[roshiq]

Originally Posted by _____V_____

ELIMINATION ROUND #2
- Roshiq - Frank Darabont enjoyed a lot of success with The Mist in 2008. Do you have an equally effective Stephen King short story in mind to be adapted into a movie screenplay?

Frank Darabont has become the premiere mainstream prestige interpreter of Stephen King; cause he adapts the stories about ordinary people under stress so beautifully, that attracts a greater portion of the viewing public. He emphasizes mainly the human part of the work over the suspense or horror. Like his latest adaptation of his mentor Stephen King’s short story The Mist (which he described…"one of Steve’s best ‘muscular’ short pieces”) where he focused the tension and highlighted the element of fear in order to explore how it forced people to behave differently. Moreover, the interesting thing is from The Woman in the room to even The Mist, Darabont’s all works on King stories more or less has an one common element and that is ‘imprisonment’.

Among the very few stories of one of the finest storyteller of the century-Stephen King, that hasn’t been have a Film or TV adaptation yet but I personally like to see its celluloid version by Darabont is The Reach. This short story by Stephen King first published in Yankee magazine in 1981 under the title "Do the Dead Sing?” the re-titled story was collected in Skeleton Crew in 1985.
The story follows an old woman named Stella Flanders who has lived her entire life in the Goat Island, Maine, which is separated from the mainland by the Reach…a body of water. In the story, Stella remembers the past, the present, the living that populates the island, and the dead that populate her memories. She becomes alarmed when she begins seeing visions of her long deceased husband, Bill Flanders. Bill keeps attempting to lure Stella across the newly frozen Reach, which last froze over in 1938. With her health rapidly deteriorating, Stella sets off to cross the Reach only to become lost in the snow. Frightened, she is soon surrounded by her husband and dearly departed old friends assisting her to the mainland. She is later found following the snowstorm on the mainland four miles from her home, frozen to death.

Darabont can make another masterpiece from it if he adapts the story himself like the way he portrayed his most critically acclaimed movies The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption.

Throughout King’s work, New England has played a vital role. It has lent its often gloomy atmosphere and harsh winters as unforgiving elemental characters in his frightening tales.
Death and dying is the predominant theme in “The Reach”. Stella Flanders’ reminiscences focus as much on the dead as they do the living, and it is the dead that give support to Stella when she is crossing the Reach. The realization that her illness is progressing creates the desire to cross the Reach, it is a metaphor for Stella’s desire to cross from one life to the next. When she becomes lost in the snow, her environment is described as otherworldly; she describes it as gauzy and grey thus setting the scene for the appearance of her long deceased husband and friends.
So, this time Darabont have the option to enrich his masterful skill of moviemaking by adding the Gothic touch of the story. In the story, King uses fictional Goat Island in Maine and its unforgiving winters as the ominous home for Stella Flanders and her familial community. King uses the Gothic element of foreshadowing by giving the reader glimpses of the illness that is advancing in Stella Flanders. When Stella attempts to cross the Reach and becomes lost, she likens herself to the damsel in distress; when the dead come to her aid, the supernatural characteristic strengthens the Gothic influence. King’s use of unsettling words to describe the island, weather, and events further evoke gothic standards. Therefore, when Darabont is going to put his pen for the screenplay of The Reach, definitely this would become something totally new and fascinating experience for his fans.

Though there’s news on the net that says Darabont is now actually very much interested to go for King’s one of the popular novel of Stephen King (that published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) The Long Walk next, but I think The Reach is an appropriate short story that has been waiting for decades to be portray on the big screen by none other than Frank Darabont.