‘Cujo’ star Dee Wallace says Stephen King thanked her for changing movie’s ending

The first draft was a little ruff.

When Dee Wallace signed on to play the frantic mother in the big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s canine chiller Cujo, she made one thing clear to the producers: They needed to change the ending.

“The movie is very different from the book,” she explained to Steve Kmetko on the newest episode of his podcast Still Here Hollywood. “The dog’s possessed by a demon and the kid dies. And when they brought me aboard, I said, ‘The kid can’t die.'”

Cujo, released in 1983, concerns a mother and son trapped in a car surveilled and threatened by a rabid dog.

“C’mon,” Wallace continued. “It’s [the] 1980s and you can’t put everybody through what we’re gonna put them through. Half the people aren’t gonna have read the book that come to see the movie,” she argued.

Luckily, the creative team, which included director Lewis Teague (director of Alligator!) and producer Robert Singer, later a showrunner on Supernatural, agreed. And they weren’t the only ones.

“Stephen King wrote us after Cujo and said, ‘Thank God you didn’t kill the kid at the end. I’ve never gotten more hate mail for anything else I’ve done.'”

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That’s quite a compliment from the King of Horror, a man not known to keep mum if an adaptation of one of his works is not to his liking.

Ironically, nine out of 10 cinephiles will tell you that Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining is one of the best spookfests ever put to celluloid. (There are even some people who have turned watching it into a kind of spiritual quest.) But King hated it so much that, in 1997, he wrote and produced Stephen King’s The Shining, an ABC miniseries response to the film from 1980. Very, very few people prefer that version.

Concerning Cujo, the rabid St. Bernard who never meant anyone any harm, his legacy lives on. King penned a novella, Rattlesnakes, which is a sequel to the original 1981 novel. (It’s included in the 2024 You Like It Darker collection.)

What’s more, Darren Aronofsky — director of Black Swan and the groovy Postcard From Earth experience currently blowing minds at the Las Vegas Sphere — is said to be “in talks” to perform a pooch resurrection for a new version of the tale (tail?) at Netflix.

For more with Dee Wallace, check out her full interview with Still Here Hollywood.