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Analysis of 'Why We Crave Horror Movies' by Stephen King

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Published: Apr 8, 2022

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Stephen King's essay, "Why We Crave Horror Movies," delves into the intriguing phenomenon of why people are drawn to horror films. King explores the idea that individuals enjoy challenging fear and demonstrate their bravery by willingly subjecting themselves to scary movies. He suggests that humans have an inherent desire to experience fear and that society has built norms around the acceptable ways to do so, with horror movies being one of those sanctioned outlets.

King ultimately argues that horror movies serve as a release valve for the darker aspects of our psyche, allowing us to maintain a sense of normalcy and societal conformity. He suggests that by indulging in controlled madness within the confines of a movie theater, we can better appreciate the positive emotions and values of our everyday lives.

Throughout the essay, King's thoughts evolve from an exploration of psychological impulses to a nuanced consideration of the ethical and moral dimensions of our fascination with horror. He challenges readers to contemplate the complexities of human nature and the role of horror movies in our society.

Works Cited:

American Psychological Association. (2021). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).
National Geographic. (n.d.). Why we believe in superstitions. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/taboo/articles/why-we-believe-in-superstitions/
New World Encyclopedia. (n.d.). Superstition. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Superstition
Radford, B. (2016). Superstition: Belief in the age of science. Oxford University Press.
Rogers, K. (2019). The power of superstition. Scientific American Mind, 30(6), 50-55.
Sørensen, J. (2014). Superstition in the workplace: A study of a bank in Denmark. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30(1), 34-42.
Truzzi, M. (1999). CSIOP Investigates: Superstition and the paranormal. The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, 1(1), 174-181.
Vyse, S. A. (2013). Believing in magic: The psychology of superstition. Oxford University Press.
Woolfolk, R. L. (2018). Educational psychology: Active learning edition (14th ed.). Pearson.
Yamashita, K., & Ando, J. (2019). Superstition and work motivation: A field study in Japan. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 49(1), 28-36.

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According to Stephen King, This Is Why We Crave Horror Movies

The horror king breaks down our obsession with the macabre.

Stephen King and horror are synonymous. Are you really able to call yourself a fan of horror if one of his novels or film adaptations isn't among your top favorites? The Maine-born writer is hands down the most successful horror writer and one of the most beloved and prolific writers ever whose legacy spans generations. Without King, we might not be as terrified of clowns and or think twice about bullying the shy girl in school. One could say that King has earned the moniker, "the King of Horror." In addition to all he's written, King has also had over 60 adaptations of his work for television and the big screen and has written, produced, and starred in films and shows as well. He has fully immersed himself in the genre of horror from all sides, and it's unlikely that we will ever have anyone else like Stephen King. But did you know that King wrote an essay that was published in Playboy magazine about horror movies?

In 1981, King's essay titled " Why We Crave Horror Movies " was published in Playboy magazine as a variation of the chapter " The Horror Movie As Junk Food" in Danse Macabre . Danse Macabre was published in 1981 and is one of the non-fiction books in which that wrote about horror in media and how our fears and anxieties have been influencing the horror genre. The full article that was published is no longer online, but there is a shortened four-page version of it that can be found.

RELATED: The Iconic Horror Movie You Won't Believe Premiered at Cannes

Stephen King Believes We Are All Mentally Ill

The essay starts out guns blazing, the first line reading "I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little bit better." From here, he describes the general behaviors of people we know and how mannerisms and irrational fears are not different between the public and those in asylums. He points out that we pay money to sit in a theater and be scared to prove a point that we can and to show that we do not shy away from fear. Some of us, he states, even go watch horror movies for fun, which closes the gap between normalcy and insanity. A patron can go to the movies, and watch someone get mutilated and killed, and it's considered normal, everyday behavior. This, as a horror lover, feels very targeted. I absolutely watch horror movies for fun and I will do so with my bucket of heart-attack-buttered popcorn and sip on my Coke Zero. The most insane thing about all of that? The massive debt accumulated from one simple movie date.

Watching Horror Movies Allows Us to Release Our Insanity

King states that we use horror movies as a catharsis to act out our nightmares and the worst parts of us. Getting to watch the insanity and depravity on the movie screen allows us to release our inner insanity, which in turn, keeps us sane. He writes that watching horror movies allows us to let our emotions have little to no rein at all, and that is something that we don't always get to do in everyday life. Society has a set of parameters that we must follow with regard to expressing ourselves to maintain the air of normalcy and not be seen as a weirdo. When watching horror movies, we see incredibly visceral reactions in the most extreme of situations. This can cause the viewer to reflect on how they would react or respond to being in the same type of situation. Do we identify more with the victim or the villain? This poses an interesting thought for horror lovers because sometimes the villain is justified. Are we wrong for empathizing with them instead?

Let's take a look at one of the more popular horror movies of recent years. Mandy is about a woman who is murdered by a crazed cult because she is the object of the leader's obsession. This causes Red ( Nicolas Cage ) to ride off seeking revenge for the love of his life being murdered. There are also movies like I Spit On Your Grave and The Last House On The Left where the protagonist becomes the murderer in these instances because of the trauma they experienced from sexual assault. Their revenge makes audiences a little more willing to side with the murderer because they took back their power and those they killed got what was deserved. This is where that Lucille Bluth meme that says "good for her" is used. I'll die on the hill that those characters were justified and if that makes me mentally ill then King might be right!

What Does Stephen King Mean When He Tells Us to "Keep the Gators" Fed?

At the end of the essay, King mentions he likes to watch the most extreme horror movies because it releases a trap door where he can feed the alligators. The alligators he is referring to are a metaphor for the worst in all humans and the morbid fantasies that lie within each of us. The essay concludes with "It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed." From this, we can deduce that King feels we all have the ability to be institutionalized, but those of us that watch horror movies are less likely because the sick fantasies can be released from our brains.

With that release, we can walk down the street normally without the bat of an eye from walkers-by. Perhaps this is why the premise for movies like The Purge came to fruition. A movie where for 24 hours all crime, including murder, is decriminalized couldn't have been made by someone who doesn't get road rage or scream into the void. It was absolutely made by someone who waited at the DMV for too long or has had experience working in retail around Black Friday. With what King is saying, The Purge is a direct reflection of that catharsis. Not only are you getting to watch a crazy horror movie where everyone is shooting everyone and everything is on fire, but it's likely something you've had a thought or two about. You can consider those gators fed for sure.

Do Horror Movies Offer Us True Catharsis or Persuasive Perspective?

Catharsis as a concept was coined by the philosopher Aristotle . He explained that the performing arts are a way to purge negative types of emotions from our subconscious, so we don't have to hold onto them anymore. This viewpoint further perpetuates what King is trying to explain. With that cathartic relief, the urgency to act on negative emotion is less likely to happen because there is no build-up of negativity circling the drain from our subconscious to our reality. However, some who read the essay felt like King was just being persuasive and using fancy imagery rather than identifying an actual reason why horror is popular. Some claim the shock and awe factor of his words and his influence on horror would cause some readers to believe they are mentally ill deep down. I have to say, as a millennial who rummages through the ends of social media multiple times a day, everyone on the internet thinks they're mentally ill, and we all have the memes to prove it. It is exciting and fascinating to watch a horror movie after working a 9-5 job where the excitement is low. Watching Ghostface stalk Sidney Prescott ( Neve Campbell ) in Scream isn't everyone's idea of winding down, but for the last 20-something years, it has been my comfort movie when I'm feeling sad or down. The nostalgia of Scream is what makes it feel cathartic to me and that's free therapy!

What is the Science Behind Loving Horror Movies?

Psychology studies will tell us that individuals who crave and love horror are interested in it because they have a higher sensation-seeking trait . This means they have a higher penchant for wanting to experience thrilling and exciting situations. Those with a lower level of empathy are also more likely to enjoy horror movies as they will have a less innate response to a traumatic scene on screen. According to the DSM-V , a severe lack of empathy could potentially be a sign of a more serious psychological issue, however, the degree of severity will vary. I do love rollercoasters, but I also cry when I see a dog that is just too cute, so horror lovers aren't necessarily the unsympathetic robots that studies want us to be. Watching horror films can also trigger a fight-or-flight sensation , which will boost adrenaline and release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. Those chemicals being released make the viewers feel accomplished and positive, relating back to the idea that watching horror movies is cathartic for viewers.

Anyone who reads and studies research knows that correlation does not imply causation, but whether King's perspective is influenced by his position in the horror genre or not, psychology and science can back up the real reasons why audiences love horror movies. As a longtime horror lover and a pretty above-average horror trivia nerd, I have to wonder if saying we are mentally ill is an overstatement and could maybe be identified more as horror lovers seeking extreme stimulus. Granted, this essay was written over 40 years ago, so back then liking horror wasn't as widely accepted as it is today. It's possible that King felt more out of place for his horror love back then and the alienation of a fringe niche made him feel mentally ill. Is King onto something by assuming that everyone has mental illness deep down, or is this a gross overestimation of the human psyche? The answer likely falls somewhere in between, but those that love horror will continue to release that catharsis through the terrifying and the unknown because it's a scream, baby!

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Stephen King has spent half a century scaring us, but his legacy is so much more than horror

It’s a big year for King adaptations, but the movies only tell part of the story.

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It’s nearly impossible to overstate how influential Stephen King is. For the past four decades, no single writer has dominated the landscape of genre writing like him. To date, he is the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No. 1 best-sellers. He now has more than 70 published books, many of which have become cultural icons, and his achievements extend so far beyond a single genre at this point that it’s impossible to limit him to one — even though, as the world was reminded last year when the feature film adaptation of It became the highest-grossing horror movie on record, horror is still King’s calling card.

In fact, we’ve been enjoying a cultural resurgence of quality King horror adaptations lately, from small-screen adaptations like Gerald’s Game and Castle Rock to the upcoming remake of Pet Sematary , the first trailer for which looks like a promising continuation of the trend.

That means if you’re a King fan — or looking to become one — there’s no better time to rediscover why he’s such a beloved cultural phenomenon.

After all, without King, we wouldn’t have modern works like Stranger Things , whose adolescent ensemble directly channels the Losers’ Club, King’s ensemble of geeky preteen friends from It . Without The Shining , and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece film adaptation, “Here’s Johnny!” would be a dead talk show catchphrase and parodies like the Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror would be bereft of much of their material.

Without Carrie , we wouldn’t have the single defining image of the horror of high school: a vat of pig’s blood being dropped on an unsuspecting prom queen. Without King, we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic and recognizable images in cinema history — Andy Dufresne standing in the rain after escaping from Shawshank prison — nor would we have the enduring horror of Pennywise the Clown, Cujo the slavering St. Bernard, or Kathy Bates’s pitch-perfect stalker fan in Misery .

This is but a sampling born from a staggeringly prolific writing career that’s well on its way to spanning five decades. King has effectively been translating America’s private, communal, and cultural fears and serving them up to us on grisly platters for half a century.

King might have remained a struggling English teacher, but for two women: Tabitha King and Carrie White

Born in 1947, King grew up poor in Durham, Maine, the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. A lifelong fan of speculative fiction, King began writing seriously while attending the University of Maine Orono. It was there, in 1969, that he met his wife, Tabitha.

By 1973, King was a high school English teacher drawing a meager $6,400 a year. He had married Tabitha in 1971, and the pair lived in a trailer in Hampden, Maine, and each worked additional jobs to make ends meet. King wrote numerous short stories, some of which were published by Playboy and other men’s magazines, but significant writerly success eluded him.

Tabitha, who’d been one of the first to read Stephen’s short stories in colleges, had loaned Stephen her own typewriter and refused to let him take a higher-paying job that would mean less time to write. Tabitha was also the one who discovered draft pages of what would become Carrie tossed in Stephen’s trash can. She retrieved them and ordered him to keep working on the idea. Ever since, King has continued to pay Tabitha’s encouragement forward. He frequently and effusively blurbs books from established as well as new authors, citing a clear wish to leave publishing better than he found it. Meanwhile, Tabitha is a respected author in her own right , as are both of their sons, Joe Hill and Owen King.

