Everyone loves a good Stephen King trailer, and the new preview for Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Doctor Sleep is a great one. Atmospheric and spooky, with impressive recreations of Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining, the teaser gets audiences in the right frame of mind to remember something timeless, and get excited for something brand new.
And yet, as good as the trailer for Doctor Sleep is, it’s nothing compared to the teaser for Maximum Overdrive.
This a masterpiece of self-adulation, an ironic classic in its own right. Because as much as it boasts about the overwhelming terror that awaits you in Maximum Overdrive – a film about trucks that get possessed by aliens, lest we forget – we all know how this movie actually turned out. It may be awesome as hell, but it ain’t “scary.”
To fully appreciate the absolute marvel that is the Maximum Overdrive trailer, we are going to have to analyze it piece by piece, as though we have never seen it or the finished movie before.
First, imagine yourself in a movie theater in 1986.
By this point, Stephen King adaptations have been mostly excellent – with hits like Carrie, The Dead Zone, Christine and The Shining – and the announcement of a new one, which often came in the theater (since the internet and social media weren’t really a thing yet), would have come as a surprise.
The trailer begins with Stephen King himself, the best-selling horror author, standing in front of a giant Green Goblin head. Yes, that Green Goblin. The bad guy from the Spider-Man comics. Needless to say, it’s one hell of an image.
“Hello,” he says. “I’m Stephen King. I’ve written several motion pictures but I want to tell you about a movie called Maximum Overdrive, which is the first one I’ve directed.”
Ho. ly. Crap. Stephen King has directed his own horror movie. The master of horror has taken a seat behind the camera. This, we are expected to tell ourselves, is going to be the scariest movie of all time.
And somehow the Green Goblin is involved?
Well, don’t worry, because we’re about to see some of that terrifying footage. First, future Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul co-star Giancarlo Esposito gets killed by an exploding arcade cabinet, and then some guy gets a soda can shot into his testicles by a vending machine.
Uh-oh.
“A lot of people have directed Stephen King novels and stories,” King says, speaking about himself in the third person like that’s ever been a good sign. “And I finally decided if you want something done right you oughta do it yourself.”
Once again, just in case you’ve forgotten, that’s Stephen King throwing massive shade at Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma and John Carpenter, amongst others. He’s not just saying that the film he directed is going to be good, he’s calling some of the greatest horror directors in the history of the cinematic medium incompetent.
Cut to cars driving themselves through a front window of a diner! Cut to Yeardley Smith, the future voice of Lisa on The Simpsons, screaming in terror!
“It was my first picture as a director, and you know something?” King asks the audience, rhetorically, as he works himself up into a manic line reading. “I sort of enjoyed it!”
Oh man, he’s really worked up about directi… wait, “sort of?” He only “sort of” enjoyed it?
“WHAT IS GOING ON,” Yeardley Smith screams! “I DON’T KNOW,” yells her husband!
“I just wanted someone to do Stephen King right,” says Stephen King, who probably didn’t think too hard about that sentence. (Or worse, he thought about it a lot and he came to the conclusion that it didn’t sound weird or creepy, and not in the good way.)
Cut to Emilio Estevez shooting a rocket launcher at an alien truck, and then back to…
“So come and spend some time with me and my friends at the Dixie Boy,” King invites us. “Spend some time in the dark.”
And then, in the piece de resistance, King lifts his finger dramatically to the audience and declares, “I’m going to scare the hell outta you. And that’s a promise.”
“Jesus is comin’ and he is [OFF-SCREEN CAR HORN SOUND EFFECT],” Emilio Estevez announces, after a brief montage of mayhem.
God bless this trailer, this absurd, cocky, unconvincing, condescending trailer that dares to call The Shining, The Dead Zone, Carrie and Christine pieces of crap while trying to sell us on the idea that Maximum Overdrive – one of the most ridiculous (albeit ridiculously entertaining) – Stephen King adaptations is better than all of them.
Imagine if the Doctor Sleep trailer opened with director Mike Flanagan looking directly at the screen, in front of a giant image of Doctor Doom’s face for some reason, and calling Stanley Kubrick a punk for screwing up The Shining, then pointing his finger directly at the camera and daring you to see his new film.
That would be absurd. It would also be the biggest flex ever, and it would also be exactly what Stephen King did (if you exchange Green Goblin for Doctor Doom, of course).
They don’t make trailers like the one for Maximum Overdrive anymore. They didn’t even really make them at the time. It was a colossal marketing power play, a gamble that audiences would flock to anything – even the goofiest Stephen King movie ever – so long as they knew that King himself was in charge. And they were somehow guaranteed to think it was the scariest movie ever, despite oodles of footage in that exact same trailer which pretty much proved otherwise.
Maximum Overdrive is, for the record, a cult classic, and a beloved film amongst many King fans specifically because the author took a big swing, made something bonkers, and never directed again. But to say it lived up to its own hype would be a huge overstatement. And that hype gushes from this trailer in waves.
So enjoy that Doctor Sleep trailer if you must. Just know that if you want something done right, you oughta do it yourself, and put a big ol’ groin attack in your trailer to prove it.
