Then again, King rarely had the same kind of affection for adaptations of his works that many other people did. Despite having a few kind words to say about Misery, many of the interpretations of his work either left him with a sour taste in his mouth or had him questioning what the director had in mind.

It’s not like every one of them was terrible, though. Stanley Kubrick might as well have thrown the original version of The Shining in the trash when telling his story of the Overlook Hotel, but when looking at what he got out of Jack Nicholson and Shelley DuVall, he clearly knew how to make a visual stunning piece, even if he took a few moral liberties with how he decided to treat his actors.

But if there’s one connective tissue between a lot of King’s works, it’s revenge. No one has written more despicable characters whose fate has turned around more beautifully than in movies like Shawshank Redemption, and yet when an action movie roared into theatres that was all about revenge on a town full of people, King was never going to give Rambo the creative thumbs-up.

There’s a lot to like about Sylvester Stallone’s balls-to-the-wall action movie, but all of the blood spilled in the movie felt a bit too forced for King, saying, “The pandering aspect of it disturbs me a lot. It is pornography. There are fuck movies, there are suck movies and there are snuff movies. And there are also movies that are like invitations to a kind of knee-jerk hate reaction. To me, that was what Rambo was.”

No one’s denying that Rambo isn’t looking to elicit a tepid reaction from its audience, but King does have a small point. Most people would have to go through a logistical gymnastics routine to come to the conclusions that Rambo does throughout the movie, and it could have had some dangerous effects on kids that took everything at face value, but it was never meant to be that kind of movie. Stallone’s character is the kind of war hero that most people wish they could be, and even if it’s a wish-fulfilment movie in many respects, it’s not like King was safe from a few strange moments in his filmography.

Since he always wanted to see one of his movies done right, King’s decision to become one of the main advisors on a few of his stories did come back to bite him in the ass. No, Rambo might not be the movie you go to when you’re in a deep and thoughtful mood, but considering King took all of his strange ideas and channelled them into movies like Sleepwalkers and Maximum Overdrive, he was never afraid of going over-the-top as well.

King may have looked down on what he saw as action porn a lot of the time, but it normally comes down to how most people look at the silver screen. It’s much easier for people to devour pages of dialogue and get a more nuanced story, but there’s no shame in wanting to see some of the most grizzly action stars in the world prove their worth as a badass, either.

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