Streamin’ King: ‘Thinner’ Takes Body Horror To The Extreme

Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching Thinner, the 1996 adaptation of King’s 1984 novel originally published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym.

STREAMIN’ KING: THINNER

THE GIST: Husband/dad/lawyer distracted during automotive sexytime runs down elderly Romani leader’s slightly less elderly daughter; titular single-word curse cast upon White Man From Town. Effects as advertised, unstoppable terminal weight loss at rapid speed, leading to quest for cure and/or sweeping vengeance before, as he puts it, “being erased” completely.

PEDIGREE: Directed/co-written by Child’s Play/Fright Night helmer Tom Holland, who the year prior adapted King’s The Langoliers as a TV miniseries. Script co-penned by Michael McDowell, who has writing credits on Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Tales from the Darkside. Stars Robert John Burke (Gossip Girl, BlacKkKlansman), three-time Emmy nominee Joe Mantegna (Criminal Minds, The Godfather: Part III), Lucinda Jenney (Rain Man, The Mothman Prophecies), Bethany Joy Lenz (One Tree Hill), and Michael Constantine (My Big Fat Greek Wedding). Cinematography by Kees Van Oostrum (The Fosters), score by Daniel Licht (Dexter).

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Every so often a sticky King elevator pitch snags you and you have to ride that elevator to the last floor, whether it takes weeks or decades to actually find out what’s down there. Misery, Carrie, 11/22/63, Under the Dome—some of these you hear the premise and have to see it through. If Thinner is one for you, by all means go ahead and…actually, still maybe check yourself before you cinematically wreck yourself. It’s so far from being the scariest, most memorable, most human, or most well-made SK adaptation that you’re better off engaging with almost anything else. Go see what the hell’s going on with The Mangler or Children of the Corn XIX. If Bachman’s infamous mean streak is precious to you, redirect your time toward The Long Walk or its brethren. If Thinner steered into its opportunity to honestly deliver an ending as madly bleak as The Mist or Pet Sematary, it’d have a good bargaining chip. But, perhaps unavoidably, it hits like a depressed wet fart.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Ever seen a non-porn flick where the inciting incident is a bee-jay in a moving car? Not even close to the first question that needs asking; I’m just wondering. Thinner’s middling body horror (with, I guess, increasingly tolerable makeup effects) isn’t remotely the grossest aspect of this pigslop of xenophobia, misogyny (emphatically sexualizing and demeaning in particular), exotification, and toxic protagonists. The score is hella ’90s, it all looks washed out, an hour and a half rarely felt so interminable. The fatsuits, garbage. Most damningly by a long shot, everything about the Romani community is horrendously presented (“they bring disease, crime, and prostitution!”) and builds to a ghoulish mobster Racist Rambo–ing their camp with a machine gun, causing explosions, death, and, let’s be honest, literally generational trauma.

7 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. The book—boldly, for an author who didn’t want his secret found out—features two actual name checks where Billy’s problem is said to resemble a Stephen King story.
2. The oppositionally tender Elevation, published 34 years and several lifetimes after Thinner, follows a middle aged Mainer suddenly shedding all his weight with no visible change to his body. The thrust of SK’s contemplative and contemporary 2018 novella is how long can this guy with an unheard-of illness keep himself tethered to Earth till he’s utterly irrelevant to gravity and floats away, and what bonds will he foster in those final months?

3. Holland told the Losers’ Club podcast he turned down The Stand to direct Thinner, then entered 13 years of development hell “because the ending was so brutal, studios were scared to death of it.” He’s “97 percent” satisfied with it, remains interested in adapting Strawberry Spring and The Ten O’Clock People, and considered trying Duma Key, which is still begging for a good adaptation (and has a gutwrenching John Slattery audiobook by the way).

4. Joe Mantegna is one of an elite (but not super small) batch of King adaptation actors to narrate the author’s work on tape/MP3/future-brainchips—and one of the only ones to narrate the book that bore their screen performance. (Sissy Spacek read Carrie!) Canvassing this actors x audiobooks niche, I found his take on Thinner “soft-spoken and flecked with a New York accent, like [his character Richie Ginelli] with a love for reading,” who also “has to compete with way too much grating music.” Mantegna did the story “Popsy” on Nightmares & Dreamscapes’ audiobook in 1993 as well, alongside fellow stars of SK things Kathy Bates, Tim Curry, David Cronenberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Rob Lowe, and Gary Sinise.

5. Other repeat Kingverse journeyfolk: John Horton did The Shawshank Redemption and Thinner back to back, playing a judge in both; Daniel Licht scored Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice and III: Urban Harvest; writer Michael McDowell adapted “The Word Processor of the Gods” for Golden Tales; second unit DP Robert Draper does cinematography on Shudder’s Creepshow (including the “Gray Matter” segment); producer Richard P. Rubinstein did the OG Creepshow and its sequel, then Pet Sematary, Golden Years, The Langoliers, The Night Flier, and The Stand—both the 1994 and 2020 miniseries, earning an Emmy nom for the Mick Garris endeavor. Lastly and perhaps most interestingly, A. Welch Lambeth’s one production credit is Thinner, but his career as a transportation coordinator/captain has spanned decades and includes The Green Mile and Pet Sematary.

6. Stevie cameos as one “Dr. Bangor,” the story’s second fellow geographically-named medical professional  after Dr. Mike Houston. (“Agent Stoner” also kills me.)

7. While the 1987 adaptation of the Bachman book The Running Man was solely credited to the pen name, for this one—the only other—they opted to dress it up and send it to the dance as Stephen King’s Thinner. The rights to both were sold before Bachman’s identity was known.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Tomatometer is a dessicated 14% Fresh with a sturdy 30% from audiences. The typical bad horror movie review–type beat joints are easy to find, but so are some head-scratching compliments like the San Francisco Chronicle judging it as “one of the better Stephen King-derived movies” and the New York Times saying with a straight face that the “production is slick, the Maine scenery is bracing, the characters are well-acted”—but not before conceding the “tale of negligent homicide, class warfare, vengeance, jealousy and murder” contains the “outlines of Shakespearean tragedy and the intellectual content of a jack o’lantern.” Variety came out swinging, saying it was “one of the more pedestrian translations of the shockmeister’s books, and is headed for the video remainders pile after a brief, lackluster theatrical run,” the Globe and Mail found the “dramatic justification for all this careless maligning of gypsies and lawyers remains as enigmatic as the film’s title,” and Entertainment Weekly’s D review wrapped, “Like too many Stephen King movies, Thinner is all (emaciated) concept and no follow-through.”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR THINNER (1984): Amid its publication, per King, Richard Bachman “died suddenly…when the Bangor Daily News, my hometown paper, published the story that I was Bachman.” While his first four RB novels “did not sell well at all,” Thinner moved “28,000 copies when Bachman was the author and 280,000 copies when Steve King became the author.” He was “surprised, upset, and pissed off” at the fact his cherished “vampirish side” was “killed by the sunlight of disclosure.” Misery was intended to be Big Bach’s big book. Here’s what our guy looked like the only time he emerged from SK’s imagination and onto a book jacket:

Timeline-wise, Thinner was preceded in ’83 by Christine, Pet Sematary, and Cycle of the Werewolf, hit the same year as fantasy outings The Talisman (with Peter Straub) and The Eyes of the Dragon, and followed by Skeleton Crew in ’85 and It in ’86.

Zach Dionne writes and records Stephen King things regularly at SKzd on Patreon.