Christine

Jamie Graham, Editor-at-Large, Total Film

- 

I fell in love with Christine at first sight. It was 1986, I was 14 years old, and I watched the videotape four times back to back. I was instantly obsessed with this tale of high-school loser Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) buying his first automobile, a 1958 Plymouth Fury with headlights like eyes and a grinning grill, to become a) cool, and b) no more the victim, his bullies reduced to roadkill. What teenage boy wouldn’t dig that?

Christine entered my life at a time when I’d recently discovered Stephen King and was devouring his work. I’d read Firestarter, Carrie, Pet Sematary, Different Seasons and Salem’s Lot, but not yet Christine – if I had, I’d perhaps not have fallen so hard for John Carpenter’s adaptation given it’d undergone an overhaul more exhaustive than Kubrick’s refashioning of The Shining. And while I’d seen and adored Halloween, The Fog and