When Stephen King looked back on his childhood, it was 1960 in The Body, or 1959 for the film adaptation Stand By Me. When his son Joe Hill looked back, it was 1988. A film adaptation of Hill’s Snapshot 1988 is in development from Oculus and Gerald’s Game creators Jeff Howard and Mike Flanagan. Howard said a Snapshot 1988 film would require more than the usual Blumhouse budget, and updated us on the development.
“They’re trying to find a nice solid A-list director,” Howard said during a phone interview for his Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. “It was designed from the beginning to be a bigger budget movie.”
The story is about a teenager looking after an elderly lady who is losing her memories not to dementia, but to a memory thief called The Phoenician.
“It’s a really emotional piece of material about childhood and loss and overcoming some of your problems as a child,” Howard said.
“It’s mostly about memory and how memory can be a really beautiful thing but it can also be something that really, really can be one of the cruelest things in our life. To me, it’s a modern Stand By Me and I think they’re treating it very preciously which I love to see. I love to see Blumhouse not grinding out a movie but taking their time to find a really good filmmaker to take it on. To me, if this was 1987 I would hand it to Rob Reiner and beg him.”
A director now on the level Reiner was when he made Stand By Me would have been a child of the ‘80s, just as Howard was.
“When I read the Snapshot novella, I was probably a couple years younger than the main character but it’s just so many of the same things,” Howard said. “It was such a joy to Google 1988 and read every number one song from 1988 which was a way more diverse batch of songs than you can ever imagine. We tried to work as many of them into the script as we could.”
Howard’s latest project is the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, on Netflix Friday, October 12.
