STEPHEN KING’S NIGHTSHIFT COLLECTION
Last night’s Halloween flick forced me to track down the dust-covered VCR in the back of my storage closet and fire it up one more time. I can’t remember what took me longer: figuring out how to make the damned thing work or watch the actual movie.
Stephen King’s Nightshift Collection is a title that implies several films but is actually two short adaptations from the anthology collection of the same name. The first one, The Woman in the Room, put Frank Darabont’s name on the map — and it’s easy to see why. Darabont’s strength has always been finding the unique balance between humanity and horror, especially in King’s cinematic work. The Woman in the Room’s nuance is delicate. The horror imagery is sparse, not exploitative. The actors portray three-dimensional people and validate King’s unique voice without overplaying it. The story, about a lawyer weighing the act to euthanize his suffering mother, is tactful and emotional. We see guilt, love, and humanity measure on his soul as he’s forced to watch his mother deteriorate in front of him. For a short film, it’s extremely effective and I can see why King seized on Darabont’s talent right away.
The second short, The Boogeyman, has the misfortune of following Darabont’s entry. By no means is it a train wreck. While still rough and unpolished (it’s a student project from 1982: filmmakers couldn’t just open their iPhone 8 and scroll through trendy filters to fake style), it’s still well done, creepy and intriguing. The film focuses on a man swirling the drain of insanity. His children have been terrorized and killed by the titular monster and making it look like sudden infant death syndrome. The threads in the story are those expanded into King’s later novel IT: kids being stalked by a shape-shifting monster; the idea of fear causing belief and that belief summoning the shape of your death. Its director, Jeff Schiro, didn’t do much after this short (according to IMDB), which is a shame. I would’ve liked to have seen what he could’ve done with a professional crew and budget at his disposal.