The Ugly Story Behind the Bryan Singer-dirrected Stephen King adaptation 1998 Apt Pupil May Be Creepier Than the Film Itself

which says a lot, as it's about a Nazi war criminal's relationship with a psychotic young man

The story behind Bryan Singer’s 1998 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novella Apt Pupil might be more disturbing than the film's premise. Considering that Apt Pupil involves the Holocaust, Concentration camps, animal abuse, murder, Nazis and blackmail, that’s saying an awful lot.

James Mason and Richard Burton were both pursued for the role of Kurt Dussander, a Nazi war criminal living in the United States under the name Arthur Denker but died before shooting could begin.

In 1987 filming began on an adaptation that would have starred Nicol Williamson as Dussander/Denker and Ricky Schroeder as Todd Bowden, the All-American boy who develops a sick fascination with the Nazi next door.

Forty minutes were filmed, but the project was abandoned when Schroder aged out of the role.

It seemed like Apt Pupil was destined to rot in development hell despite the extremely commercial premise of an evil American teenager’s psychotic relationship with a Nazi.

Audiences love sympathetic characters they can root for and identify with. Apt Pupil, in sharp contrast, revolves around a literal Nazi war criminal and an American teen who somehow manages to be crueler and more vicious than someone who killed Jews for a man whose name is synonymous with evil.

We are, unfortunately, going through a Nazi moment right now. Fascism is on the ascent. We’ve got a wannabe Hitler in the White House. The richest world in the man notoriously gave what sure appeared to be a Nazi salute TWICE.

Musk denied that he was giving props to the head of the Nazi party. His denial would be more persuasive if he didn’t also act like a Nazi. For example, Musk responded to a commenter defending the idea “Hitler was right” with “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.” with “You have spoken the absolute truth.”

Twenty-four-time Grammy winner and former billionaire Kanye West’s newest single is called “Heil Hitler” and features a sample of the man behind the slaughter of six million Jews.

That makes Apt Pupil’s irrelevance even more perplexing.

The film’s eviscerating darkness is only partly due to its grim subject matter. With Apt Pupil, Bryan Singer went from being the critic’s darling behind The Usual Suspects to a controversial figure due to allegations that he had underage boys strip naked for a shower scene.

This was the beginning of dark rumors that would eventually lead to Singer ending up in director’s jail for unprofessionalism, drug abuse, and sexual impropriety after he was fired from Bohemian Rhapsody before filming wrapped and was replaced by an uncredited Dexter Fletcher.

Filmmakers often end up in the director’s jail when they belong in a real prison, for, in Singer’s case, alleged sexual crimes against underage boys.

Renfro’s future was even grimmer. Drug abuse and mental problems sabotaged a promising career before the child star and teen idol died of an overdose at twenty-six. As a final insult, Renfro was not included in the Memorial Reel at the Oscars despite his impressive, if brief, film career.

Apt Pupil dials down the violence and depravity of the book, but remains a sick puppy. In the novella, which was included in 1982’s Different Seasons, the same collection as “The Body”, which inspired Stand By Me, and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, the inspiration for the greatest movie of all time, villain Todd Bowden isn’t just endlessly fascinated by Hitler in a way that calls to mind Kanye West: he tries to beat Hitler’s body count all by himself.

The novella follows Todd through his high school years as he goes from being a deranged, murderous cretin obsessed with Nazis to a spree shooter with a date with oblivion. It starts dark, gets darker, and then goes into almost unspeakably bleak and depraved territory.

Todd and his next-door neighbor share much, including a love of murdering hobos. Apt Pupil cuts way down on the hobo murder. Instead of a fuck-ton of hobos getting killed by Todd and Kurt there’s only a single lonely hobo played by Elias Koteas.

Singer’s film also condenses the timeline to a single year rather than Todd’s entire high school experience.

In Apt Pupil Renfro’s creep figures out that the seemingly harmless old man next door is a Nazi war criminal in exile who worked in concentration camps.

The twisted young man blackmails the reluctant senior citizen into telling him about his experiences murdering mindlessly in the name of an evil ideology. He’s an impatient Adam pining for the secret knowledge of what it’s like to kill straight from the source.

Dussander is understandably reluctant to dredge up the past but Todd threatens him with exposure. He’s still a teenager, yet Todd is a canny criminal in his own right. He’s a real prodigy.

Todd sadistically forces Dussander to recreate his past, buying him a Nazi uniform and ordering him to march.

Dussander, in turn, terrorizes Todd into getting good grades. Being confronted with his genocidal past brings out the worst in Dussander. He tries to toss a cat in an oven and begins the process of killing a hobo that his partner in crime, Todd, finishes, then covers up.

The proceedings are marked by both homoeroticism and homophobia. When Todd can’t perform sexually with a Jewish girlfriend he eventually loses interest in, she asks him if he isn’t interested in her, or girls as a whole.

The truth is that nothing can compare to the thrill of having firsthand access to a real-life Nazi who committed real-life atrocities against real-life Jews. The boy’s got an unfortunate hard-on for the Nazis and their sinister ways.

Later in the film a soft, mustachioed guidance counselor played by the ostentaciously Jewish David Schwimmer figures out the “grandfather” Todd brought to school was actually a notorious Nazi war criminal being held by the authorities.

He goes to the boy’s house to confront him, and Todd discourages him from informing the police by threatening to accuse him of molestation. The relationship between Dussander and Todd has a homoerotic edge, due in part from the relentless homoeroticism of Nazi iconography and garb.

Apt Pupil is not the story of an innocent corrupted. It is instead the story of a teenager who begins evil and grows progressively worse. Todd and Dussander function as the demons on each other’s shoulders, figures of infinite darkness locked in a poisonous dynamic that brings out the worst in them.

McKellan makes a monster human. It’s a deft performance with unexpected notes of playfulness and humor. He alone emerges from this unscathed.

Not long after playing a Nazi war criminal for Singer, McKellan played Magneto, a Holocaust survivor turned super-villain in the wildly influential X-Men.

The Apt Pupil novella concludes with Todd going on a shooting spree by a highway. It’s an ending that eerily recalls Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 masterpiece Targets.

Targets was similarly about an old European gentleman who represents the evil of the past and a kill-crazy American kid with a death wish and impressive body count.

Apt Pupil resembles Targets enough to suffer terribly by comparison. Targets is unmistakably a product of its time and timeless, while Apt Pupil is cold, distant, and strangely emotionless.

Apt Pupil took a long time to make it to the big screen. Considering what Singer has been accused of doing on the set, it would undoubtedly be better for the world if it never got made, at least by a man who was interested in evil and horrific abuses of power because he himself had evil in his soul and was prone to horrific abuses of power.