Carrie, which King sold for a $2,500 advance, would go on to earn $400,000 for the rights to its paperback run. The story of a troubled girl who develops powers of telekinesis, Carrie is the ultimate “high school is hell” morality tale. Carrie faces ruthless abuse from her religious mother and bullying from high school classmates, and the book introduces us to two of King’s most prominent themes: small Maine towns with dark underbellies, and main characters written with care and empathy despite being deeply flawed and morally gray — in this case Carrie, her mother, and her bully Sue. The complicated bond between protagonist and antagonist is also a recurring motif in King’s writing.

Two years after Carrie ’s publication, Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation grossed $33 million on a $1.8 million budget, largely on the strength of advance critical praise and word-of-mouth reviews. Buoyed by the subsequent success of Carrie ’s paperback sales, King would go on to churn out six novels ( Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Rage, The Stand, The Long Walk, and The Dead Zone ) over the next six years, establishing a prolificacy that would continue through much of his career.

“The movie made the book and the book made me,” King told the New York Times in 1979.

By 1980 , King was the world’s best-selling author.

It’s taken decades for King’s work to be critically appreciated — in particular for its literary qualities

King’s work has appeared in magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Harper’s to Playboy. The author has influenced literary writers like Haruki Murakami and Sherman Alexie along with genre creators like the producers of Lost . And he’s won virtually every major horror, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy award there is. But King also spent decades being written off by both the horror writing community and the literary mainstream.

King once referred to critics perceiving him to be “a rich hack,” a perception that bears out in horror writer David Schow’s offhand 1997 description of him as “comparable to McDonald’s” — intended to characterize King as horror’s pedestrian mainstream. When a 1994 King short story , his first to be published in the New Yorker, won the prestigious O. Henry Award, Publishers Weekly declared it to be “one of the weaker stories in this year’s [O. Henry Award] collection.”

“The price he pays for being Stephen King is not being taken seriously,” one of King’s collaborators told the LA Times in 1995.

The critical disparagement of King often went hand in hand with genre shaming. In a 1997 60 Minutes interview , Lesley Stahl questioned King’s literary tastes, getting him to admit that he’d never read Jane Austen and had only read one Tolstoy novel. In response, King grinned that he had, instead, read every novel Dean Koontz had ever written — Dean Koontz being a notoriously lowbrow writer of thrillers. (That same year, the New York Times would compliment the breadth of King’s literary knowledge even while panning his epic best-seller The Stand. )

“Here you are, one of the best- selling authors in all of history,” Stahl continued, “and the critics cannot find much that they like in your work.”

To this, King replied, “All I can say is — and this is in response to the critics who've often said that my work is awkward and sometimes a little bit painful — I know it. I'm doing the best I can with what I've got.”

While King’s self-deprecation may have been a mark of respect for his critics, those critics were on the cusp of being proven wrong. This was in large part thanks to the sleeping giant that became The Shawshank Redemption, which drew popular attention to the fact that King could do more than “just” write horror, and helped kick-start critical reassessment of him and his work.

The film, written by longtime Stephen King adapter Frank Darabont, is based on one of King’s most literary works, a 1982 novella about an agonizingly slow prison break. Shawshank flopped when it opened in theaters in 1994, but it was nominated for seven Academy Awards — more than any other King adaptation. As indicated by its long reign as the highest-ranked film on IMDB , it has gone on to become one of the most popular and beloved films ever made.

By 1998, under the oversight of a new publisher, King’s books were actively being marketed as literary fiction for the first time. From the mid-’90s through today, King’s critical and cultural reputation has advanced as thoroughly as it stagnated before.

In a 2013 CBS interview , we see the marked difference with which contemporary media has come to view King’s work: “You used to always get slotted in the Horror genre,” interviewer Anthony Mason commented to King. “And I think it was sort of a way of some people, I think, not treating you all that seriously as a writer.”

“I don't know if I want to be treated seriously per se, because in the end posterity decides whether it's good work or whether it's lasting work,” King replied, secure in his position as one of the best-loved authors of the 20th century.

But evolving cultural views on genre fiction aside, King’s writing has always displayed significant literary qualities, particularly ongoing literary themes that have shaped how we understand horror as well as ourselves.

The horror of Stephen King doesn’t lie with the external but with the internal

In his award-winning 1981 collection of essays on horror, Danse Macabre , King names three emotions that belong to the realm of the horror genre: terror, horror, and revulsion. He argues that while all three emotions are of equal value to the creation of horror, the “finest” and most worthy is terror because it rests on the creator’s ability to command audiences’ imaginations. Drawing on numerous writers before him, he posits that never fully revealing the source of the horror is the best way to effect terror upon the mind.

King argues that the art of making us terrified about what lies around the corner is all about getting us to identify with the characters who are experiencing the terror. If we don’t care about the characters, then it won’t matter how many jump scares you fling at the audience — we have to be at least a little invested in their fate.

As such, King spends a great deal of time on characters’ interior lives, often jumping between different point-of-view characters throughout his novels. (For example, Salem’s Lot , It , and The Stand are all stories with large ensemble casts and multiple shifting points of view.) But every characterization, even a minor one, is rich with detail; even if you just met a new character, you can bet that by the time he or she meets a grisly ending a few pages later, you’ll have a deep understanding of who that character is.

King’s novels often contain deeply flawed yet sympathetic central characters surrounded by large ensemble casts full of equally flawed people, each struggling to interact and grapple with larger forces. By framing his stories within an interwoven web of narrative perspectives and juxtaposed character experiences, King is able to generate a feeling of interconnectivity, as well as explore the various literary themes that stretch throughout his multidimensional universe, including but not limited to:

1) Nerdboys to men

King credits his absentee father for bequeathing him a love of horror via a stash of pulp novels King discovered as a boy. But another lasting legacy of this truncated relationship was King’s ongoing preoccupation with relationships between men and boys, the process of attaining manhood, and the bridge between boyhood and adulthood.

We see these bonds take a variety of shapes and meaning throughout his work, ranging from comforting ( Salem’s Lot ) to destructive ( Apt Pupil ) to ambiguous ( The Shining ). King explores male intimacy through these relationships, frequently challenging typical masculine forms of expression. He can do this because his boys and men tend to be nerds and outcasts who already exist outside traditional masculine norms. The bookish nerdy kid was relatively uncommon in mainstream adult fiction before King came along; now we recognize such characters as hallmarks of genre literature.

To King, the social markers that make kids outcasts in school — from being nerdy to being overweight to enduring acne — also make them uniquely outfitted to be conduits for readers’ social anxieties and fears. Because deep down, we’re all reliving the social terrors of school every day of our lives.

2) Creative struggles and struggles with addiction

King frequently writes about the process of creation, often by exploring an artist who’s been prevented from creating in some way. The main characters of Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones , 1408, and numerous short stories are all writers who’ve been in some way prevented from writing or thwarted in their creative efforts. Many of these and other artistic characters mirror King’s own real-life experiences; for example, the artist at the center of 2008’s Duma Key reflects his physical struggle to write following a highly publicized 1999 injury that made writing difficult for several years.

King has also been open throughout his career about his struggles with addictions ranging from alcohol to drug abuse to painkillers, and many of his main characters likewise struggle with addiction — either directly, in books like The Shining and Revival , or indirectly: The villain of Misery , Annie Wilkes, is a metaphor for cocaine itself.

3) World building through geography and repeated characters

Most people associate Stephen King with Maine and Maine with Stephen King. This is because King almost exclusively writes and sets his stories there. The town of Derry, for example, where It lives, is based on Bangor, Maine. Numerous fictional King towns, like Derry, Haven (the location of a 2010 TV series based on King’s mystery novel The Colorado Kid ), and Castle Rock, exist in his works alongside real towns.

King uses these locations to increase the verisimilitude of his stories, painting them as all part of the same fictional universe. In stories like It , he borrows liberally from real places and landmarks, highways and scenery, even real street corners. And while Derry is the most famous of King’s fictional towns, Castle Rock is his most frequent destination, showing up over and over in his works.

King doesn’t only reuse places in his stories, however — he also reuses people. One popular villain, a recurring supernatural figure who may or may not be the devil, appears throughout the Stephen King universe in various guises. In T he Dark Tower he’s “the Man in Black”; to the lost souls in The Stand , he’s a leader named Randall Flagg. In other stories, he’s a nebulous cast of characters with the initials “R.F.”

Frequently throughout his books, King will signal that his worlds are all connected by having characters meet characters from other books in passing. King characters also are frequently able to travel between narrative landscapes, with or without their awareness ( The Shining, Gerald’s Game, Bag of Bones, Lisey’s Story ). This interconnectivity becomes the central conceit of the Dark Tower , which explicitly links most of King’s stories together in one vast multiverse and explains that there are metaphysical doors between the worlds that allow all this to happen.

King’s work endures not because of its inherent darkness but because of its inherent hope

Part of the reason it may have taken critics so long to reassess King’s work is that “horror” implies the lower rungs of emotion King speaks of in Danse Macabre — the gross-outs and the physical gags that play into our understanding of the genre. But the key to his popularity as a horror novelist, and as a novelist in general, resides not in the darkest moments of his writing, but in his basic belief in humanity’s innate goodness.

He spells out his essentially hopeful, fundamentally romantic worldview in a 1989 interview :

There must be a huge store of good will in the human race. ... If there weren’t this huge store of good will we would have blown ourselves to hell ten years after World War II was over. ... It’s such a common thing, those feelings of love toward your fellow man, that we hardly ever talk about it; we concentrate on the other things. It’s just there; it’s all around us, so I guess we take it for granted ... I believe all those sappy, romantic things: Children are good, good wins out over evil, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I see a lot of the so-called “romantic ideal” at work in the world around us.

It’s this core optimism, more than his ability to scare us, that makes King so beloved by readers. Even in his bleakest works, he retains his ability to empathize deeply with his characters, and to see even his monsters as fundamentally human.

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Why We Crave Horror Movies

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Analysis: “Why We Crave Horror Movies”

The essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies” interweaves point of view , structure, and tone to address the foundational themes of fear, emotions, and “insanity” in relation to horror movies. It examines why horror films allow the expression of fearful emotions linked to irrationality. The essay integrates literary techniques and pop culture references to form a cohesive whole, and it highlights several key themes: Good Versus Bad Emotions , The Expression of Fear Through Horror Movies , and “Insanity” and Normality in Society and Horror Film .

King argues that fear and other negative emotions are universal and that horror movies are a key art form for expressing these emotions. The essay gives audiences permission to experience and enjoy these films as a vehicle for fears.

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What makes Stephen King horror books and movies so scary

Following is a transcript of the video .

"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years--if it ever did end-- began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspapers floating down a gutter swollen with rain." This is how Stephen King begins "It," his 22nd novel, published in 1986. It's a passage that really exemplifies what King does best: instantly engrossing you in the horrific and unknown. And it's this unique ability that has made him one of the best-selling writers of our time, selling over 350 million copies worldwide and earning him the distinguished title of Master of Horror.

Yet, despite his success and popularity, King is still a difficult writer to discuss among the literary circle. Once described by The New York Times as "a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap," there has been a long-standing discussion on whether King's works are really literature or just glorified pulp. Nonetheless, King has managed to create some of the most iconic and haunting stories ever to come out of the genre. Which raises the question: How does he do it?

Like any writer, King isn't shy to share his sources of inspiration, most notably writers like Richard Matheson of "I Am Legend" and Bram Stoker of the now classic "Dracula." But perhaps the writer that most closely resembles his style is H.P. Lovecraft, one of the most influential writers of the horror genre. He single-handedly created a whole new subgenre that is now more commonly known as cosmic horror, in which unknown cosmic entities and phenomena beyond our understanding, often portrayed as ancient, mythical monsters, became the subject of horror. But the monsters of Lovecraft were never really monsters.

