• Director(s):

    DUPUY (Julien)

  • Producer(s):

    BRAINWORKS, ARTE FRANCE, ROCKYRAMA

  • Territories:

    Worldwide.

  • Production year:

    2020

  • Language(s):

    German, English, French

  • Rights:

    TV, NON-THEATRICAL, INTERNET, VOD

Consecrated “king of horror” of modern literature, he distinguished himself in other genres such as fantasy, science fiction or detective stories. Several of his works have been adapted for cinema such as Shining by Stanley Kubrick, Dead Zone by David Cronenberg or Misery by Rob Reiner. 

What is Stephen King afraid of? "Well of everything !" says the prolix American novelist. Born in 1947 in Maine, where he still lives, he has established himself since the mid-1970s as the king of fantasy and horror, selling more than 350 million copies of his bestsellers around the world in half a century. Revitalizing the genre by playing on child terrors, his stories, rooted in today's rural America, have inspired a host of accomplished filmmakers, from Brian De Palma (Carrie) to Stanley Kubrick ( The Shining) to John Carpenter (Christine), David Cronenberg (The Dead Zone), George A. Romero (The Dark Half), or Rob Reiner (Misery).
 
Influenced in his youth by the works of Richard Matheson and the classics of fantasy (those of H. P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker), marked as much by the arrest of a serial killer in the 1950s as by the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, this cantor of popular literature sheds light on the genesis of some of his greatest bookstore bestsellers and their adaptation, for television or cinema, through interviews gathered by Julien Dupuy in an enlightening documentary portrait. Between two film extracts, Stephen King confides in it his childhood memories - the figure of the father, who abandoned him and his mother when he was 2 years old -, his impecunious youth in a small town in Maine, his work methods, but also his struggle against his inner demons (alcohol addiction in especially), his defiance of machines, whose revolt he staged in Maximum Overdrive, his only film as a director, or his philanthropic support for libraries to enable the greatest number of people to have access to books.
 
Long despised by literary critics, it has since won several prestigious awards such as the National Book Award.