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To be fully transparent, media piracy has become a more complicated phenomenon in recent years than it was when I first started earnestly getting into media criticism. In my early undergraduate days, I was steadfast in my conviction that piracy was wrong, though that might have been due, in part, to my (no joke) Yoko Ono acolyte media literacy instructor who regularly had a laptop chugging along, pirating movies, in the middle of class. He’d routinely stop lectures to stop seeding one title and start on the next one. Weird times. Anyway, as media access is constrained and I develop a growing awareness of how, beyond the United States especially, access is even worse, I recognize that piracy isn’t as simple as right or wrong. Even here, there are titles without home video releases whose sole availability is a YouTube rip you can watch for free. That’s the case for Mark Pavia’s The Night Flier, based on Stephen King’s story of the same name, which you can watch right now on YouTube.
Per IMDB: A reporter is on the trail of a vampiric murderer who travels by plane.
YouTube rips are complicated. As a huge fan of classic made-for-television horror movies, for instance—I’m talking ABC Movie of the Week types—there are few, if any, legal options available. And, well, there’s a solid chance that searching for the title on YouTube will result in at least one grainy, low-definition rip available to stream in its entirety. Is it right? I can’t say. Someone owns those rights, and even accessing it through a legal channel might theoretically amount to stealing. At the same time, outside of prohibitively expensive physical copies, YouTube is the only place where Stephen King’s The Night Flier can be streamed.
And The Night Flier should be seen, broadly speaking. It’s one of the more gruesome, garish King adaptations, the source of several childhood nightmares for me personally. I caught it regularly on cable growing up, where it first premiered on HBO followed by a limited theatrical stint the next year. It was irregularly released on home video in the years that followed, though Stephen King’s The Night Flier is presently 27 (!!!) years old. Yeah, it’s hard to track down.
So, if you’re interested in catching one of Stephen King’s more underrated adaptations, you can stream it on YouTube here. I’m not going to tell you whether that’s right or wrong, because there isn’t an easy answer. But it’s there—the choice to fly in and land is yours.
More importantly, what do you think of The Night Flier? Do you have any fond memories of it? Which other Stephen King adaptations from the 1990s do you love? Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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