Instead, they were metaphors that symbolized Lovecraft's deep fear of the rapid technological and scientific advancements in the early 20th century. The helplessness he felt towards the changes around him reflected in the hopeless struggle of people against forces that are far beyond their control. Lovecraft believed that people's inability to truly understand their reality was the most merciful thing in the world and that doing so would be enough to drive anyone to insanity.

In many ways, this is the same kind of horror that King taps into. Whether it's vampires, a haunted hotel, or a rabid dog, the subjects of King's horror all represent our fear for something else. More specifically, the societal fears of the American people. In "Danse Macabre," King's study of the horror genre, he explains that there are two different kinds of horror.

The first is horror that plays on our phobic pressure points. These are fears based on our individual phobias, like the fear of spiders or ghosts, something that a lot of recent horror movies have based themselves on. But these horrors also have a clear limit, as they target a very specific group of people with that specific phobia. Which is why more effective and successful works of horror play with what's known as national pressure points. These are political, societal, and psychological fears that are shared by a wider spectrum of people. Like in the works of Lovecraft and King, are represented by the abnormal and the supernatural. It's what King excels at, living through some of the most tumultuous periods in American history.

His debut novel, "Carrie," on the surface a book about a girl with telekinetic powers, is really a story about the suppression of female sexuality in the '60s, published just six years after the famous Miss America protest in 1968. And in "The Shining," a book about a family stranded in a haunted hotel, King picks apart the concept of patriarchy that is deeply rooted into the American culture to discuss the cyclical nature of parental legacy. Sometimes it's more personal.

Two of his most famous works, "Misery" and "Cujo," deal with addiction and the lack of self-control it accompanies and were written by King during his own struggle with drugs and alcohol. Like Lovecraft, the horrors that King portrays are self-reflective and grounded in our reality. Which in turn makes the horror feel that much more real. They're representations of American fear. Things that threaten the very foundation of the society we live in. And just like Lovecraft, it's reality that terrifies King. As he once put it, it isn't the physical or mental abnormalities that really horrify us, but the lack of order in our reality they represent.

So, how does King put this on paper? The first thing to note is that situation comes first. King's books are often based on situations rather than intricate plots. Every single one of his works is based on a series of what-if scenarios. Like what if an ancient, cosmic evil in the shape of a clown terrorized a small town in Maine? Then he drops a group of well-fleshed-out characters right into the heart of the situation. But it's not to help them work their way free, but to simply watch what happens. And it's this spontaneity that allows for some of the most unexpected and shocking moments in King's stories. And it's impossible to talk about Stephen King without talking about suspense.

Another master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, once said suspense is "the most powerful means of holding on to the viewer's attention." And it's what King also excels at. Grabbing your attention and keeping it on something horrific, so you're unable to turn away. And he accomplishes this by applying three of the most basic literary devices. The first step is foreshadowing. Both his books and adaptations are riddled with lines and moments that hint at what's to come. This is why King's stories have an overarching sense of doom and dread.

Unlike most horror novels and films, it's not the uncertainty of danger that has you on edge, but exactly when that danger will finally happen. Then, the next step is callback, where King racks up the suspense by continuously reminding the audience that the danger is lurking. And oftentimes, it takes a while for the danger to actually show its face. And then, finally, the payoff. In which the suspense we've been building towards reaches its peak and we finally face the danger we've been waiting for. And it's at this final moment that King scares us. And you can very well see this throughout King's career. Even in the passage that started this video. With just one line, foreshadowing the terror to come, a callback to the longevity of said terror, and, finally, the payoff to the very thing that started it all.

Analyzing the works of Stephen King is a great opportunity to understand what really scares us at the end of the day. His works are prime examples that show us that our object of fear very much exists in our own reality. Sometimes it's not the monsters or ghosts that scare us, but the horrors of everyday life lurking in the corners, waiting to strike. And it's this horror that King knows and understands perhaps better than anyone. And if that's not enough to make him the Master of Horror, it would be hard to find someone else that deserves it more.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in September 2019.

A Summary of Stephen King’s Essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies”

A while back, renowned author Stephen King wrote an essay that appeared in a leading magazine entitled “Why We Crave Horror Movies.” In that essay, he tried to explain why people enjoy watching scary movies so much more than virtually any other type of movie out there. The idea he came up with was one that actually surprised a lot of people, and it certainly made them stop and think about how they interact with their own little corner of the world for a minute.

In this essay, King made it very clear that in his opinion, the reason that people enjoy watching horror movies is because no one is completely sane. He even went as far as to say that mental illness is something that every person has in common, only some people are able to hide it somewhat better than others. That’s right, King very clearly connected people who live what most individuals consider a relatively normal life with those who are living inside insane asylums, stating that the only difference is that one group of people was capable of hiding their insanity better than the other.

He goes on to say that the reason horror films are so popular is because it is a relatively safe way of feeding that insanity. People enjoy watching the gore, feeling that rush of adrenaline that comes when watching something in this particular genre, and perhaps even watching other people carry out things on the screen that they would never actually do in real life, even if they have thought about it a time or two.

The interesting thing is that many people have said that they think Stephen King is both a genius and crazy, all at the same time. Many individuals say they would never want to spend the night alone in a house with him, because if he is able to have that kind of stuff going through his head, they wouldn’t feel very comfortable in his presence without other people around. According to King, he’s merely writing what everyone else thinks about at one time or another.

Is this really true? There certainly were a large number of responses to this essay. Some people were outraged that he would even make such a statement and others actually agreed with him. For the most part, it made the average everyday citizen stop and take a long, hard look at themselves. For anyone that does enjoy horror films to the point of seeking out virtually every one that’s ever been made in order to get that adrenaline rush, the question becomes even more pressing. Why is it so interesting to watch something when you know something bad is going to happen? Why does it seem so appealing to watch something filled with a tremendous amount of gore, questionable subject lines, and boundaries that sometimes shouldn’t be crossed? If you’re the person that sits and watches these movies, do you really have any right to criticize the people who wrote them? After all, no one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to watch it.

This was ultimately the point that King was making. Everyone has free will. For anyone that flocks to these types of movies, they just might be a little bit crazy, at least as much as whoever wrote them in the first place.

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Aiden Mason

Aiden's been an entertainment freelancer for over 10 years covering movies, television and the occasional comic or video game beat. If it's anything Shawshank Redemption, Seinfeld, or Kevin Bacon game related he's way more interested.

Exploring Stephen King: Why We Crave Horror Movies

Stephen King is a prolific writer famous for his horror novels, including “Carrie,” “The Shining,” and “IT.” However, his insights extend beyond the realm of fiction and delve into the psychology and societal influences behind our fascination with horror movies. In this long-form article, we will explore King’s perspective on why we crave horror movies and how they provide a myriad of psychological and emotional reactions.

Key Takeaways

Stephen King highlights the psychological thrill of fear in horror movies.
Horror movies provide catharsis and release of pent-up emotions and anxieties.
They offer a means of escaping the mundane aspects of everyday life and provide a platform to confront societal taboos in a safe environment.
Horror movies cater to the human desire to explore the mysteries of the world’s unknown .
They push our sensory boundaries and stimulate our creative thinking by immersing us in terrifying scenarios that evoke intense emotions.

The Psychological Thrill of Fear

As Stephen King suggests, one of the reasons why we are drawn to horror movies is the psychological thrill they provide through fear . Our brain is wired to respond to danger, creating an adrenaline rush that heightens our senses and emotions. Horror movies tap into our primal instincts, triggering the fight or flight response and providing a thrilling experience that is both terrifying and exhilarating.

The experience of fear in a controlled environment can be cathartic, allowing us to confront our deepest fears and experience a sense of release . This complex, multi-layered experience is what makes horror movies so appealing to audiences across generations.

Catharsis and Release

Stephen King contends that one of the reasons there is such an appeal for horror movies is the concept of catharsis . Catharsis is the purging of negative emotions by bringing them to the surface and realizing them. When we experience horror movies, we’re taken on a journey that allows us to express emotion and safely confront our fears, providing a sense of release and resolution. The adrenaline rush , accompanied by excitement and fear that one feels during the anxiety-inducing scenes, creates an outlet for our frustrations and anxieties, hence making it an enjoyable experience.

“It follows then that the genre is important because it offers an emotional and intellectual release – it allows healthy, if temporary, connections with the darkest parts of ourselves and the world around us.” – Darren Mooney

During and after the movie, the sense of fear melts away, making us feel calm and relieved. The viewer is relieved of their anxiety and pent-up emotions, which is why people have been craving horror movies for generations. The genre promises relief and provides the viewer with an opportunity to confront and overcome their personal demons in an exhilarating way, with a sense of satisfaction and contentment after the experience.

Escaping Routine and Taboos

In a world filled with monotony and repetition, it’s no surprise that people crave a little excitement and stimulation. Stephen King suggests that one of the reasons why we enjoy horror movies so much is that they offer a means of escaping routine and providing a fresh perspective on life.

“We’re always looking for something that’s just around the corner, and just out of sight. … The real horror is what’s behind us, what we’ve already done.”

By confronting our deepest fears and anxieties, horror movies provide a cathartic release and allow us to confront societal taboos in a safe environment. The genre often deals with issues that are considered taboo or controversial, such as violence, death, and sexuality, and allows us to explore these themes without judgment or shame.

Through horror movies, we can explore the dark and mysterious corners of the world with a sense of adventure and excitement, without having to put ourselves in real danger. This is why horror movies continue to be a beloved genre that captures the imagination and curiosity of audiences worldwide.

The Allure of the Unknown

As human beings, we are inherently drawn to the mystery of the unknown . It’s the curiosity that drives us to explore the world around us, and the desire to uncover secrets that are waiting to be revealed. Stephen King understands this allure and knows that we crave the unexplored and undiscovered.

Horror movies cater to this innate desire by taking us on a journey to the unknown , and immersing us in terrifying and suspenseful situations that keep us on the edge of our seats. The unknown can be both thrilling and terrifying, and horror movies leverage this duality to create a unique and captivating experience.

Whether it’s the eerie shadows in a haunted house, the unexplained noises in the dark, or the unsettling presence lurking just out of sight, horror movies tap into our primal instincts and evoke powerful emotions. They challenge our senses and imagination, and offer a glimpse into the unknown that is simultaneously terrifying and alluring.

“The unknown is the most alluring part of life. It’s the reason we have science, exploration, and art.” – Stephen King

Challenging Our Senses

Stephen King’s horror movies are known for their ability to push the boundaries of our sensory experiences. By incorporating vivid visuals, spine-tingling sound effects, and suspenseful storytelling, King creates a heightened atmosphere that challenges our senses and immerses us in the terrifying world he has created.

Horror movies often rely on jump scares and sudden bursts of action to trigger our fight or flight response, leading to a rush of adrenaline and a heightened awareness of our surroundings. The physiological reaction to horror movies includes increased heart rate and breathing, which in turn increases the release of endorphins that induce a sense of euphoria.

“The idea that horror is the only genre that consistently challenges the audience’s senses is very true. Horror films are intended to frighten and unsettle us, which they do by playing on a variety of our emotional and sensory responses.” – Stephen King

King’s attention to detail in creating a one-of-a-kind sensory experience has been recognized by critics and audiences alike. By tapping into our primal instincts and pushing our sensory boundaries, he has created horror movies that stay with us long after the credits roll.

The Power of Imagination

Stephen King believes that horror movies have a unique ability to stimulate our imagination. When we watch these films, we transport ourselves to terrifying scenarios that evoke intense emotions and stimulate our creative thinking. The power of imagination is immense, and horror movies utilize this to create memorable experiences that linger long after the credits have rolled.

King argues that, through horror movies, we can confront our deepest fears and anxieties and tap into our primal instincts. By doing so, we expand our imaginative capacity, broaden our understanding of the world, and explore the unknown. Horror movies allow us to push the limits of our imagination and face the unthinkable, all while remaining in a safe and controlled environment.

