I am never sure how I feel about someone writing something that finds its foundations in the work of another. It can be pretty hard to avoid being derivative, because you often fail to understand the driving force behind the creation of the original work.
Not everyone can take a character in the way that Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman has been able to do, and breathe a life into them that makes them both contemporary and call back to the earlier works.
Talking of Moore, I liked Watchmen. I was dubious about it, but it unpacked a possible forward motion for the story that was great commentary on the world today, and which captured the spirit of the graphic novel.
I just watched Pet Sematary 2, and it was not as good as the original, but nor was it as horrible as I was thinking it might turn out to be. I watched the remake yesterday, and the original adaptation earlier, and none of them really captured for me a certain magic that is in the book. They don’t earn the horror because they throw aside the relationships that give value to the characters, and make the fact of the things that happen to the characters horrific in and of themselves. The acts are a little hollow in the way that King complains Kubrick’s The Shining is. Salem’s Lot surprised me when I read it – you know that there is a lot of depth in a book that a film cannot replicate, but it is the depth of the characters that I feel gets really missed. Castle Rock is, for this reason, a pleasure – it gives you the scope to dig in deep with the characters and really explore their psychology.
The stories are never about the horror only. The horror doesn’t work without the humanity.
How would I feel if people were to eventually pick up my characters and reboot them? I would be interested what they would mean to others. It would be something of an honour, right?