Poets & Writers Theater

“There’s something in people that is naturally story-like. You’re taking all this unformed, chaotic stuff and making sense of it.” Award-winning novelist and poet Peter Straub speaks about creating characters and his love of writing horror stories in this 2012 Open Road Media interview. Straub, who received the 2008 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award for his generosity to the literary community, died at the age of seventy-nine on September 4, 2022.

Dracula is a new BBC/Netflix television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 gothic horror novel. Created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, the three-episode miniseries stars Claes Bang in the title role, along with Morfydd Clark, John Heffernan, and Dolly Wells.

Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep (Scribner, 2013), the sequel to his 1977 classic The Shining, has been adapted into a feature film directed by Mike Flanagan. The movie picks up the story several decades later as a grown-up Danny Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, meets a young girl with psychic powers similar to his own that he tries to protect from a supernatural cult of murderous nomads.

In this film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 supernatural horror novel, It, seven children are terrorized by a shape-shifting being that appears in the form of an evil clown. Directed by Andrés Muschietti, the film stars Chosen Jacobs, Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, and Finn Wolfhard.

The Dark Tower is a film sequel to Stephen King’s eight-novel series of the same name, which was published between 1982 and 2004 and inspired by Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Directed by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, and Katheryn Winnick, the film will premiere in August.

“Sometimes for a kid the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. And that’s the way that we think in dreams.” In this Blank on Blank animated video of a 1989 interview, Stephen King talks about the many different connections between childhood and his own writing process.