The Benefits of Stimulating the Imagination

Horror movies offer several significant benefits by stimulating our imagination and creativity:

Ultimately, the power of imagination is the key to the horror movie genre’s appeal. It is what sets this form of entertainment apart from others and creates a lasting impact on audiences. Horror movies provide a unique opportunity to stimulate our minds and expand our horizons. As Stephen King once said, “Imagination is not a talent of some people, but is the health of every person.”

Identification and Empathy

Horror movies often feature a protagonist with whom we can identify and share their fears and struggles, forming emotional connections with the character. Stephen King explains that it’s through this identification that we are drawn into the story and invested in its outcome, as we experience the same emotions as the character.

Empathy plays a fundamental role in our psychological connection to horror movies. By immersing ourselves in the story, we gain a better understanding of human emotions and the complexities of the human psyche. Stephen King suggests that this empathy translates into our real-life experiences, improving our ability to relate to others and understand their emotions.

“We like to view ourselves as rational creatures, but we’re all emotional all the time, and horror movies tap into those emotions we don’t often let out.”

Adrenaline Rush and Biological Response

While horror films may be frightening, they also provide a rush of excitement. Stephen King notes that watching horror movies triggers a biological response in our bodies, releasing adrenaline and heightening our senses. The rush of adrenaline that comes with watching a scary scene is similar to that experienced during a fight-or-flight situation. The body’s fight-or-flight response prepares us to face danger by increasing our heart rate, speeding up our breathing, and activating our muscles.

The biological response in our bodies to horror movies can also lead to a feeling of euphoria. This feeling is caused by the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers, which are secreted in response to the excitement and fear that horror films produce. The release of endorphins can create a sense of pleasure and calm after the initial adrenaline rush has subsided.

Overall, horror movies have the ability to trigger a range of physiological responses in our bodies, from the release of adrenaline to the production of endorphins. These responses add an extra level of enjoyment to the horror film experience, providing the audience with a unique and exhilarating experience.

Societal Reflections and Commentary

In analyzing the themes of horror movies, Stephen King has pointed out that they often serve as a reflection of societal fears, anxieties, and cultural phenomena, providing a commentary on contemporary issues and social norms. By exploring our deepest fears and anxieties, horror movies expose the hidden anxieties of society, highlighting the issues we need to address and deal with.

Furthermore, through the portrayal of taboo topics and societal norms that are often too sensitive to discuss, horror movies provide a platform to confront these issues in a safe environment. As King puts it, “Horror movies are a way to confront our demons without putting ourselves in danger.”

“I think that we’re all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better.” -Stephen King, Danse Macabre

By stimulating our imagination, horror movies offer a way to examine subconscious ideas and ideas that may be buried deep in our thoughts, yet play out in our current societal constructs. They can help us identify societal deviance by promoting empathy and understanding of darkness, while also serving as a commentary on social norms.

The importance of commentary and societal reflection in horror movies

The societal reflection aspect of horror movies cannot be ignored. It’s impossible to miss the commentary on the need for escapism in a capitalistic society, the dangers of unchecked power, and the risks of ignorance when confronting complex societal issues. Blending all these themes together, horror movies are not just a source of entertainment, they are an awareness-raising tool that helps audiences connect with societal issues they might otherwise be unaware of.

These discussions and reflections on society are what make horror movies so much more than jump scares and gore. Indeed, they push us to think and reflect on the world we live in and take action. Through this genre, we can approach many heavy topics, taste the fear, the thrill and simultaneously, take something constructive and useful.

In conclusion, Stephen King’s insightful analysis illuminates why we crave horror movies . From the psychological thrill of fear to the cathartic release they provide, horror movies tap into our primal instincts and offer a safe means of confronting societal taboos . They challenge our senses, stimulate our imagination, and foster empathy and emotional connections.

As King notes, horror movies also serve as a reflection of societal fears, anxieties, and cultural phenomena. Through their exploration of contemporary issues and social norms, they offer commentary and insight into our world.

Ultimately, King’s observations remind us of the powerful draw of horror movies and their ability to evoke intense emotions and sensations. As we continue to crave these experiences, we can look to King’s work as a guide to understanding the complex interplay between our psychology, emotions, and societal reflections .

So, the next time you find yourself drawn to a horror movie, take a moment to appreciate the many subtle factors that contribute to this attraction. And who better to guide you through this exploration than the master of horror himself, Stephen King?

Why are horror movies so popular?

Horror movies are popular because they tap into our primal instincts and provide a thrilling experience through fear. They allow us to release pent-up emotions and anxieties, offering a sense of catharsis and resolution. Additionally, horror movies offer a means of escaping the mundane aspects of everyday life and provide a platform to confront societal taboos in a safe environment. Furthermore, they cater to our fascination with the unknown and the human desire to explore the mysteries of the world. Horror movies also challenge our senses through visuals, sound effects, and suspenseful storytelling. They stimulate our imagination, fostering creativity and intense emotional reactions. Moreover, horror movies allow us to identify with characters, fostering empathy and emotional connections. Lastly, the physiological effects of watching horror movies, such as the release of adrenaline and the heightened senses, contribute to the allure . Overall, horror movies serve as a reflection of our society, often commenting on contemporary issues and social norms.

What insights does Stephen King provide about horror movies?

Stephen King offers various insights into the allure of horror movies. He emphasizes the psychological aspect, highlighting how they tap into our primal instincts and provide a thrilling experience through fear. King also discusses the concept of catharsis, illustrating how horror movies allow us to release pent-up emotions and anxieties. He suggests that horror movies offer an escape from routine and a means to confront societal taboos in a safe environment. Furthermore, King explores the fascination with the unknown and the human desire to explore mysteries. He examines how horror movies challenge our senses through visuals, sound effects, and suspenseful storytelling. King emphasizes the power of imagination , noting how horror movies stimulate creative thinking by immersing us in terrifying scenarios. Additionally, he discusses the identification with characters in horror movies, fostering empathy and emotional connections. Lastly, King highlights the physiological effects of watching horror movies, including the release of adrenaline and the heightened senses.

How do horror movies reflect societal fears and anxieties?

Horror movies often serve as a reflection of societal fears, anxieties, and cultural phenomena. They provide a platform to comment on contemporary issues and social norms. Through terrifying scenarios and monstrous creatures, horror movies depict the fears and anxieties that resonate with a wide audience. They address societal taboos and explore the darker aspects of human nature. Additionally, horror movies often incorporate subtexts and symbolism to comment on political, social, or cultural landscapes. By tapping into our collective fears, horror movies can provoke thought and initiate discussions about societal issues.

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Friday essay: in praise of the ‘horror master’ Stephen King

Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

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Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Growing up in the 1980s, the name Stephen King was synonymous with macabre, terrifying, apparently taboo (though ubiquitous) book covers. They seemed to appear everywhere: bookstores, to be sure; but also newsagents, supermarkets, cinemas, airports and libraries. They always seemed to be spinning in some library carousel, looking tattered, like they’d been borrowed 100,000 times.

Like a kid from a King novel, I was obsessed with the forbidden. I would spend hours staring at these book covers, thinking about the horrors that might lie within.

A giant, bloody salivating dog. A freakish pair of eyes looking out of a drain. A silhouette of a figure with an axe eclipsing someone in a wheelchair. Hell, they looked more like movie posters than book covers. I’d go to bed and imagine one of these figures coming alive and creeping towards the house from the backyard.

Very occasionally, this was actually scary – but mostly it was just fun.

Why we love horror

Why do we gravitate towards subject matter that, if it existed in the real world, would be at best supremely unpleasant? There are many theories regarding why people love horror film and literature.

Perhaps it’s cathartic. Maybe it reflects Freud’s “ death drive ,” or what Edgar Allan Poe described, in a titular short story, as the “imp of the perverse,” (suggesting we all have self-destructive tendencies). Or maybe it simply reflects our fascination with extreme experiences, a desire to be overwhelmed by the sublime, which Edmund Burke defined as a mixture of fear and excitement, terror and awe. Perhaps horror thus manifests a desire to re-enchant the world with magic in a controlled and safe context, physically activating the body and its response mechanisms in an environment that only simulates real peril.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the collective pleasure of inflicting pain on others through punishment. Does our fascination for horror channel this? Or, as Julia Kristeva ’s theory suggests, does art help us manage our abject horror at the breakdown between self and other – most pointedly captured in our confrontations with corpses?

Literary theorist René Girard ’s ideas are equally compelling. Perhaps we’re attracted to images of violence because of its anthropological function in the earliest periods of community formation. A victim – the scapegoat – would be chosen to bear the violence that would otherwise be destructively directed towards other members of the community. This idea is beautifully rendered in Drew Godard’s The Cabin in the Woods , a horror film about the origins of horror films in ritual and sacrifice.

In a broader cultural sense, our modern interest in horror, the supernatural and the weird has grown in direct proportion to industrialisation, and the parallel shrinking of the world’s magic and mysteries (captured in the term “globalisation”).

In a post-sacred era of intense scientific rationalism and technological development, the aesthetics of the weird, supernatural and horrific – in all their wondrous irrationality – allow us to occupy an alternate, imaginary space removed from the horror of things as they really are: mass industrial wars of attrition, precarious states of living, pandemic disease and global warming.

Read more: Friday essay: scary tales for scary times

My first King

When I finally had the autonomy (and my own money) to pick the books I wanted to read, it was with mixed feelings of shame and excitement that I went to buy my first Stephen King novel.

I still remember the suburban bookstore and the sardonic frown of its middle-aged clerk as she looked down at my ten-year-old self when I placed Pet Sematary on the counter and got 12 bucks out of my wallet. I remember blushing when she intimated (or was it actually a question?) I must have been buying this for an older relative.

The novel follows what happens to a doctor and his family when they discover, in the woods, a children’s pet cemetery that reanimates whatever is buried there. It lived up to the promise of its cover, offering splashes of superlative gore, a handful of genuinely terrifying moments (the sequences involving Rachel’s sick sister Zelda still get to me) and a plethora of new words. Not swear words, mind you – any self-respecting kid knows all of these by seven or eight – but terms like “cuckold”, about which I had to consult my mum.

For the next two years, I spent most of my reading time dedicated to King. I quickly got through the pantheon – massive tomes like The Stand , Needful Things and It ; more moderately sized ones like Carrie , The Shining and Salem’s Lot ; and short, explosive ones like The Running Man , published under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. And then I started with the new releases (there was at least one every year – like 1994’s Insomnia ), generally available from Kmart in hardback.

I found in King an interlocutor who spoke with gusto and enthusiasm about all kinds of things – old age, domestic abuse, natural and supernatural horrors of the mind and closet. But, more than anything else, he seemed not only to write stories that often featured young characters, but to accurately dramatise what it actually felt like to be a kid.

Short stories like The Sun Dog , novels like Cycle of the Werewolf and the monumental It – not to mention more obvious outings like The Body, the basis of the massively successful nostalgia film Stand By Me – captured the peculiar melancholic excitement, both intense and slightly wistful, of being near the beginning of life in that delirious halcyon era just before puberty sets in.

Then I grew up – and stopped reading King. Through writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen, I was introduced to prose worlds that seemed to be richer: both more concentrated and more expansive, certainly more nuanced. King gradually disappeared from my field of vision.

I forgot about the “gypsy” curse on Billy Halleck (the basis of Thinner ) and about Arnie and Dennis from Christine , as they struggle to overcome the eponymous evil car. Like one of the children of It – who forget their childhoods, until they reunite as adults to confront them – I forgot about my horror master, erasing my childhood experiences from memory. When I was 15, as a gag, I tried reading Firestarter and found it garish, gross, infantile. A few years earlier, King’s novel about a pyrokinetic child being hunted by a government who want to weaponise her would have seemed thrilling, maybe even insightful.

But the King was dead.

