That novel not only introduced Castle Rock to the author’s canon, but also Sheriff George Bannerman and the evil serial killer Frank Dodd – both elements that return in King’s canine-centric horror story. Ultimately the movie that Lewis Teague wanted to make was one that honed much closer to the book, and in that mission he was very successful, but there are still some major differences to note – with the way that the film version ends being the most significant.Īs alluded to above, one aspect of Stephen King’s Cujo nowhere present in the film version is the fact that it is a semi-sequel to The Dead Zone. While he doesn’t receive any official credit for his work, Stephen King himself penned the first draft of the screenplay for Cujo’s film adaptation, though ironically part of the reason why another writer was brought in was because King’s take veered too far away from the source material. How Lewis Teague’s Cujo Differs From Stephen King’s Book

I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page. I don’t say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. In his 2000 non-fiction book On Writing, King says that he barely remembers the novel’s creation “at all,” adding, By the late 1970s/early 1980s, the author’s issues with drugs and alcohol became extreme, evidently resulting in states of blackout. One of the oddest things about Cujo is that Stephen King has said that he has little recollection of actually committing the story to paper. What she has no way of knowing, though, is that the Camber family dog, Cujo, has contracted rabies, and after the beginnings of a violent rampage is left lying in wait for Donna and Tad to arrive and for their car to break down at what turns out to be the worst possible time. When Vic has to travel with his business partner to New York, Donna agrees to take their malfunctioning Ford Pinto in for repairs – going to visit a garage on the outskirts of town owned by a man named Joe Camber.

Privately, Donna has been carrying on an affair with a man named Steve Kemp, which she decides to call off and tell her husband about and professionally Vic finds the status of his advertising career in jeopardy when a cereal brand he has as an account with begins making kids puke up red vomit that looks like blood. Bringing audiences back to the town of Castle Rock, Maine following its debut appearance in the 1979 novel The Dead Zone, Cujo introduces Constant Readers to the Trenton family – Donna, Vic, and their son Tad – as they face crises of both the internal and external variety.

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