From Book to Screen: The Tommyknockers

It’s been a while since the Stephen King Book to Screen series came knocking, but we’re glad to be back! We covered Misery in our last entry, and this time aren’t skipping any books. King’s next novel after Misery received an adaptation only six years after publication, though in the form of a TV movie.

While far from King’s most popular or critically lauded work, there is some excitement here as we cover King’s hardest foray into sci-fi to date. Listen with us for… The Tommyknockers!

The Novel

In a fitting inspiration for a horror author’s first sci-fi novel, it was H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space that King drew from in writing this book. Looking at the overall plot structure, it’s easy to see that he more or less directly adapted the Lovecraft story, though there is a heavy dose of Maine folklore to serve background chills and mystery before the book more directly answers what’s causing all the trouble. King even uses a poem about Tommyknockers as the book’s preamble.

Like many of his books, the main characters are writers. This time, they are a pair of ex-lovers who still have a relationship due to mutual respect for each other’s work. The arguable lead, Bobbi, winds up uncovering a spaceship back in the Maine woods, which starts to psychically infect the town’s residents as well as herself, preparing them for something to come. This winds up calling Bobbi’s ex, Gardner, to town from afar.

The Tommyknockers was one of many novels written during a period of heavy drug abuse for King. Like several other works from the 80s, he has only a hazy recollection at best of writing it, and he looked back with regret on it. He was highly critical of the novel’s quality, thinking there were some parts of a good book underneath the excess. Contemporary critics seemed to think the same after it was published in 1987, with one noting that it more or less rewrote the TV serial Quartermass and the Pit.

We’re forced to agree with King’s assessment. Though there are interesting themes and ideas, and sections of the book where King’s writing shines (mostly in its rapid characterization), The Tommyknockers is an overly long and ponderous work. Excess may be a common flaw with King, but his best long books work in so many ways that their length almost becomes an asset.

Not so here. There are many sections of this book that simply meander and fail to advance the plot. The first third is especially dull and difficult to get through. The book picks up a bit in the middle when King starts focusing on the town as a whole and exploring the various ways the spaceship starts to affect them and manipulate them to its advantage. But the book loses momentum again by the third act and feels like it lacks a proper ending (another common King criticism).

That said, the thematic commentary on addiction and the proliferation of nuclear power and technology does work at times. Gardner and Bobbi are excellent characters overall, with Gardner’s alcoholic battle feeling well-realized due to King’s ability to write that authentically. He’s a miserable slump of a man, but one you can’t help but like. No matter how derivative King’s plots get, he always remains readable due to his ability to write great characters.

The Tommyknockers remains one of King’s more forgotten works. While it received the adaptation we are covering today (and, as we describe below, it may get another one), few but diehard fans ever talk about it or read it. There are some dedicated fans of it here and there who appreciate King taking on a more sci-fi approach and find his descriptions of aliens fascinating, but these are a minority.

The Film

The film, or miniseries, aired on ABC in 1993 in two parts. The production process was a long and labored affair. After the novel was only a mixed success, screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen worked with King to write a screenplay that improved on the novel and tried to fix some of the book’s issues. Some of these writing changes might have been an improvement, such as changing the ending.

But ABC forced a rushed production schedule, requiring shooting to be started after October 1992 and the entire miniseries to be complete by May 1993. Because the story was set in summer, this forced them to film out of country in New Zealand. While many today speak of filming in New Zealand with fondness due to Peter Jackson‘s legendary The Lord of the Rings trilogy shooting there, The Tommyknockers dealt with inexperienced New Zealand crew members not ready for this size of production. Shipping equipment became a logistical nightmare.

Lewis Teague, the film’s original director and noted King adaptation director, was fired two days into the shoot, allegedly due to moving too slowly for the producers. He was replaced by the Australian John Power. Power was not an inexperienced director, but he had mostly stuck to documentaries and TV films and certainly didn’t have the cinematic reputation of Teague.

The chaos continued in the writing process. The second part’s script wasn’t completed even halfway through filming, and rewrites also bogged things down. Despite all the issues, the shoot was completed on time, but the rush of it didn’t help the finished product.

