Stephen King wrote his first original screenplay for a horror film about feline vampires
In short: In 1992, Stephen King broke his tradition of adapting his own novels to write Sleepwalkers, a horror film about nomadic, shapeshifting energy vampires. These creatures, who feed on the life force of human virgins, face a singular, lethal weakness: domestic cats. The result is a strange, campy battle for survival.
Sleepwalkers follows Charles and Mary Brady, the final survivors of a vampiric species that can shift between human form and bipedal werecats. While they possess telekinetic powers and the ability to create illusions, they are constantly hunted by domestic cats, which are the only creatures capable of seeing through their disguises. The film, directed by Mick Garris, was shot in Franklin Canyon Park, California, and marked a departure for King, who wrote the screenplay specifically for the screen rather than adapting existing prose.
The production faced significant hurdles with the Motion Picture Association, requiring five submissions before securing an R-rating. Garris had to truncate scenes involving extreme violence—such as a finger-biting sequence and a corkscrew eye-stabbing—and excise explicit sexual content to avoid an X-rating. Despite these efforts, the film received generally poor critical reception, with aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic showing low approval scores. Critics like Alan Jones dismissed the material as an underdeveloped potboiler, though some, such as John Kenneth Muir, noted that the film’s first half maintained a grim, involving tone before devolving into camp.
Despite the critical response, the film was the number one release during its opening week. Garris later revealed that Tabitha King, the author's wife, once penned a sequel treatment involving a women's basketball team, though the studio showed no interest in pursuing a franchise. While Garris and producer Joe Russo have discussed the possibility of a reboot in recent years, the project remains dormant. The film is remembered for its unique lore, including the invention of a 'Book of Arcane Knowledge' to provide backstory, and its reliance on feline protagonists to defeat the supernatural antagonists.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Sleepwalkers (1992 film)
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