The Forgotten Miniseries That Nearly Teamed Up Steven Spielberg With Stephen King
For a brief moment, the world was almost blessed with a project where two titans, Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, could have combined forces. In the end, they never directly collaborated on a finished piece, but here is what could have been.
In 1996, Spielberg was searching for a new project, specifically a haunted house tale, and reached out to the Master of Horror himself. According to King, he got a call from the filmmaker, who said, “I want to make the scariest ghost story ever made.”
So together, they created the story of Rose Red, which was loosely based on Robert Wise‘s 1963 film The Haunting, which itself was loosely based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 book The Haunting of Hill House.
King and Spielberg collaborated on the project, with King incorporating aspects of the Winchester Mystery House, with its staircases to nowhere, trapdoors, and a confusing labyrinth of rooms, into his script to create a sense of being trapped for the characters by a house that “starts to build itself.” However, as the story began to evolve, the two powerhouse creators began to clash.
ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
“It went back and forth between us,” King told the LA Times back in 2002. “It became a kind of struggle for the soul of this movie.” The author explains that “in what he wanted, there was a…kind of Indiana Jones…thing,” while King wanted a more horror-based story.
“Steven wanted these people to be heroic,” said King. “I just wanted them to be terrified.”
Ultimately, the two would part due to their inability to agree on a premise and a tone. In 1999, Spielberg produced The Haunting, while King would face a nightmare of his own after a near-fatal accident almost ended his writing career.
But after getting hit by a van while jogging in 1999, King wasn’t sure he would write again, but the script for the miniseries Rose Red, the story of a bewitched mansion, became his saving grace. “There was this one awful minute when I sat there and I thought, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this anymore,'” he said in an interview with NBC’s Katie Couric. “At first it was as if I’d never done this in my life. It was like starting over again from square one.”
ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
After having obtained the screenplay he’d developed with Spielberg, King turned his haunted mansion story into a miniseries, praising the narrative benefits of the format’s length over film. In 2002, King’s Rose Red debuted on ABC.
Starring Melanie Lynskey, Judith Ivey, Julian Sands, Emily Deschanel, Nancy Travis, Matt Keeslar, Kimberly J. Brown, David Dukes, Jimmi Simpson, and Matt Ross, Rose Red follows a psychology professor who leads a group of psychics into a malicious haunted mansion to study the paranormal activity inside. Once inside, the group becomes trapped as the house’s eerie history is revealed, feeding on their fears and making them part of its dark legacy.
ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Rose Red was a ratings success for ABC. The first night drew over 18 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched miniseries of the early 2000s. Today, it has a cult following, remembered fondly for its set design and its creepy, gothic atmosphere.
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