“I Am The Doorway” on its way

doorway

By Keri O’Shea

It’s always good to be able to share good news here, so finding out that one of my favourite short movie directors is about to bring us an official Stephen King adaptation is definitely something worth sharing. Some years ago, the talented Czech director Robin Kašpařík made a short occult horror film called Seance; I was lucky enough to see it, and then as part of our Horror in Short section Robin very gamely allowed us to feature it here (though a link won’t be forthcoming right now, sorry folks, as the video has since been moved. Well, we are going back a few years…)

So far, the official channels for the film say very little about the film itself, but we do know at least that the film will be in the sci fi/horror genre. Indeed, the King story on which the film will be based – which appeared in the highly-regarded Night Shift collection which was first published in the late 70s – takes place in outer space, where it follows the horrific fate of Arthur, an astronaut exposed to a mutagen during a voyage to Venus, and his subsequent fate – becoming a distorted mirror, his skin grotesquely becoming covered in tiny eyeballs, via which an alien species can see into our world (where they don’t exactly like what they see). There’s certainly plenty of scope there for a tantalising type of body horror, and I’m interested to see what Kašpařík has done with the source material, as it seems to be that there are various aspects which could be played up.

The film is currently in post-production, and some encouraging, minimalist stills/images have now begun to surface on the official Facebook page. All considered, I Am The Doorway should be with us soon and as soon as possible, we’ll be giving it a look. Good Stephen King adaptations have become few and far between in recent years, so fingers crossed here’s a film to buck the trend.