The Dark Tower seems like the unadaptable Stephen King project. Long regarded as King’s magnum opus, the previous film version failed, and the work seems too dense for most filmmakers.
It seems like one man is up for the task, and it’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Midnight Club’s Mike Flanagan, who is already familiar with the work of King, previously adapting Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game.
Speaking to IGN, the horror filmmaker says The Dark Tower is his “dream project.” He feels like he knows how to capture King’s work well and gives IGN an idea of how Dark Tower would look under his vision.
“What it would look like? It would look like the books… It would be a black screen, and the words ‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed’ would come up on silence, and you’d hear the wind, and we’d gradually fade up to this Lawrence Of Arabia-esque landscape with a silhouette in the distance just making his way across the hardpan. And we would build it out from there in order to the end.”
He tells IGN that the key to making The Dark Tower work is simply staying faithful to the source material:
“It would just be a question of taking the more fantastic elements that might be harder to connect to – especially where it gets pretty meta at mid-point – and grounding it, just pulling it in. But otherwise, the characters are who they are, the arc is what it is, and I think the way not to do The Dark Tower is to try and turn it into something else – to try and make it Star Wars or make it Lord of the Rings. It’s what it is; what it is is perfect. It’s just as exciting as all of those things and just as immersive.”
Flanagan adds, “It’s a story about a tiny group of people, and all the odds in the whole world are against them, and they come together. As long as it’s that, it will be fine. There won’t be a dry eye in the house. Is it a series? Is it a franchise of feature films? I don’t know. It’s all of those things; it’s none of them. It would be my Everest to do that, but nothing would make me happier, and god, I hope there’s a chance. I really do.”
Flanagan is currently working on The Fall of the House of Usher, set to hit Netflix in mid-2023. His latest project, The Midnight Club, is currently on the streamer.
