Originally published in two parts in Esquire, the novella “In the Tall Grass,” by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, turns the uniform expanse of rural Kansas into a field that stretches to the horizon in every direction. The field itself has a malevolent presence, like the sentient vines in Scott Smith’s novel “The Ruins,” but just the idea of getting trapped in a sea of green, with the sticky heat and the buzzing flies and the six-foot-tall cuts of grass, is suffocating enough for a short-form shocker.

King and Hill sustain the premise for Part 1 before surrendering to abstraction. In the Netflix adaptation, written and directed by Vincenzo Natali , that part lasts only 12 minutes of 102. The rest is a fevered mishmash of spiritual and supernatural nonsense that feels like a trap of another kind, a metaphysical zone defined by arbitrary laws and by characters who are constantly screaming each other’s names.