Read more: 'Supp'd full with horrors': 400 years of Shakespearean supernaturalism

Literary snobs and good writers

Perhaps the only thing worse than the literary snob who looks down on everyone who doesn’t read Joyce’s Ulysses on loop is the literary snob of the populist variety, the one who scowls at everyone who doesn’t read the kind of fiction that ord’nary folks like.

When outspoken literary critic and professor Harold Bloom described the 2003 awarding of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Stephen King as “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life,” it was easy to dislike Bloom as an example of the former. Listening to King discuss his writing, it is almost as easy to dismiss him as the latter.

What makes a good writer? According to King,

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

So is King, as Bloom writes, “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis”? King does, after all, describe his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s”. And there are numerous passages throughout his work – probably most pronouncedly in the words of writer Bill Denbrough in It – in which King expresses a serious disdain for academic knowledge and scholarship.

As Bloom would probably argue, consistency in style and tone, and complexity of form, are key elements underpinning any kind of aesthetic mastery. And it’s undeniable that King has produced a not-inconsiderable volume of poorly written and inconsistent work. Sometimes his novels warrant criticisms of pretentiousness, hackneyed style and tediously repetitive prose.

King may or may not be a great, or even good, writer. His more self-consciously serious stuff sometimes seems intolerable to me: kitsch is only fun if the attitude is fun. And some of his work ( Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Dolores Claiborne , for example) feels heavy-handed to the point of being virtually unreadable. Never mind – these works are frequently adapted into incredibly popular and incredibly dull films.

In any case, the debate continues to play out, with critics intermittently arguing for and against King’s writing. Dwight Allen, for example, wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books that King creates one-dimensional characters in dull prose. In the same publication, Sarah Langan responded :

All of [King’s] novels, even the stinkers, have resonance. […] his fiction isn’t just reflective of the current culture, it casts judgement. […] No one except King challenges [Americans] so relentlessly, to be brave. To kill our monsters.

King is, undeniably, a juggernaut of commercial literary production – an industry unto himself, a literary and cinematic brand – who has written a handful of genuine horror genre masterpieces throughout his career.

Perhaps it’s in part this combination of prolific volume and intermittent brilliance that keeps me, like an addict, coming back for more.

Ultimately, though, I would suggest I like reading King for the same reason so many others do, a reason that accounts for his enduring popularity when better horror stylists (King’s contemporaries Clive Barker and Peter Straub , for example) have fallen by the wayside. And that’s his unprecedented capacity to tap into nostalgia.

Returning to King-world

Nearly 20 years after I gave up on Stephen King, in one of those random nostalgic moments that seem to populate his fictional world, my brother gave me Revival for Christmas.

King’s Frankensteinian novel, published in 2014, is about the aftermath of an encounter between a young boy and a Methodist minister fascinated by electricity. After years of mainly reading what is sometimes pretentiously called “literary” fiction, and mostly avoiding anything written after the 19th or very early 20th centuries, I returned to King-world.

And I was dazzled by what I found there, realising what I must have known as a kid: King is a superb storyteller. Much of his work is characterised by an infectiously energetic prose style, governed by a flair for simple but satisfying plotting and a supremely inventive imagination.

And – yep – I was stunned by his capacity to precisely render in prose, perhaps more acutely than any other contemporary writer, the confusing, often hokey and melodramatic, but always exciting images, emotions, and sensibilities of youth.

I realised there’s something brilliant, and totally inimitable, about King. Despite his work’s sometimes kitsch silliness (a hazard of the horror genre), despite the not uncommon misfires – and despite the absurdly voluminous output - King is able to authentically generate an atmosphere of nostalgia that taps into something at the very core of the pleasure of reading.

Read more: Frankenstein: how Mary Shelley's sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God

It: a masterpiece of nostalgia

His novel It is a case in point: a masterclass in narrative development through a nostalgic structure.

It – for anyone who hasn’t read it, or seen one of the three film adaptations – cuts between the adult lives and childhoods of a group of misfits, the “ Losers Club ”, who collectively band together to fight the evil of their town, Derry. That evil takes the form of a shape-shifting clown, Pennywise.

The Losers Club battled and banished Pennywise as kids, but now “it” has come back. The club members return from around the world to live up to their childhood promise: that if “it” ever returns, they, too, will return to fight “it”. The narrative cuts between characters, en route to Derry, as they recall forgotten passages from their childhood “it’s” return has forced them to remember.

So, the novel is structured around a nostalgic trope: adults literally remembering and reconstructing their childhood in the present. At the same time, the town Derry is developed by King according to a quintessentially nostalgic image of the American small town, recalling peak 1950s Americana. Think Grease : soda fountains, switchblades and quiffs. But behind closed doors, fathers abuse daughters, mothers keep their children sick, and a monster that assumes the form of whatever demon most terrifies you stalks the streets, killing and eating children.

The narrative architecture is starkly simple, sustaining a profound sense of dread in the reader. The characters remember a dreadful past, in a present-future they wish had never materialised. Perhaps nostalgia always contains shades of the dreadful, given its suggestion that one’s future is foreclosed, that all we have are memories of a better time: memories that only exist as memories.

In some of King’s work – Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, for example – nostalgia acts mainly as window dressing, functioning primarily as an aesthetic. But in It, nostalgia is neither incidental nor benign: it’s a way of exploring the impossibility of having to remember trauma .

Memory appears inevitably nostalgic, because it involves, for the characters, narrative reconstruction of childhood in the present. In the Derry library, for town librarian Mike Hanlon – the only Loser to remain in Derry as an adult (and the only one who didn’t battle It in the sewers as a child) - for example. Or for Ben Hanscom, an internationally successful architect, once the fat kid of the group, who flies back to Derry, drunk and asleep in first-class.

In this way, the novel functions as a kind of treatise on narrative itself. A grab bag of clichés from the horror playbook become legitimately terrifying for the children in the novel - they’re kids after all, and the cultural worlds of kids are often constructed around clichés – from mass-produced popular figures like the Wolf Man, to figures associated with the characters’ nightmarish personal traumas.

It’s a “coming of age” story with a vengeance - a metatext on the horrors of youth, of fitting in, metamorphosing into adulthood, and breaking free of one’s parents - and it inherently explores the ways we use horror stories (like fairytales) to come to terms with this.

As Adrian Daub, revisiting the novel on its 30-year anniversary, wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016:

Anamnesis — remembering — is the central structuring device of It’s parallel plots: characters have to find out what they once did, and confront what on some level they already know. […] Perhaps all the kids who devoured It in the ’80s sensed that King had made their pre-adolescent mode of experiencing the world — that unique combination of vivid clarity and forgetfulness — its formal principle. […] All the friends, events, images, and feelings that we ever-so-gently cover in sand as we stumble into adulthood can startle us when we come face to face with them again, and these are the true source of It’s terror. What else have we hidden back there, we wonder uneasily?“

In It’s truly weird (over)length, in It’s oscillating moments of genius and stupidity, in It’s ambition – as King’s horror book about horror, the horror book to end all horror books – it is an American masterpiece. It captures everything incisive, deluded, cruel and sentimental about the popular American literary imagination.

Read more: Why do we find it so hard to move on from the 80s?

Reading as escape and connection

So why is nostalgia such a powerful affect in It, and in King’s work in general?

I think it taps into something at the heart of the process of reading novels. We sit with a novel and retreat from the world: an intensely solipsistic act. A novel sweeps us up into a fantasy image of things (no matter how distant or close to reality) and makes us feel, in our solitude, excitement about what’s to come – but also a faint melancholy in remembering we will soon have to leave this world.

It’s no surprise many people cry at the end of novels: we’ve made such a personal investment, then that world simply disappears, and all we’re left with are our memories of it. In our desire to return to this pleasurable state, we may feel compelled to borrow – or buy – another book.

But while reading a novel feels like a private act (as opposed to going to a movie or concert), there’s also always a sense we are connected to (and connecting with) some kind of cultural and historical continuum.

We read Dickens in our solitude, yet imagine we’re in Victorian England, connected across 150-odd years. Time and space seem collapsed into a vibrant, active present. Dickens speaks to us, but more significantly, the zeitgeist addresses us in a moving presence – perhaps we can cheat death, after all?

The structure of It (and much of King’s other work) reproduces what attracts many of us to reading fiction in the first place – an escape into a present that is at the same time a kind of memory-fantasy, governed by lingering nostalgia.

For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch , literature offers a utopian space in which we can transcend and transform the past and future, captured in the figure of heimat (meaning homeland – and appropriated in opposition to the term’s German nationalist use). Literature allows us to return to a mythic-nostalgic image of "home” – which we know has never actually existed. This nostalgic space opens the possibility of a better collective present and future.

Read more: The psychology behind why clowns creep us out

Long live the King!

There are definitely better, more controlled stylists than King in popular horror fiction. But their work is somehow more forgettable. King’s perpetual presence - as ringmaster, as media conglomerate, as relentless worker – is always in performance in his work.

You may find his style annoying, or his narratives hokey, but you will always recognise them as Stephen King. He has a flavour, and it ties his work together, good and bad. Much of it emanates from the man himself and his sheer love of writing and reading – dare I say it, of “literature”.

This is evident in his publishing history, but also in the forewords and reviews, and endorsements, he writes for writers he loves. The revival of interest in noir master Jim Thompson , for example, who had vanished into obscurity, seems to be at least in part down to King’s forewords to several of his books. And one wonders how much the Hard Case Crime imprint, which publishes hard-boiled crime novels in the flavour of those of the 1950s and 60s, relies on the success of King’s original crime novels written for them. How many forgotten masterpieces of noir literature have been brought back into print because King publishes with Hard Case? How many books have moved because a line from King is featured on the cover?

No other living horror writer has enjoyed King’s longevity. There’s no one whose monsters have lingered quite as long in the popular imagination, and in the imaginations of countless readers like me.

The literature we read as children and adolescents has a profound effect on our cultural and personal formation, shaping our becoming as adults. King’s worlds, where children struggle to shape their futures, draw upon our own, personal nostalgia. But they also tap into a kind of nostalgia that lies at the heart of novelistic pleasure itself.

Horror films and novels situate us in precarious situations - we identify with victims, sense their isolation as monsters attack, and feel their glory when and if the monsters are defeated.

We creep through the worlds of horror, watchful, alert, before returning to the safety of our bedrooms, but we’re always a little sad when we come back: that world may have been dominated by killer birds , or by hellish blood-sucking fiends , but it was an exciting, atmospheric - and beautifully solitary – place.

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 31, 2018 • ( 3 )

Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.”

King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America—Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania—and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.

King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. In Danse Macabre , a study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made monster), the vampire, and the werewolf. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic; the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters have taken on a new mystique. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. King’s paranormal horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults; they externalize the traumas of life, especially those of adolescence.

Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie , is a parable of adolescence. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. Her mother, a religious fanatic, associates Carrie with her own “sin”; Carrie’s peers hate her in a mindless way and make her the butt of every joke. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. The novel is also about the terrors of passage to womanhood. In the opening scene, in the school shower room, Carrie experiences her first menstrual period; her peers react with abhorrence and ridicule, “stoning” her with sanitary napkins, shouting “Plug it up!” Carrie becomes the scapegoat for a fear of female sexuality as epitomized in the smell and sight of blood. (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) As atonement for her participation in Carrie’s persecution in the shower, Susan Snell persuades her popular boyfriend Tommy Ross to invite Carrie to the Spring Ball. Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is paralleled by a new plot by the girls against her, led by the rich and spoiled Chris Hargenson. They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted king and queen of the ball, only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Carrie avenges her mock baptism telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only survivor.

