From A Buick 8 Will Be Stephen King’s Most Lovecraftian Movie

The news that Stephen King’s novel From A Buick 8 will soon gain a movie adaptation should be exciting not only for fans of the horror legend but also for anyone hoping to see HP Lovecraft’s horror writing brought to life on screen in the future. A bestselling author since his 1974 debut Carrie, prolific horror legend Stephen King is having something of a moment right now. Between the two-part blockbuster adaptation of It, which was so successful it broke box office records, to the string of high-profile small-screen miniseries being adapted from his work (both originals and remakes), King is everywhere right now.

Viewers can’t seem to get enough of King’s work, despite the author’s career spanning decades. However, not every King adaptation has been a success. For every solid effort like Lisey’s Story, which proved King should script more of his adaptations, there is an expensive folly like 2020’s The Stand. King’s writing is proving to be as difficult to adapt as ever, which makes it all the more interesting that one of the author’s most Lovecraftian tales is now on its way to the big screen.

Director Jim Mickle is helming a Thomas Jane-starring From A Buick 8 adaptation, which should be good news for both King fans and anyone hoping to see Lovecraft brought to life onscreen. Released in 2002, From A Buick 8 is the second of King’s novels to center around a killer car. However, unlike the earlier Christine (adapted into a classic ‘80s horror by John Carpenter), King’s second killer car story is a lot more existential than the story of a possessed automobile. Although the exact nature of the eponymous threat is never explained, the Buick is some form of inter-dimensional monstrosity that breaks the minds of its victims as much as their bodies—not unlike most of Lovecraft’s most famous monsters. As far as King’s horror stories go, From A Buick 8 is one of the most heavily Lovecraft-influenced works by the author, making its adaptation all the more exciting for horror fans as it may pave the way for more filmmakers to take on the infamously tricky author.

Lovecraftian Horror Is Famously Hard To Film

As proven by Guillermo del Toro’s legendary struggle to get At The Mountains of Madness financed, Lovecraftian horror is often too abstract and conceptual to make it to the big screen. Despite Rick & Morty’s promises to depict Cthulu, most serious mainstream horror shies away from Lovecraft’s style of cosmic dread as the mind-breaking monsters of the author’s work are inherently impossible to realize onscreen. This has changed somewhat in recent years, with HBO’s short-lived Lovecraft Country, director Richard Stanley’s recent cult hit The Color From Space, and 2020’s monster movie Underwater proving it was possible to adapt the writer’s work to screen. However, the unknowable status of Lovecraft’s most famous monsters still makes them tricky to realize on celluloid, with each of those adaptations taking a different route to avoid focusing on depicting the evils of Lovecraft too often and in too much dwelled-upon detail.

Like the earlier existent King villains The Langoliers (also referenced in Rick & Morty), the Buick of From A Buick 8 could potentially be deeply silly if brought to life onscreen as it is described in the novel. Borrowing heavily from Lovecraft’s techniques, King describes what the car contains sparingly and focuses more on how the sight of its contents impacts the people who are unfortunate enough to come across it. As such, trying to provide a straightforward monstrous depiction of this more conceptual sort of horror could be difficult, save that this adaptation has all the right collaborators lined up to pull off this feat.

Thomas Jane Starred In King’s Most Lovecraftian Horror Yet

With its inexplicable inter-dimensional monsters that appear out of nowhere and conform to no earthly biology or scale, The Mist’s antagonists are King’s most Lovecraftian monsters on film so far. Thomas Jane has starred in numerous Stephen King adaptations of varying quality, but the fact that the leading man proved able to ground the action of the potentially silly and surreal The Mist proves he is perfect for the part of From A Buick 8’s shook protagonist. Sure, in the case of The Mist, Ms. Carmody is technically the movie’s real threat and the siege horror does feature many scenes that focus on religious hysteria inside as much as the Lovecraftian terror outside. However, there is nonetheless no denying that Jane’s everyman hero made the CGI beasties of The Mist believable and scary, which bodes well for From A Buick 8, and the actor also sold a tragic ending that could easily have tipped over into unintentional comedy thanks to its overwhelming bleakness. The failure of The Mist’s television remake proves that the balance of the story is hard to nail, and Jane’s presence in this second Lovecraftian King adaptation bodes well as a result.

From A Buick 8’s Director Has Unseen Horror Experience

Since From A Buick 8’s plot centers around, as the title implies, a car of non-earthly origin whose trunk contains something that kills (or at least maddens) anyone who bears witness to it, it’s a potentially silly premise. In the book, this turns into a surprisingly scary, slow-burn horror precisely because of how little the novel depicts and how much is left to the imagination. In much the same way, the movie’s attached director Jim Mickle’s earlier crime thriller Cold In July cut away during its most gruesome scene to make an unseen snuff movie’s impact much more effective than gory effects could have hoped to.

Black Mirror guest star Wyatt Russell is chilling as the villain of Cold In July, but the sight of the usually-genial star beating a woman to death could easily have proven unconvincing and gratuitous. Instead, Mickle opted to cut away after establishing the terrible inevitability of the victim’s fate leaving the worst moments to the viewer’s imagination while still providing enough horror for all but the most hardened audiences to be disturbed. It is a difficult balance to capture and one that any prospective Lovecraftian horror needs to get right, proving that the movie version of Stephen King’s Lovecraft-inspired From A Buick 8 is in safe hands.

About The Author

Cathal Gunning
(1446 Articles Published)

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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