I saw Rose Red not too long ago, and not too long after having read the book. I went to Spain in the Summer of 2003 for a few weeks. I was traveling on my own, making a documentary for the University of California, and literally on my last day in Spain, I noticed a book called My Life at Rose Red, by Stephen King, at a liquor store in a town called Benidorm on the southeastern coast. I picked it up, since I had about 30 hours of travel ahead of me back to California and because I hadn't seen a book in English in quite some time. Having been a Stephen King fan for most of my life (I opened the floodgates of horror novels when I read `It' in 6th grade), I was amazed at how much of a character study the book was, but the movie dealt with the mystery of the haunted Rose Red, not with it's construction, which is what the book is all about. The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, I think, makes an honest attempt to go back and tell that part of the Rose Red story.
What is truly odd, however, is that the movie that actually tells the story of Ellen and John Rimbauer, the story of the construction of Rose Red, about which Stephen Kings' book is written, is actually based on a journal of Ellen's that was written by a different author. I hope I have my facts straight here. King's book is actually in the form of Ellen's diary, although he delves suspiciously close to novel writing at many times. Who writes a diary like that? Anyway, this film telling the story that led up to the subject of the lengthy miniseries aired on ABC a couple years ago comes much closer to telling the story in the book from which that miniseries took its name. Its interesting that the miniseries needs a prequel to tell the story of the book upon which it is based.
Okay, I'm getting a little repetitive. Much more digestible at less than half the length of Rose Red, the movie unfortunately never really comes out of the shadow of the movie that its content precedes, always coming across as a prequel that leads up to something else. Maybe it's because it didn't have enough life of its own or because I always got the feeling that it was purposely covering the holes left by Rose Red, providing an excuse for that movie having so little to do with the book upon which it was supposedly based. Either way, taken together the two movies provide a pretty interesting ghost story, one about a haunted mansion that actually has such a turbulent past leading to why it is haunted (hence the need for this prequel). It's just too bad that it takes a total of more than six hours for them to tell that story
What is truly odd, however, is that the movie that actually tells the story of Ellen and John Rimbauer, the story of the construction of Rose Red, about which Stephen Kings' book is written, is actually based on a journal of Ellen's that was written by a different author. I hope I have my facts straight here. King's book is actually in the form of Ellen's diary, although he delves suspiciously close to novel writing at many times. Who writes a diary like that? Anyway, this film telling the story that led up to the subject of the lengthy miniseries aired on ABC a couple years ago comes much closer to telling the story in the book from which that miniseries took its name. Its interesting that the miniseries needs a prequel to tell the story of the book upon which it is based.
Okay, I'm getting a little repetitive. Much more digestible at less than half the length of Rose Red, the movie unfortunately never really comes out of the shadow of the movie that its content precedes, always coming across as a prequel that leads up to something else. Maybe it's because it didn't have enough life of its own or because I always got the feeling that it was purposely covering the holes left by Rose Red, providing an excuse for that movie having so little to do with the book upon which it was supposedly based. Either way, taken together the two movies provide a pretty interesting ghost story, one about a haunted mansion that actually has such a turbulent past leading to why it is haunted (hence the need for this prequel). It's just too bad that it takes a total of more than six hours for them to tell that story