As in most folk cultures, initiation is signified by the acquisition of special wisdom or powers. King equates Carrie’s sexual flowering with the maturing of her telekinetic ability. Both cursed and empowered with righteous fury, she becomes at once victim and monster, witch and White Angel of Destruction. As King has explained, Carrie is “Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”

Carrie catapulted King into the mass market; in 1976 it was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Brian De Palma. The novel touched the right nerves, including feminism. William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), which was adapted into a powerful and controversial film, had touched on similar social fears during the 1960’s and 1970’s with its subtext of the “generation gap” and the “death of God.” Although Carrie’s destructive power, like that of Regan in The Exorcist , is linked with monstrous adolescent sexuality, the similarity between the two novels ends there. Carrie’s “possession” is the complex effect of her mother’s fanaticism, her peers’ bigotry, and her newly realized, unchecked female power. Like Anne Sexton’s Transformations (1971), a collection of fractured fairy tales in sardonic verse, King’s novel explores the social and cultural roots of evil.

King’s Carrie is a dark modernization of “Cinderella,” with a bad mother, cruel siblings (peers), a prince (Tommy Ross), a godmother (Sue Snell), and a ball. King’s reversal of the happy ending is actually in keeping with the Brothers Grimm; it recalls the tale’s folk originals, which enact revenge in bloody images: The stepsisters’ heels, hands, and noses are sliced off, and a white dove pecks out their eyes. As King knows, blood flows freely in the oral tradition. King represents that oral tradition in a pseudodocumentary form that depicts the points of view of various witnessess and commentaries: newspaper accounts, case studies, court reports, and journals. Pretending to textual authenticity, he alludes to the gothic classics, especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot , King’s next novel, is a bloody fairy tale in which Dracula comes to Our Town.

‘Salem’s Lot

By the agnostic and sexually liberated 1970’s, the vampire had been demythologized into what King called a “comic book menace.” In a significant departure from tradition, he diminishes the sexual aspects of the vampire. He reinvests the archetype with meaning by basing its attraction on the human desire to surrender identity in the mass. His major innovation, however, was envisioning the mythic small town in American gothic terms and then making it the monster; the vampire’s traditional victim, the populace, becomes the menace as mindless mass, plague, or primal horde. Drawing on Richard Matheson’s grimly naturalistic novel I Am Legend (1954) and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), King focused on the issues of fragmentation, reinvesting the vampire with contemporary meaning.

The sociopolitical subtext of ‘Salem’s Lot was the ubiquitous disillusionment of the Watergate era, King has explained. Like rumor and disease, vampirism spreads secretly at night, from neighbor to neighbor, infecting men and women, the mad and the senile, the responsible citizen and the infant alike, absorbing into its zombielike horde the human population. King is especially skillful at suggesting how small-town conservatism can become inverted on itself, the harbored suspicions and open secrets gradually dividing and isolating. This picture is reinforced by the town’s name, ‘Salem’s Lot , a degenerated form of Jerusalem’s Lot, which suggests the city of the chosen reverted to a culture of dark rites in images of spreading menace.

King’s other innovation was, paradoxically, a reiteration. He made his “king vampire,” Barlow, an obvious reincarnation of Stoker’s Dracula that functions somewhere between cliché and archetype. King uses the mythology of vampires to ask how civilization is to exist without faith in traditional authority symbols. His answer is pessimistic, turning on the abdication of Father Callahan, whose strength is undermined by secret alcoholism and a superficial adherence to form. The two survivors, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, must partly seek, partly create their talismans and rituals, drawing on the compendium of vampire lore—the alternative, in a culture-wide crisis of faith, to conventional systems. (At one point, Mears holds off a vampire with a crucifix made with two tongue depressors.) The paraphernalia, they find, will work only if the handler has faith.

It is significant that the two survivors are, respectively, a “wise child” (Petrie) and a novelist (Mears); only they have the necessary resources. Even Susan Norton, Mears’s lover and the gothic heroine, succumbs. As in The Shining , The Dead Zone, and Firestarter , the child (or childlike adult) has powers that may be used for good or for evil. Mears is the imaginative, nostalgic adult, haunted by the past. The child and the man share a naïveté, a gothic iconography, and a belief in evil. Twelve-year-old Mark worships at a shrinelike tableau of Aurora monsters that glow “green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus” he was given in Sunday School for learning Psalm 119. Mears has returned to the town of his childhood to revive an image of the Marsten House lurking in his mythical mind’s eye. Spiritual father and son, they create a community of two out of the “pop” remnants of American culture.

As in fairy tales and Dickens’s novels, King’s protagonists are orphans searching for their true parents, for community. His fiction may reenact his search for the father who disappeared and left behind a box of Weird Tales . The yearned-for bond of parent and child, a relationship signifying a unity of being, appears throughout his fiction. The weakness or treachery of a trusted parent is correspondingly the ultimate fear. Hence, the vampire Barlow is the devouring father who consumes an entire town.

The Shining

In The Shining , King domesticated his approach to the theme of parent-child relationships, focusing on the threat to the family that comes from a trusted figure within it. Jack Torrance, a writer, arranges to oversee a mountain resort during the winter months, when it is closed due to snow. He moves his family with him to the Overlook Hotel, where he expects to break a streak of bad luck and personal problems (he is an alcoholic) by writing a play. He is also an abused child who, assuming his father’s aggression, in turn becomes the abusing father. The much beloved “bad” father is the novel’s monster: The environment of the Overlook Hotel traps him, as he in turn calls its power forth. As Jack metamorphoses from abusive father and husband into violent monster, King brilliantly expands the haunted-house archetype into a symbol of the accumulated sin of all fathers.

In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1970’s. The monster is the American Dream as embodied in the automobile. King gives Christine all the attributes of a fairy tale for “postliterate” adolescents. Christine is another fractured “Cinderella” story, Carrie for boys. Arnie Cunningham, a nearsighted, acne-scarred loser, falls “in love with” a car, a passionate (red and white) Plymouth Fury, “one of the long ones with the big fins,” that he names Christine. An automotive godmother, she brings Arnie, in fairy-tale succession, freedom, success, power, and love: a home away from overprotective parents, a cure for acne, hit-andrun revenge on bullies, and a beautiful girl, Leigh Cabot. Soon, however, the familiar triangle emerges, of boy, girl, and car, and Christine is revealed as a femme fatale— driven by the spirit of her former owner, a malcontent named Roland LeBay. Christine is the medium for his death wish on the world, for his all-devouring, “everlasting Fury.” LeBay’s aggression possesses Arnie, who reverts into an older, tougher self, then into the “mythic teenaged hood” that King has called the prototype of 1950’s werewolf films, and finally into “some ancient carrion eater,” or primal self.

As automotive monster, Christine comes from a variety of sources, including the folk tradition of the “death car” and a venerable techno-horror premise, as seen in King’s “Trucks” and Maximum Overdrive . King’s main focus, however, is the mobile youth culture that has come down from the 1950’s by way of advertising, popular songs, film, and national pastimes. Christine is the car as a projection of the cultural self, Anima for the modern American Adam. To Arnie’s late 1970’s-style imagination, the Plymouth Fury, in 1958 a mid-priced family car, is an American Dream. Her sweeping, befinned chassis and engine re-create a fantasy of the golden age of the automobile: the horizonless future imagined as an expanding network of superhighways and unlimited fuel. Christine recovers for Arnie a prelapsarian vitality and manifest destiny.

Christine’s odometer runs backward and she regenerates parts. The immortality she offers, however—and by implication, the American Dream—is really arrested development in the form of a Happy Days rerun and by way of her radio, which sticks on the golden oldies station. Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled “Teenage Car-Songs,” “Teenage Love-Songs,” and “Teenage Death-Songs.” Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Christine’s burden, an undead 1950’s youth culture, means that most of Arnie’s travels are in and out of time, a deadly nostalgia trip. As Douglas Winter explains, Christine reenacts “the death,” during the 1970’s, “of the American romance with the automobile.”

The epilogue from four years later presents the fairy-tale consolation in a burnedout monotone. Arnie and his parents are buried, Christine is scrap metal, and the true Americans, Leigh and Dennis, are survivors, but Dennis, the “knight of Darnell’s Ga Rage ,” does not woo “the lady fair”; he is a limping, lackluster junior high teacher, and they have drifted apart, grown old in their prime. Dennis narrates the story in order to file it away, all the while perceiving himself and his peers in terms of icons from the late 1950’s. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words, “ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.” From Dennis’s haunted perspective, Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or déjà vu, which continued after Christine ’s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seamless illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay.

The subtext of King’s adolescent fairy tale is another coming of age, from the opposite end and the broader perspective of American culture. Written by a fortyish King in the final years of the twentieth century, Christine diagnoses a cultural midlife crisis and marks a turning point in King’s career, a critical examination of mass culture. The dual time frame reflects his awareness of a dual audience, of writing for adolescents who look back to a mythical 1950’s and also for his own generation as it relives its undead youth culture in its children. The baby boomers, King explains, “were obsessive” about childhood. “We went on playing for a long time, almost feverishly. I write for that buried child in us, but I’m writing for the grown-up too. I want grownups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up. The child should be buried.”

Pet Sematary

In Pet Sematary , King unearthed the buried child, which is the novel’s monster. Pet Sematary is about the “real cemetery,” he told Winter. The focus is on the “one great fear” all fears “add up to,” “the body under the sheet. It’s our body.” The fairy-tale subtext is the magic kingdom of our protracted American childhood, the Disney empire as mass culture—and, by implication, the comparable multimedia phenomenon represented by King himself. The grimmer, truer text-within-the-text is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1818).

The novel, which King once considered “too horrible to be published,” is also his own dark night of the soul. Louis Creed, a university doctor, moves with his wife, Rachel, and their two children (five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage) to Maine to work at King’s alma mater; a neighbor takes the family on an outing to a pet cemetery created by the neighborhood children, their confrontation with mortality. Additionally the “sematary,” whose “Druidic” rings allude to Stonehenge, is the outer circle of a Native American burial ground that sends back the dead in a state of soulless half life. Louis succumbs to temptation when the family cat, Church, is killed on the highway; he buries him on the sacred old Native American burial grounds. “Frankencat” comes back with his “purr-box broken.” A succession of accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths—of neighbor Norma Crandall, Creed’s son Gage, Norma’s husband Jud, and Creed’s wife Rachel—and resurrections follows.

The turning point is the death of Gage, which Creed cannot accept and that leads to the novel’s analysis of modern medical miracles performed in the name of human decency and love. Louis is the father as baby boomer who cannot relinquish his childhood. The larger philosophical issue is Louis’s rational, bioethical creed; he believes in saving the only life he knows, the material. Transferred into an immoderate love for his son, it is exposed as the narcissistic embodiment of a patriarchal lust for immortality through descendants, expressed first in an agony of sorrow and Rage , then ghoulishly, as he disinters his son’s corpse and makes the estranging discovery that it is like “looking at a badly made doll.” Later, reanimated, Gage appears to have been “terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.” Performing his task, Louis feels dehumanized, like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book.”

The failure of Louis’s creed is shown in his habit, when under stress, of taking mental trips to Orlando, Florida, where he, Church, and Gage drive a white van as Disney World’s “resurrection crew.” In these waking dreams, which echo the male bond of “wise child” and haunted father from as far back as ‘Salem’s Lot , Louis’s real creed is revealed: Its focus is on Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (a personification of death to Rachel) and Walt Disney, that “gentle faker from Nebraska”—like Louis, two wizards of science fantasy. Louis’s wizardry is reflected in the narrative perspective and structure, which flashes back in part 2 from the funeral to Louis’s fantasy of a heroically “long, flying tackle” that snatches Gage from death’s wheels.

In this modernization of Frankenstein , King demythologizes death and attacks the aspirations toward immortality that typify contemporary American attitudes. King’s soulless Lazaruses are graphic projections of anxieties about life-support systems, artificial hearts, organ transplants—what King has called “mechanistic miracles” that can postpone the physical signs of life almost indefinitely. The novel also indicts the “waste land” of mass culture, alluding in the same trope to George Romero’s “stupid, lurching movie-zombies,” T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men, and The Wizard of Oz: “headpiece full of straw.” Louis worries that Ellie knows more about Ronald McDonald and “the Burger King” than the “ spiritus mundi .” If the novel suggests one source of community and culture, it is the form and ritual of the children’s pet “sematary.” Its concentric circles form a pattern from their “own collective unconsciousness,” one that mimes “the most ancient religious symbol of all,” the spiral.

