We've seen the haunted car before: in 1977's THE CAR and perhaps most notably in the truly chilling Spielberg film DUEL (made in 1971 for TELEVISION, no less!). So it is not unexpected that Stephen King would take a crack at it, with somewhat mixed results.<br /><br />The novel was too long, for one thing: a pitfall often seen in King novels. IT took eight hundred and some pages to tell its story and then the payoff was so obvious and disappointing that I threw the book in the trash. THE STAND, on the other hand, was even longer than IT, but there was virtually no waste; that novel NEEDED its length to tell its massive story.<br /><br />Here the story is not massive: A nerdy kid decides to buy a rustbucket of a 1958 Plymouth Fury from an oddball named George LeBay. In an interesting switch of perspective from the novel, the original owner (called Roland LeBay in the book) was the current owner's brother and committed suicide in the car; George LeBay has never driven it and only wants to unload it. This is rather an improvement on the novel in my opinion; the book can't seem to make up its mind whether the source of the evil is the car or LeBay; in the film there is little doubt that it is the car itself (herself). Fleshing out the relatively small cast are the nerdy kid's best friend (one of the high school jocks, if you can buy that one), his beautiful girlfriend, and in extremely minor roles, his parents and a bunch of hooligans who like to pick on him, for which the car exacts a terrible revenge.<br /><br />Not all that bad, really, and the movie is pretty well cast; there are no Oscar performances here, but they are not amateurs either.<br /><br />What's missing is the soul of the book. Because the real tragedy of King's novel is not so much the car's destructive effects on Arnie Cunningham but the way it (she?) alienates him from everyone who loves him, especially his best friend Dennis, with whom he has shared his life since they were babies.<br /><br />Anne Rivers Siddons, writing about her excellent horror novel THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR, once observed that the really chilling thing about evil is that is smashes people and breaks up relationships, and the tragic message of horror is that sometimes even love is not enough to save someone. Carpenter is a master craftsman, but this is a cold film for all that. The novel was not one of King's best, but its greatest strength was showing the tragedy of the destruction of the friendship between two boys who really loved each other despite their differences. Unfortunately Carpenter either failed to see this or he didn't think it was important.