Apt Pupil (film) - Differences Between Novella and Film

Differences Between Novella and Film

Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil begins in 1974, when Todd Bowden is in junior high, and it ends with him graduating from high school. In Bryan Singer's film, the story takes place fully in 1984, when Todd Bowden is in his last year in high school. In the novella, for three years leading to the end of the story, Todd Bowden and discovered Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander independently murder a large number of hobos and transients, whereas in the film, the murders are condensed to Dussander's attempt to kill the hobo Archie. Singer sought to reduce the novella's violence, not wanting it to appear "exploitative or repetitive". Unlike in the novella, animosity toward Jews was not displayed in the film. The novella's dream sequence in which Bowden rapes a sixteen-year-old Jewish virgin as a laboratory experiment under Dussander's guidance was replaced by the film's dream sequence in which Bowden sees three shower-gas chamber scenes unfold. Reduced in the film was Todd's encounter with the schoolgirl Betty (named Becky in the film). In the novella, he dreams of Betty as a concentration camp inmate who he can rape and torture. In the film, he has a brief encounter with Becky where he finds himself unable to perform sexually.

In the novella, Bowden's high school counselor Edward French confronts the student with suspicions that Dussander is not really Bowden's grandfather, and Bowden murders French in cold blood. Bowden then embarks on a shooting spree from a tree overlooking a freeway, which results in his death five hours later. Singer felt unable to accomplish King's ending: "I told the ending reads so beautifully. I could never measure up to it; I would have killed it." In the film, Bowden intimidates French, who suspects Dussander's false relationship to the student, by threatening to destroy him with "rumor and innuendo". Stanley Wiater, author of The Complete Stephen King Universe, wrote, "As depicted on screen, Todd is much more consciously evil, in his way, than in the book. This switch, while making the ending less brutal, perhaps, achieves the impossible: it also makes the ending even darker."