For years, I’ve wanted to see several Stephen King stories get movie adaptations, one in particular – and I have the perfect actor to cast in the lead role, too. I grew up reading Stephen King, and I’ve torn through his novels and his short story collections. While plenty of his novels have stuck with me, like It and the Dark Tower series, Stephen King’s short stories have always packed the greatest punch for me. There’s just something about the quick snapshots of horror and visual images King paints in his short stories that sears itself into my brain, including in his newest short story collection, You Like It Darker.

That’s why it surprises me that Hollywood hasn’t adapted more of Stephen King’s short stories. Sure, there have been lots of adaptations of his shorts, whether as movies or one-and-done episodes in anthology TV shows. Still, full-length movie adaptations of his short stories have been a lot harder to come by. I can only imagine it’s because the short stories would have to be considerably changed and fleshed out to be feature-length. Even so, there’s one Stephen King short story adaptation that I think would work very well as a horror movie thanks to its unique narrative structure and horrific, single-location premise.

Survivor Type Is A Stephen King Movie I’ve Wanted For Years

It’s A Gruesome Body Horror Story

Stephen King’s short story “Survivor Type,” first published in the 1982 horror anthology Terrors and later rereleased in King’s own 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, would make for a fascinating movie. The story follows corrupted surgeon Richard Pine, who was attempting to smuggle heroin onto a ship when the ship sank. He finds refuge on a small island, but soon discovers it’s barren, with no food or water sources. The rest of the story involves his spiral into madness as he’s forced to cut off and eat parts of his own body to sustain himself until help hopefully arrives.

To that end, I think “Survivor Type” would be an incredible body horror movie. It’s a genre that often turns my stomach, but I love it all the same. The description of him surgically removing and consuming his own body parts with methodical efficiency is horrific, to the point that Stephen King himself once admitted in an old Monsterland Magazine interview that it went a bit too far, even for him. “Survivor Type” was so gruesome that, despite him writing it in 1977 and already being a famous author at that point, he couldn’t get anyone to publish it for years, a level of perverse for a horror story that I honestly find inspiring.

Cillian Murphy Would Be The Perfect Actor To Play Richard Pine

He Does Alone And Isolated Better Than Any Other Actor

The way “Survivor Type” is written in the first person is incredibly compelling. King describes the deteriorating mental state of a man with skill, with Richard Pine first starting off as erudite and philosophical before descending into raving insanity and delusion. The calculating way he uses his surgical knowledge to know exactly what pieces of himself to cut first without too much blood loss or loss of mobility chilled me with its matter-of-fact, cold pragmatism. For me, that alone would be really interesting to watch on screen. As such, it would take a very skilled actor to pull it off without Pine’s sanity snapping being too abrupt or feeling too cheesy.

I have the perfect actor to do it, too: Cillian Murphy. Can you imagine Cillian Murphy playing a man trapped on an island, slowly going mad as he eats parts of his own body? I can. Murphy clearly has the range and the talent to pull it off – the man is an Oscar winner, after all. He’s also shown he can smoothly transition from intellectual, cerebral doctor to stark, raving mad, as evidenced by his performance as Dr. Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow in The Dark Knight trilogy. Murphy injects all his roles with a magnetic intensity, which would serve him well in “Survivor Type” seeing as how he’d be on screen alone for 90% of the film.

Cillian Murphy is especially skilled at playing characters who are, in so many ways, uniquely alone. Sometimes, that’s been literal, such as his breakout role as Jim in 2002’s 28 Days Later. At other times, it’s metaphorical, such as his turn as J. Robert Oppenheimer. In that movie, Oppenheimer was rarely completely alone for long, but he was isolated in the sense that he alone bore the full mental and emotional weight of the Manhattan Project and how it would change the world – not for the better. In “Survivor Type,” Pine is alone in every conceivable way a person could be – geographically, physically, and mentally, something Murphy can and has mastered.

Survivor Type Would Have To Differ From The Story In One Way

One Other Stephen King Adaptation Shows That Might Not Matter, Though

That said, “Survivor Type” would be nearly impossible to adapt exactly as-is from the short story, I’m afraid. The reason is that the entire story is an epistolary narrative, told entirely through Pine’s journal entries as he details the process of eating himself. The last line of his final entry (which I won’t spoil for you) shows the full depth of Pine’s madness, and stuck with me long after I finished the story. It’s chilling, to say the least.

As cool as it is, however, it’s impossible to translate journal entries, a written medium, to the visual medium of film. At best, Richard Pine’s journal entries could be read as a voiceover narration, but that’s not the same as the startling effect of reading the the journal entries on a page. There’s no real way to convey that sense of his madness through a written form. A “Survivor Type” movie could show glimpses of the journal entries on screen, but even that fails to capture the true horror of reading Pine’s entries as they grow darker and more disturbed.

Even though the story wouldn’t be exactly as it was on the page, though, I still think it could be a disturbingly great horror adaptation, especially if Cillian Murphy or someone of his skill were cast as Richard Pine. After all, the 2007 adaptation of Setphen King’s “1408” starring John Cusack changed up the original story and it was still a really solid adaptation. It shares similarities with “Survivor Type,” too: a single location with a single man slowly losing his mind. Considering that, “Survivor Type” could be the next Stephen King short story to make a great psychological thriller.