Stephen King

You are free to write about any of Stephen King’s works or their film adaptations EXCEPT CARRIE. The only requirement is that any film you choose has to be
explicitly based on something King has written. CHOSE ONE QUESTION TO WRITE ABOUT USING ONLY ONE OF HIS FILMS(except CARRIE):
1. Does the work of Stephen King deconstruct or mythologise American ideals of masculinity? 

2. How does the work of Stephen King use bodily experience to articulate American cultural anxieties of the 1970s? 

3. Does The Shining demythologise the concept of ‘The American Dream’? 

4. Should we consider Carrie White a figure of female empowerment or male anxiety? 

5. Are Carrie and Christine sympathetic or anxious towards their adolescent central characters? 

6. How is the history of the Salem Witch Trials evoked in film adaptations of Stephen King’s work? 

7. Consider the influence of the New England Puritan mindset on the work of Stephen King 

8. How is mental ill-health represented in Misery and The Shining? 

9. How and why does The Shining represent American History as a palimpsest? 

10. Do the children of Stephen King’s stories represent optimism for America’s future? 

11. How is the ‘American Horror’ of the 1970s represented in the stories of Stephen King? 

12. Are the film adaptations of Stephen King’s work in the 1980s best understood as conservative or progressive? 

13. Critics have called Stand by Me ‘nostalgic’ and ‘sentimental’. Does the film mythologise the American 1950s? 

14. Does Gerald’s Game succeed as a Feminist film? 

15. What is the cultural and personal significance of the act of writing in the stories of Stephen King? 

16. How is Stephen King a ‘cinematic’ writer? How does his style suggest or evoke the conventions of narrative film? 

17. Discuss the tension between the civilisation and savagery of America’s past in The Shining or The Shawshank Redemption 

18. How and why have film adaptations of Stephen King’s stories evoked American Pioneer experience? 

19. Filmmakers frequently alter the details of Stephen King’s plots. What makes a ‘successful’ adaptation of his work? 

20. Consider the representation (or absence) of African-American experience in the work of Stephen King. To what extent do his stories consider or ignore
issues of race in America?