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Stephen King’s Kinky Sex Horror Novel, ‘Gerald’s Game,’ Is Getting A Movie Adaptation

By Dustin Kemp
Published on: 21:12 PST, Sep 9, 2016

Did you know that Stephen King once wrote a novel that took the premise of kinky sex and made it into a brilliant psychological thrill-ride? He did so with the 1992 gem Gerald’s Game. Now, Birth Movies Death reports that the horror-erotica Stephen King yarn, against all odds, is getting a very unconventional movie adaptation on Netflix from an extremely sought-after horror director.

Mike Flanagan, director of 2016’s Hush and the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game. [Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images]

“If you know the source material, you’ll know there are a lot of challenges inherent in that story,” said Mike Flanagan, director of the recently produced and extremely successful home invasion thriller Hush.

“Not so much the narrative challenges of how to adapt it; it took me 10 years of constantly thinking about the book to crack the cinematic version.”

Anyone who has read Gerald’s Game, one of Stephen King’s more risqué novels, can probably see why it would be so hard for Flanagan to come up with a suitable screen adaption. After all, the book is based on a couple driving to an isolated vacation cabin in the woods and stripping down in the bedroom. The man then handcuffs his willing girlfriend to the bed in preparation for a night of kinky fun. I’m not going to spoil any more of the story, but even those who haven’t read Gerald’s Game can probably guess based on the fact that it’s by Stephen King that what comes after gets pretty horrific and is at times quite gruesome. In other words, not the kind of stuff conventional movie studios are eager to include in their films.

“It’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do,” Flanagan continued.

Again, I don’t want to spoil Gerald’s Game, but the story it tells is not one that gels well with any tried and true Hollywood movie formulas. Because of this and the fact that the book gets so graphic, it was impossible for Flanagan to get funding for the project in the past. It is only now that Netflix, a much more out-of-the-box yet still extremely popular movie studio, has arisen that Stephen King’s racy story can finally become a reality on the screen.

Flanagan told Rue Morgue that Netflix was willing to take a chance on his version of Gerald’s Game because of the vast success of Hush, which recently performed very well on the video streaming service.

“It’s been viewed an amazing number of times, and the reception has been very, very positive,” he explained. “Coincidentally, Stephen King watched Hush at home on Netflix and tweeted about it, which kind of blew my mind. And that got us talking about Gerald’s Game again.”

Of course, the fact that Stephen King adaptations are generally huge money-makers did not hurt either.

Now that logistical obstacles have been overcome, the Gerald’s Game adaptation seems to be in extremely good hands with Mike Flanagan. This is because, as Flanagan said himself, he is a huge fan of Stephen King and refuses to produce a failed adaptation unworthy of King’s brilliance.

“Stephen King has been my hero since I was a child, and one of the things about being a fan of his is that I’m used to the familiar heartbreak of seeing his film adaptations and feeling like something’s gone off, and that the source material I love so much has not translated properly—with obvious exceptions. It’s just that for every Shawshank or Green Mile or Stand by Me, you’ve got… the others that really hurt! It’s very important for me, as a fan, not to end up in that pile.”

“I loved Gerald’s Game from the minute I put it down; I had gooseflesh all over my arms and my neck when I finished it, and I remember just exhaling and saying, ‘I want to make this into a movie—and it’s unfilmable!’ and shaking my head, thinking, ‘If I could crack this, this could be one of the greatest King adaptations of them all,” Stephen King super-fan Flanagan laughed.

All this is not to say that Gerald’s Game is simply an erotic novel with some gross-out body horror thrown in. Sure, those things are there to some degree, but the book is, like almost any Stephen King tale, more than what it may at first seem, a deep and meaningful exploration of the horrors our memories and imaginations can summon up. And of course, some awesome visceral scares.

As of now, there is no further information about the adaptation of Stephen King’s X-rated masterpiece, but The Inquisitr will definitely deliver more updates as they come.

Also check out The Inquisitr‘s frequent updates on the other big budget Stephen King screen projects in development, including Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Dark Tower film and movie premiering in February, Andres Muschietti’s film adaptation of Stephen King’sIt due out next September, and the TV show airing on Spike TV in 2017 based on Stephen King’s novella The Mist.

[Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images]

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