In It , a group of children create a community and a mythology as a way of confronting their fears, as represented by It , the monster as a serial-murdering, shape-shifting boogey that haunts the sewers of Derry, Maine. In 1958, the seven protagonists, a cross-section of losers, experience the monster differently, for as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), It derives its power through its victim’s isolation and guilt and thus assumes the shape of his or her worst fear. (To Beverly Rogan It appears, in a sequence reminiscent of “Red Riding Hood,” as her abusive father in the guise of the child-eating witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”)

In a scary passage in Pet Sematary , Louis dreams of Walt Disney World, where “by the 1890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.” To all of It’s protagonists, the monster appears in a similar archetypal or communal form, one that suggests a composite of devouring parent and mass-culture demigod, of television commercial and fairy tale, of 1958 and 1985: as Pennywise, the Clown, a cross between Bozo and Ronald McDonald. As in Christine, Pet Sematary, and Thinner , the monster is mass culture itself, the collective devouring parent nurturing its children on “imitations of immortality.” Like Christine, or Louis’s patched-up son, Pennywise is the dead past feeding on the future. Twenty-seven years after its original reign of terror, It resumes its seige, whereupon the protagonists, now professionally successful and, significantly, childless yuppies, must return to Derry to confront as adults their childhood fears. Led by horror writer Bill Denborough (partly based on King’s friend and collaborator Peter Straub), they defeat It once more, individually as a sort of allegory of psychoanalysis and collectively as a rite of passage into adulthood and community.

It was attacked in reviews as pop psychology and by King himself as a “badly constructed novel,” but the puerility was partly intended. The book summarizes King’s previous themes and characters, who themselves look backward and inward, regress and take stock. The last chapter begins with an epigraph from Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850) and ends with an allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” from which King takes his primary theme and narrative device, the look back that enables one to go forward. During the 1970’s, King’s fiction was devoted to building a mythos out of shabby celluloid monsters to fill a cultural void; in the postmodern awareness of the late 1980’s, he began a demystification process. It is a calling forth and ritual unmasking of motley Reagan-era monsters, the exorcism of a generation and a culture.

Other 1980’s Novels

As for King the writer, It was one important rite in what would be a lengthy passage. After It’s extensive exploration of childhood, however, he took up conspicuously more mature characters, themes, and roles. In The Eyes of the Dragon (written for his daughter), he returned to the springs of his fantasy, the fairy tale. He told much the same story as before but assumed the mantle of adulthood. This “pellucid” and “elegant” fairy tale, says Barbara Tritel in The New York Times Book Review (February 22, 1987), has the “intimate goofiness of an extemporaneous story” narrated by “a parent to a child.” In The Tommyknockers , King again seemed to leave familiar territory for science fiction, but the novel more accurately applies technohorror themes to the 1980’s infatuation with technology and televangelism. In The Dark Tower cycles, he combined the gothic with Western and apocalyptic fiction in a manner reminiscent of The Stand . Then with much fanfare in 1990, King returned to that novel to update and enlarge it by some 350 pages.

King and Bachman

The process of recapitulation and summing up was complicated by the disclosure, in 1984, of Richard Bachman, the pseudonym under whose cover King had published five novels over a period of eight years. Invented for business reasons, Bachman soon grew into an identity complete with a biography and photographs (he was a chicken farmer with a cancer-ravaged face), dedications, a narrative voice (of unrelenting pessimism), and if not a genre, a naturalistic mode in which sociopolitical speculation combined or alternated with psychological suspense. In 1985, when the novels (with one exception) were collected in a single volume attributed to King as Bachman, the mortified alter ego seemed buried. Actually Bachman’s publicized demise only raised a haunting question of what “Stephen King” really was.

Misery , which was conceived as Bachman’s book, was King’s first novel to explore the subject of fiction’s dangerous powers. After crashing his car on an isolated road in Colorado, romance writer Paul Sheldon is “rescued,” drugged, and held prisoner by a psychotic nurse named Annie Wilkes, who is also the “Number One Fan” of his heroine Misery Chastain (of whom he has tired and killed off). This “Constant Reader” becomes Sheldon’s terrible “Muse,” forcing him to write (in an edition especially for her) Misery’s return to life. Sheldon is the popular writer imprisoned by genre and cut to fit fan expectations (signified by Annie’s amputations of his foot and thumb). Like Scheherazade, the reader is reminded, Sheldon must publish or literally perish. Annie’s obsession merges with the expectations of the page-turning real reader, who demands and devours each chapter, and as Sheldon struggles (against pain, painkillers, and a manual typewriter that throws keys) for his life, page by page.

Billed ironically on the dust jacket as a love letter to his fans, the novel is a witty satire on what King has called America’s “cannibalistic cult of celebrity”: “[Y]ou set the guy up, and then you eat him.” The monstrous Reader, however, is also the writer’s muse, creation, and alter ego, as Sheldon discovers when he concludes that Misery Returns —not his “serious” novel Fast Cars —was his masterpiece. Just as ironically, Misery was King’s first novel to please most of the critics.

The Dark Half

The Dark Half is an allegory of the writer’s relation to his genius. The young writer-protagonist Thaddeus Beaumont has a series of headaches and seizures, and a surgeon removes from his eleven-year-old brain the incompletely absorbed fragments of a twin—including an eye, two teeth, and some fingernails. Nearly thirty years later, Beaumont is a creative writing professor and moderately successful literary novelist devoted to his family. For twelve years, however, he has been living a secret life through George Stark, the pseudonym under which he emerged from writer’s block as the author of best-selling crime novels. Stark’s purely instinctual genius finds its most vital expression in his protagonist, the ruthless killer Alexis Machine. Beaumont is forced to disclose and destroy his now self-destructive pseudonym, complete with gravesite service and papier mâché headstone. A series of murders (narrated in Stark’s graphic prose style) soon follows. The pseudonym has materialized, risen from its fictional grave literally to take Thad’s wife and children (twins, of course) hostage. What Stark wants is to live in writing, outside of which writers do not exist. However, the writer is also a demon, vampire, and killer in this dark allegory, possessing and devouring the man, his family, friends, community.

Drawing on the motif of the double and the form of the detective story—on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (c. fifth century b.c.e.), as well as Misery and Pet Sematary —King gluts the first half of the book with Stark/Machine’s gruesome rampages. The last half is psychological suspense and metafiction in biological metaphor: the struggle of the decently introspective Beaumont against the rawly instinctual Stark for control of both word and flesh, with the novel taking shape on the page as the true author reclaims the “third eye,” King’s term for both child’s and artist’s inward vision. Once again, the man buries the terrible child in order to possess himself and his art. The book ends in a “scene from some malign fairy tale” as that child and alter ego is borne away by flocks of sparrows to make a last appearance as a black hole in the fabric of the sky.

In dramatizing the tyrannies, perils, powers, and pleasures of reading and writing, Misery and The Dark Half might have been written by metafictionists John Fowles (to whose work King is fond of alluding) or John Barth (on whom he draws directly in It and Misery). Anything but abstract, however, The Dark Half is successful both as the thriller that King’s fans desired and as an allegory of the writer’s situation. Critic George Stade, in his review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review (October 29, 1989), praised King for his tact “in teasing out the implications of his parable.” The Dark Half contains epigraphs instead to the novels of George Stark, Thad Beaumont, and “the late Richard Bachman,” without whom “this novel could not have been written.” Thus reworking the gothic cliché of the double, King allows the mythology of his own life story to speak wittily for itself, lending a subtle level of selfparody to this roman à clef. In this instance, his blunt literalness (“word become flesh, so to speak,” as George Stark puts it), gives vitality to what in other hands might have been a sterile exercise.

Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne

Some have criticized King’s negative depiction of women, which King himself admitted in 1983 was a weakness. A decade later, King would address, and redress, this in his paired novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne . Both present a strong but besieged female protagonist, and both feature the total solar eclipse seen in Maine in 1963, during which a moment of telepathy, the books’ only supernaturalism, links the two women.

Gerald’s Game is the story of Jessie Burlingame, a young wife who submits to her husband’s desire for bondage in a deserted cabin, only to have him die when she unexpectedly struggles. Alone and helpless, Jessie confronts memories (including the secret reason she struck out at Gerald), her own fears and limitations, and a ghastly visitor to the cabin who may or may not be real. In a bloody scene—even by King’s standards—Jessie frees herself and escapes, a victory psychological as well as physical. The aptly named Dolores Claiborne is trapped more metaphorically, by poverty and an abusive husband, and her victory too is both violent and a sign of her developing independence and strength.

Initial reaction from critics was sometimes skeptical, especially given the prurient aspect of Jessie’s plight and the trendy theme of incestuous abuse in both novels. However, King examined family dysfunction in works from Carrie and The Shining to It, and he continued his commitment to women’s issues and realistic strong women in Insomnia, Rose Madder , and other novels. Archetypal themes also strengthen the two books: Female power must overcome male dominance, as the moon eclipses the sun; and each woman must find her own identity and strength out of travail, as the darkness gives way to light again. (King uses mythology and gender issues more explicitly in Rose Madder, which evenly incorporates mimetic and supernatural scenes.)

The books are daring departures for King in other ways. In contrast to King’s sprawling It or encyclopedic The Stand , these books, like Misery, tightly focus on one setting, a shorter period of time, and a small cast—here Misery’s duet is replaced by intense monologues. In fact, all of Dolores Claiborne is her first-person narrative, without even chapter breaks, a tour de force few would attempt. Moreover, King challenges our ideas of the genre horror novel, since there is little violence, none of it supernatural and all expected, so that suspense is a function of character, not plot (done previously by King only in short fiction such as “The Body” and “The Last Rung of the Ladder”).

Character and voice have always been essential to King’s books, as Debbie Notkin, Harlan Ellison, and others have pointed out. Dolores Claiborne is especially successful, her speech authentic Mainer, and her character realistic both as the old woman telling her story and as the desperate yet indomitable wife, the past self whose story she tells. In these novels, King reaches beyond childhood and adolescence as themes; child abuse is examined, but only from an adult point of view. Dolores and Jessie—and the elderly protagonists of Insomnia—reveal King, perhaps having reconciled to his own history, exploring new social and psychological areas.

Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones , which King calls a “haunted love story,” opens with narrator Mike Noonan recounting the death of his wife, Jo, who collapses outside the Rite Aid pharmacy from a brain aneurysm. Both are relatively young, and Jo, Mike learns, was pregnant. Because Mike is unable to father children, he begins to question whether Jo was having an affair. As Mike slowly adjusts to life without Jo, he is forced to make another adjustment. Formerly a successful writer of gothic romance fiction, he now finds that he is unable to write even a simple sentence. In an attempt to regain his muse and put Jo’s death behind him, Mike returns to Sarah Laughs (also referred to as “TR-90” or the “TR”), the vacation cabin he and Jo purchased soon after he became successful. As Mike quickly learns, Sarah Laughs is haunted by ghosts, among them the ghost of blues singer Sarah Tidwell.

While at Sarah Laughs, Mike meets Mattie Devore, her daughter Kyra, and Mattie’s father-in-law, Max Devore, a withered old man of incalculable wealth who is accustomed to getting anything he wants. Having rescued Kyra from walking down the middle of Route 68, Mike quickly becomes friends with both Kyra and Mattie. Mattie is the widow of Lance Devore, Max’s stuttering son. Lance had nothing to do with his father after learning that his father had tried to bribe Mattie into not marrying him. After Lance’s death from a freak accident, Max returned to Mattie’s life in an attempt to get acquainted with his granddaughter, Kyra. The truth is, however, that Max wants to gain custody of Kyra and take her away to California; he will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.

