Another meh Stephen King movie

The problem with so many of King's adaptations to film is that what seems scary on paper just comes across as tepid, or even stupid on the screen. This movie is an example.

I remember reading this novella and being creeped out by it, but the movie just bored me, despite some creative visuals by the director.

A minor issue is that at this point, King has written so many books that he has taken to using variations of the same characters over and over again. We've seen these characters before in better stories.

The bigger issue though is one of media. In print, King takes us into the minds of the character as they react to these improbable scenarios. That's where the power of his stories lie. We'd freak out too if we were trapped in a normally benign environment. We don't question the logic of the situation.

In film, we can't (easily) get into the internal dialogues of these people. All we can do is focus on the visuals... in this case tall grass surrounding a large turd-like rock. It's pretty hard to be afraid of plants blowing in the breeze. M. Night Shyamalan learned this the hard way.