Pyromania

Firestarter director Keith Thomas talks taking on a Stephen King classic

- By Bryan Cairns

STEPHEN KING’S LIBRARY OF novels and stories has terrorised and tormented millions of fans across the globe. That includes Keith Thomas. Growing up, the Vigil director immersed himself in anthologies of creepy tales, such as those from Edgar Allan Poe. Thomas then graduated to the works of HP Lovecraft and, eventually, all roads led to the Master of the Macabre, King.

“I was probably in middle school when I read Skeleton Crew,” Thomas tells SFX. “His other books were too big. There was no way I was going to read a 500-page novel. I started with the short stories. One of the first King novels I ever read was Firestarter. It was very much of the stuff I was interested in. For me, the gateway into horror was horror fiction. And then it became film. Of course, I had seen whatever I could rent from the store around the corner. There were always a lot of Stephen King ones. I ended up watching one of them, then reading some of the book, and then watching another one.”

Over the years, Thomas found himself being pulled back to Firestarter because the narrative didn’t fit into the typical supernatural mould. There were no menacing ghouls or entities. Thomas, instead, relished some of the parental beats.

“These days, folks think of King with It or The Shining, which makes sense,” Thomas says. “Those are brilliant. But there’s this other side where he explores thrillers and suspense. Firestarter is a great mash-up. I suppose, in some ways, it’s a kitchen-sink drama. It’s about two parents raising this difficult child, a child who is struck with this ability that is both a gift and a curse, but mostly a curse… let alone their own abilities. He’s woven that drama in with this