Whether due to inherent issues with the source material or the messy production, reception for the miniseries was not positive. Contemporary reviews were unkind, and retrospective writing ranks it among the worst King adaptations. King says he does not like it at all.

We are forced to agree once again. One of the miniseries’ foremost problems is the cheap nature of the production. While TV movies often have a lower budget, at least in the era of Tommyknockers, it doesn’t help that the movie made changes from the book that emphasize the lack of budget. There are some alien costumes near the end that look especially cheap. The spaceship looks highly derivative of Star Wars.

Further, Powell’s direction is utilitarian at best. The cinematography is lacking, alternating between closeups of actors in dialogue scenes and wide-angle shots that lack artistry. Regardless of whether Teague’s films were always great, he at the least brought a sense of vision to his King adaptations that is missing here.

The acting is mixed, to say the least. Casting Jimmy Smits as Gard was an intriguing choice, and he provides one of the better performances. But because the film doesn’t really want to dive into the alcoholism with the depth that King did, and because the internal monologues of the book are missing, Smits’s scenes feel very flat. Marg Helgenberger is decent, but she also can’t bring across the scope of her character’s fall. Other performances are outright bad, with Traci Lords coming across quite monotone and the child actor Leon Woods being atrocious in some of his line deliveries.

The sad irony of filming this novel is that the best parts of the book are those that don’t translate to screen very well. The more intriguing moments such as Gard’s struggle with alcohol, the way the town aligns into a psychic network under the ship’s sway, and the cosmic horror of “the Tommyknockers” as a dead entity almost interacting from back in time are each more or less cut out of the film. The movie suffers from the novel’s dullness without any of its redeeming features.

That said, this isn’t the worst King adaptation. It doesn’t become as cornball and cheesy as some adaptations, and the script still delivers decently on the relationship between Gard and Bobbi. Some of the more notable scary moments of the novel, such as the ethereal green glow of technology influenced by the Tommyknockers, or a police officer’s doll collection being given voice by the alien entities, work decently. There are the shells of a better work here that are not present in some of the absolute garbage King films.

Final Verdict

The central question of this adaptation is whether or not a better one is possible from this source material. The answer is likely no. In order to create a better film, they would likely need to shift away from King’s structure and reduce it down to something more streamlined and functioning. This movie attempts to do that occasionally, as when it changes the ending away from the bleaker one King wrote. It works better in some regards, though it feels like a cop out in others. Either way, this is far from a King classic, so there’s no rush or demand for a new adaptation.

That said, there appears to be an ongoing attempt to make a new version. NBC announced back in 2013 that it would make a new miniseries based on the book, though that never came to fruition. Then in 2018 there were reports that James Wan and others would team up to make a feature film adaptation. But there has been no news since, leaving us to wonder if the adaptation has died. Until then, this largely faithful adaptation is all fans of the book have.

• Ranked #14,938 globally
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• Wins 27% of match-ups
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• 51/104 on the Stephen King filter

These are my personal rankings for every King adaptation I’ve written about for this series. At the very end, we will see where my Stephen King taste overlaps with the global consensus.

1. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
2. Stand By Me (1986)
3. Carrie (1976)
4. The Dead Zone (1983)
5. Misery (1990)
6. The Mist (2007)
7. Creepshow (1982)
8. It (2017)
9. The Stand (1994)
10. Stephen King’s It (1990)
11. Stephen King’s The Shining (1994)
12. Cat’s Eye (1985)
13. Christine (1983)
14. The Running Man (1987)
15. Cujo (1983)
16. The Shining (1980)
17. Pet Sematary (1989)
18. Silver Bullet (1985)
19. It Part Two (2019)
20. Apt Pupil (1998)
21. Thinner (1996)
22. Sometimes They Come Back (1991)
23. Salem’s Lot (2004)
24. Children of the Corn (2009)
25. Salem’s Lot (1979)
26. Firestarter (1984)
27. Creepshow 2 (1987)
28. The Tommyknockers (1993)
29. Pet Sematary (2019)
30. The Dark Tower (2017)
31. Carrie (2013)
32. Children of the Corn (1984)
33. The Mangler (1995)
34. Graveyard Shift (1990)
35. Maximum Overdrive (1986)
36. Carrie (2002)
37. The Lawnmower Man (1992)
38. Trucks (1997)