other’s work. Previously, King demolished Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, calling it “narcissistic, dully full of itself, and tiresome.”
So, what are we thinking? Did Tarantino simply strike back for the insult of the Kill Bill movies or did he actually just hate the Salem’s Lot adaptation?