Another day, another announcement of a Stephen King adaptation. (I’m not complaining!) The latest project involves King’s short story, “Autopsy Room Four.”
According to Deadline, Ranjeet S. Marwa, whose previous credits include Memoirs of a Sikh Soldier and the upcoming Dig Me No Grave, is on board to write and direct the film adaptation. His debut work, a 2012 short titled The Man Who Loved Flowers, was also reportedly inspired by King.
“Autopsy Room Four” was first published in 1997 in King’s self-published collection Six Stories, and then later in 2002 in the traditionally published Everything’s Eventual. In it, a man finds himself paralyzed and presumed dead in an autopsy room after getting bitten by a snake. Grady Hendrix, in his Stephen King Reread series described the story as “well-written” though he acknowledges that even King recognized that “it’s basically ‘Breakdown,’ a 1955 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, only instead of Joseph Cotton crying a single teardrop to let the pathologist know he’s alive, Howard Cottrell gets a boner.”
This isn’t the first adaptation of the story. In 2003, a short film was based on it, and in 2006, it was featured in TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From The Stories Of Stephen King. But there hasn’t been a film adaptation yet, and it will be interesting to see how Marwa takes the source material and expands it into a feature-length story.
The project is apparently in its early days, so no news yet on who will play the presumably paralyzed Howard Cottrell or when the film will go into production.
