The Regulators
Dream Director: Drew Goddard (Cabin in the Woods)
The fantastical story of an Autistic boy named Seth taking control of his town due to being possessed by an entity known as Tak, and due to the boy’s love for television, he ends up morphing most of the town and its inhabitants into relics from sci-fi and the Old West. King has written plenty of stories that take place in someone’s mind or present to you a world from a uniquely skewed vantage point. The Regulators is that idea to the extreme as a detached boy’s imagination continues to pollute the (decreasingly) real world. With the hodgepodge of elements and styles that Goddard confidently mashes together in not only Cabin in the Woods, but also the recent NBC comedy, The Good Place, it feels like he could really dig into this world well. Wouldn’t it be fun to see this mad world come to life?
On the other hand, The Regulators is very much one side of a coin that has Desperation as its complimenting side. King makes these works “mirror novels” and connects the stories by having many characters from The Regulators appearing in Desperation, albeit filling entirely new roles; almost like parallel universes dealing with the same problem in different ways (King takes this idea as far as publishing Regulators under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman, his mirror self). In many ways this feels like these are almost meant to be seen as a sort of theatrical production, with the same cast performing both shows in order to convey a bigger message. Desperation is a work of King’s that has been adapted (into a TV film in 2006), but without its other half it seems to largely be missing the point. While The Regulators could certainly stand on its own merits, doing this double feature approach with someone more focused on artifice, such as PT Anderson or even Aaron Sorkin could lead to a very worthwhile, sophisticated end result.
