Streamin’ King: ‘In The Tall Grass’ Imaginatively Builds On Stephen King and Joe Hill’s Short Story

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching In the Tall Grass, Netflix’s new film based on the 2012 story co-penned by King and his son, horror/comics writer Joe Hill (NOS4A2)

STREAMIN’ KING: IN THE TALL GRASS (2019)

THE GIST: Pregnant Becky and brother Cal are driving her across the country. On one of those vast Midwestern stretches of farms and nothingness, they hear a child crying for help from a gargantuan field of grass higher than its small group of unfortunate inhabitants, a malevolent entity of its own that messes with direction, space, and time. Within it lives a mysterious and powerful black rock.
PEDIGREE: Features Patrick Wilson (Fargo, the Conjuring and Insidious franchises), who called it “one [of] my strangest films, for sure. (that’s a great thing).” Stars relatively new face Laysla De Oliveira (Netflix’s upcoming Joe Hill series adaptation Locke & Key), Avery Whitted in his second film, 12-year-old Will Buie Jr. (Bunk’d), and Harrison Gilbertson (Picnic at Hanging Rock). Score by Mark Korven (Robert Eggers’s The Witch and The Lighthouse), cinematography by Craig Wrobleski (Fargo, The Umbrella Academy).Written and directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice), who announced the project in 2015, praising its authors for turning an “otherwise innocuous Kansas field into a stage for some of the most disturbing horror fiction I have ever read.” Natali’s also a talented storyboard artist and shared 226 pages of his Grass boards on his site, along with trippy concept art from himself and three others.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Most likely, especially if this field and rock have held sway over you for several years. The plot is represented here in full, with brain-blitzing temporal fuckery added to the dreaded spatial screwiness. “Almost to the letter—as much as these things can be—I filmed the story. But it is the seed for something larger,” Natali told Decider. Tons of the dialogue (the limericks, Ross’s odd phrasings, Cal’s “out of the oven and baked just right” break with reality) comes straight from the page. There’s an extra protagonist who was only mentioned in the story, and a new ending that sort of puts an asterisk on the original stomach-destroying kicker, which is here but recontextualized. “If I had been told I couldn’t have had that scene, I would not have made the film,” Natali informed Decider. “In a way, it was the raison d’etre for me to make the movie.” Readers hoping for additional hard intel on the rock, the grass, and/or the church won’t find it, but there’s some imaginative exploration and expansion of their nature and history.
It’s also fun to experience In the Tall Grass as an indirect but situationally familiar descendant of “Children of the Corn,” a la The Shining and “1408.”

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? If the vegetational premise sounds good and you want some fresh Netflix spooky-season content, try it out. The grass’s oppressive atmosphere is fully felt, there’s a variety of haunting aerial views, a slew of transition shots straight out of a Planet Earth Halloween special, and the unpredictably urgent score is peppered with chilling, throbbing chants. You’ll need to overlook a few brief, inadvisable CGI sequences and prepare for some repetition that’s only partly justified by the time-warp aspect. Twenty minutes could easily get chopped; there are four excursions to the rock and one unnecessary romp out of the grass and into a decrepit bowling alley.
If it wins you over once, it’s a satisfying rewatch with less discombobulation and more appreciation of the well-executed package. The cast of horror-movie-perfect faces is a strong tether to hang onto while you sort out the twist (and De Oliveira’s scream game is on point); Cal’s icky love for his sister becomes doubly upsetting; Tobin’s truly a freaky little urchin. Lines like Becky’s early mission statement “forget the kid, this is about us now” and Ross’s “I remember when Natalie was pregnant, those were the salad days; enjoy it, enjoy your baby because it goes fast” suddenly feel super well-placed and foreboding.
7 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. A very Christine-ish red automobile sits in the church parking lot. “It’s an imperfect recreation of a Plymouth Fury. The best we could do for our budget!” Natali tweeted. It’s next to a VW Beetle, the onscreen choice of protagonists in The Shining and The Dead Zone.

   Did you notice that "Christine" easter egg in #InTheTallGrass on @netflix ? ;) pic.twitter.com/oTsFSihVod

   — Club Stephen King 🎈 (@ClubSTEPHENKING) October 7, 2019

   Other King connections: Grass’s Church of the Black Rock of the Redeemer surely serves its namesake similarly to how those faithful Christian tykes in “Children of the Corn” decades ago served their “strange green God, a God of corn, grown old and strange and hungry. He Who Walks Behind the Rows.” Echoes of the Shining film’s confounding hedge maze. SK previously aligned grass and the supernatural in 1975’s “The Lawnmower Man” and ’82’s The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, where the possibility is floated that “everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow.”

2. Not only will De Oliveira play the villain in Netflix’s Hill-based Locke & Key, Natali will direct a couple episodes. He’s shown his Constant Readerdom numerous times, like noting how Patrick Wilson “took what was essentially a Jack Torrance from The Shining type of character and he makes him into an uber-mensch,” or throwing his hat into the It adaptation ring in 2015.

   He’s not looking to do a Grass sequel, telling Decider, “I like endings that open themselves up to another story, but I’m not generally interested in telling that story. I just like movies that leave you with something to chew on.”

3. Tall Grass is the second of three King-based films premiering in a two-month span this autumn (and the only non-sequel), between Sept. 6’s It: Chapter Two and Nov. 8’s Doctor Sleep. It’s Netflix’s third King movie, following October 2017’s Streamin’ King-incepting Gerald’s Game and 1922.

4. In Full Throttle, Joe Hill describes writing with the Dickens of horror as perpetually feeling “like Wile E. Coyote strapped to the rocket, and my dad is the missile.” A laughing King refuted the notion in a joint interview:

   “No, I don’t think that’s exactly true. Good try, son. We look alike and we’re interested in the same things, and what we’re really like is the Everly Brothers: His style and my style, we don’t write the same but we’re in harmony with one another. The thing kind of flows naturally. Both times, I felt like I was getting a sweet ride, like I was getting in a Mercedes-Benz because I was with a pro who’s somebody I also happen to love a lot.”

5. Of his experience becoming the latest Creepy King Kid, Will Buie Jr. said, “I learned how to come off the set at Disney onto a horror film set. I learned to be creepy and how to be an actor in really hot, sticky, itchy and grassy conditions.” His mom helped him “research scary boy characters in horror movies so I could get a feel for what Tobin might be like.”

6. Westworld‘s James Marsden was originally cast as Ross; now he’ll play Stu Redman in CBS All Access’s The Stand miniseries.

7. Hill “proudly allows” (reporter’s words) that Grass‘s ending is “one of the grossest things” he’s ever conceived. “You’re thinking to yourself, ‘He’ll never do that in the movie,’ and then he did do that in the movie,” Hill said. Natali tried keeping it as his script’s conclusion, telling Decider, “I really like it in the book, but in the context of the movie—where you’ve spent nearly an hour and a half with these characters, desperately trying to get out of this place—to leave them there, to strip them of their humanity… I found it very unsatisfying.”

   King doesn’t recall giving Natali any notes. “My view of it all has been, try as much as you can to be part of the solution, but if there isn’t a problem, you should stand back and let a talented filmmaker do his thing, and that’s what we did,” he said. He and Hill did comically lament the missed opportunity for a punnier name, though.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS:Low 40s on Rotten Tomatoes, mid 40s on Metacritic. The Guardian said Natali “treats a Kansas field as if it were a haunted house, an ambitious gambit that in practice is easier to politely admire than it is to enthusiastically celebrate,” decreeing the film lives “down among the weeds next to Netflix’s many other equally forgettable horror misfires.” RoberEbert.comconversely found “more visually going on with Natali’s film than the vast majority of streaming originals we’ve seen lately, most of which seem designed to be watched on a phone or out of the corner of your eye while you’re playing with a phone.” The New York Times recognized Natali’s “atmospheric frenzy” but said compared to the story, “every new addition is a subtraction.” The A.V. Club liked how it “creates a sense of disorientation by playing with audio volume and depth” but dinged it for being “bookended by flat, brightly lit, purely functional scenes that don’t quite erase the memory of the surrealist horrors that unfold at its peak, but do come close.”

King, meanwhile, tweeted it “really has to be seen to be believed.” Hill “loved it” and thinks it’s “like Hereditary-level scary” and kind of “a gory Midwestern Inception.” He also ID’d “a thread of hope that is unique to the film and I think is a good thing.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “IN THE TALL GRASS” (2012): First published as a summer two–parter in Esquire, published that October as an e-book and an audiobook masterfully narrated by Stephen Lang. Collected this month in Joe Hill’s sophomore short fiction collection Full Throttle. Father and son also collaborated on “Throttle,” the book’s opener.
Zach Dionne is a Different Seasons die-hard elated to hear King will return to the four novellas/one book format in 2020 with If It Bleeds.

Stream In The Tall Grass on Netflix