To help Mattie fight off Max’s army of high-priced lawyers, Mike uses his own considerable resources to retain a lawyer for Mattie named John Storrow, a young New Yorker unafraid to take on someone of Max Devore’s social stature. As Mike is drawn into Mattie’s custody battle, he is also exposed to the ghosts that haunt the community. As Mike sleeps at night, he comes to realize that there are at least three separate spirits haunting his cabin. One, he is sure, is Jo, and one, he determines, is Sarah Tidwell. The third manifests itself only as a crying child, and Mike cannot tell whether it is Kyra or some other child. Mike and Kyra share a special psychic connection that allows them to share dreams and even to have the same ghosts haunting their homes—ghosts who communicate by rearranging magnetic letters on each of their refrigerator doors.

As Mike becomes further embroiled in the custody battle with Max Devore, his search to determine the truth about Jo’s affair finally leads him to a set of journals Jo was keeping, notes from a research project that was her real reason for sneaking away to Sarah Laughs. Jo’s notes explain how everyone related to the people who murdered Sarah Tidwell and her son have paid for this sin by losing a child of their own. Sarah Tidwell’s ghost is exacting her revenge by murdering the children of those who murdered her own child. Mike, related to one of the people who murdered Sarah’s child, has been drawn into this circle of retribution from the beginning, and the death of his unborn daughter, Kia, was not the accident it seemed to be. Mike also realizes that Kyra, the last descendant of this t Rage dy, is to be the final sacrifice used to put Sarah Tidwell to rest. Mike’s return to the ironically named Sarah Laughs, it seems, has been a carefully orchestrated t Rage dy. Everything is tied to the ghost Sarah Tidwell’s purposes, even Mike’s writer’s block. Mike’s writing abilities return while he is at Sarah Laughs, but by the end of the novel he realizes it was simply to lead him to the information he needed to put Sarah’s spirit to rest. Sarah’s ghost may have destroyed his wife and child, but Jo’s ghost gives him the means to save Kyra.

The usual King trademarks that fans have come to expect are present in Bag of Bones . The novel, moreover, shares much with the southern novel and its themes. Guilt is a predominant theme of many southern works, especially those of William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tennessee Williams. Racism, not a theme usually associated with northern writers, has been successfully transplanted by King via the traveling Sarah Tidwell. By the end of the novel the evils of the community have become so entrenched in the soil (another similarity to Faulkner’s fiction) that they begin to affect Mike himself, and he has to fight the urge to kill Kyra. Only by reburying the past—in this case, by literally reburying Sarah Tidwell’s body—can matters finally be put to rest. Mike dissolves Sarah’s body with lye and her spirit finally leaves Sarah Laughs. Jo’s spirit also leaves, and all is quiet once more at the cabin.

By the 1980’s, King had become a mass-media guru who could open an American Express commercial with the rhetorical question “Do you know me?” At first prompted to examine the “wide perceptions that light [children’s] interior lives” (Four Past Midnight) and then the cultural roots of the empire he had created, he proceeded to explore the phenomenon of fiction, the situations of reader and writer. During the 1990’s, King continued to develop as a writer of both supernatural horror and mimetic character-based fiction. His novels after Dolores Claiborne—from Insomnia through Lisey’s Story—all provide supernatural chills while experimenting with character, mythology, and metafiction.

Financially invulnerable, King became almost playful with publishing gambits: The Green Mile was a serial, six slim paperbacks, in emulation of Charles Dickens and as a self-set challenge; Richard Bachman was revived when The Regulators was published in 1996. Although he is still thought of as having no style, actually King maintained his compelling storyteller’s voice (and ability to manipulate his reader emotionally) while maturing in the depth and range of his themes and characters.

King, perhaps more than any other author since Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, also creates a sense of literary history within the later novels that ties them all together. In Bag of Bones , King references several of his other novels, most notably The Dark Half, Needful Things , and Insomnia . For longtime fans, this serves both to update King’s readers concerning their favorite characters and to unify King’s body of work. King’s ironic sense of humor is also evident. When Mike’s literary agent tells him of all the other best-selling novelists who have novels coming out in the fall of 1998, the most notable name missing from the list is that of Stephen King himself.

Major Works Long Fiction : Carrie, 1974; ‘Salem’s Lot , 1975; Rage , 1977 (as Richard Bachman); The Shining , 1977; The Stand , 1978, unabridged version 1990; The Dead Zone , 1979; The Long Walk, 1979 (as Bachman); Firestarter , 1980; Cujo, 1981; Roadwork, 1981 (as Bachman); The Gunslinger, 1982, revised 2003 (illustrated by Michael Whelan; first volume of the Dark Tower series); The Running Man, 1982 (as Bachman); Christine, 1983; Cycle of the Werewolf, 1983 (novella; illustrated by Berni Wrightson); Pet Sematary, 1983; The Eyes of the Dragon, 1984, 1987; The Talisman, 1984 (with Peter Straub); Thinner, 1984 (as Bachman); The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King, 1985 (includes Rage , The Long Walk , Roadwork, and The Running Man); It, 1986; Misery, 1987; The Drawing of the Three, 1987 (illustrated by Phil Hale; second volume of the Dark Tower series); The Tommyknockers, 1987; The Dark Half, 1989; Needful Things, 1991; The Waste Lands, 1991 (illustrated by Ned Dameron; third volume in the Dark Tower series); Gerald’s Game, 1992; Dolores Claiborne, 1993; Insomnia, 1994; Rose Madder, 1995; Desperation, 1996; The Green Mile, 1996 (six-part serialized novel); The Regulators, 1996 (as Bachman); Wizard and Glass, 1997 (illustrated by Dave McKean; fourth volume in the Dark Tower series); Bag of Bones, 1998; Storm of the Century, 1999 (adaptation of his teleplay); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 1999; Black House, 2001 (with Straub); Dreamcatcher, 2001; From a Buick Eight, 2002; Wolves of the Calla, 2003 (fifth volume of the Dark Tower series); Song of Susannah, 2004 (sixth volume of the Dark Tower series); The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident, 2004 (written under the pseudonym Eleanor Druse); The Colorado Kid, 2005; Cell, 2006; Lisey’s Story, 2006 Short Fiction : Night Shift, 1978; Different Seasons, 1982; Skeleton Crew, 1985; Dark Visions, 1988 (with Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin); Four Past Midnight, 1990; Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993; Hearts in Atlantis, 1999; Everything’s Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales, 2002. Screenplays : Creepshow, 1982 (with George Romero; adaptation of his book); Cat’s Eye, 1984; Silver Bullet, 1985 (adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf); Maximum Overdrive, 1986 (adaptation of his short story “Trucks”); Pet Sematary, 1989; Sleep Walkers, 1992. teleplays: The Stand , 1994 (based on his novel); Storm of the Century, 1999; Rose Red, 2002. Nonfiction : Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist’s Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000; Faithful: Two Diehard Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, 2004 (with Stewart O’Nan). Children’s literature : The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, 2004 (text adaptation by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman). Miscellaneous : Creepshow, 1982 (adaptation of the DC Comics); Nightmares in the Sky, 1988. Source: Notable American Novelists Revised Edition Volume 1 James Agee — Ernest J. Gaines Edited by Carl Rollyson Salem Press, Inc 2008.

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Stephen King: The 'Craft' Of Writing Horror Stories

Stephen King working at his home office in Maine in the 1980s. Scribner hide caption

Stephen King working at his home office in Maine in the 1980s.

On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft By Stephen King Paperback, 288 pages Scribner List price: $16

In the summer of 1999, writer Stephen King was nearly killed while taking his daily walk. A driver had left the highway and struck King as he strode along the gravel shoulder of Route 5 in Maine.

While recovering from his injuries, King worked on a book called On Writing. The book was both a reflection on his craft and his thoughts about the accident that required months of rehabilitation to repair his broken bones.

In a 2000 interview on Fresh Air, King described his life-changing accident to Terry Gross but said it didn't change the way he approached his writing.

"Obviously, it has given me some new things to write about and some new experiences to put in stories, and I've already begun that procedure," he explained. "Given a choice, if somebody had walked up to me and said, 'Well, Steve, you can continue to live the same old, boring, healthy life and you won't have any real, new experiences and you can retire at 55, or you can go for the car accident: You can get hit by the van and put in the hospital, and you'll get some new experiences and you can write until you're 60. Which do you choose?' And immediately I would say, 'Give me the boring life. I'll stop at 55.' So I do have some new experiences, and I probably will write some other things and go on for a while."

More than 350 million copies of King's novels and short story collections are in print. He received the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His most recent titles include Dreamcatcher, Under the Dome, Just After Sunset and Bag of Bones. The 10th-anniversary edition of his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft will be released on July 6.

This interview was originally broadcast on Oct. 10, 2000

Interview Highlights

On his accident seeming familiar

"It all seemed familiar to me in the sense that there was nothing involved with the whole deal that I didn't expect, but the odd thing is that when you've been seriously hurt, there's a kind of numbing shock that sets in, and as a result, everything is -- there's no surprise involved with any of the things that seem to go on. You just sort of -- the things come and you deal with them. It's like being cast adrift and riding the waves."

On the nurses who took care of him

"You know, they'd all read Misery, and they worked for an outfit called the Bangor Area Visiting Nurses. These are nurses who go into the home and give home care. And I think one of them told me toward the end of the period, where I needed full-time nursing, that they had all read it, and they had all been called into the office by their superior and told in no uncertain terms, 'You don't make any Misery jokes.' "

On addiction

"If I thought anything was unfair about what had happened to me, it was that after struggling and winning a battle to get off all sorts and drugs and alcohol [before the accident] -- [not only did I] have a problem with beer and cocaine; I was an addictive personality, period. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I loved Listerine. I loved NyQuil. You name it. Boy, if it would change your consciousness, I was all for that. And I was able to jettison almost all of those substances out of my life.

"And suddenly, you wake up in a hospital bed and you've got a phenyltol patch on your arm and you're jacked up on morphine and you've got all these different medications. I was as grossed out by that, I think, as I was by the injuries, thinking, 'My God, I'm a junkie again.' And the way that I deal with it, rightly or wrongly, is to try and make sure that you never exceed the dosage that you're supposed to have for things like Percocet or Vicodin ... and as long as you stay below the prescribed levels and as long as you're making a reasonable effort to get clean, that's a good thing to do. ... On the other hand, as other people say in those programs that I attend, 'I didn't get sober to suffer.' And if I'm in a situation where I'm miserable and medication will help that suffering, I'm going to take it."

On his religious beliefs

"I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement. 'I will believe in God because it will make my life easier and richer to believe than not to believe.' So I choose to believe. ... I can also say, 'God, why did this have to happen to me when if I get another step back, you know, the guy misses me entirely?' Then God says to me, in the voice that I hear in my head ... basically tells me to 'Get lost, I'm polishing my bowling trophies.' "

On purchasing the car that struck him

"I was in the hospital, mostly unconscious; my wife got a lawyer who's just a friend of the family. My son and his son went to school together, so we know him really well. And she got in touch with him and said, 'Buy it so that somebody else doesn't buy it and decide to break it up and sell it on eBay, on the Internet.' And so he did. And for about six months, I did have these, sort of, fantasies ... of smashing the van up. But my wife -- I don't always listen to her the first time. But sooner or later, she usually gets through. And what she says makes more sense than what I had planned. And her thought was that the best thing to do would be to very quietly remove it from this plane of existence, which is what we did."

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Excerpt: 'On Writing'

Read Stephen King’s 2010 Essay on ‘The Blair Witch Project’

The King sure does know his horror.

Released in 1999, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project completely changed the game, not just making a massive profit on an incredibly low budget and not just kick-starting the found footage movement that’s still going strong today, but also revolutionizing movie marketing and, well, just plain terrifying the entire world. The film is nothing short of one of the most influential horror movies ever made, and though these things are of course totally subjective, it simply has to be considered one of the scariest movies of all time.

How scary? It scared the daylights out of Stephen freakin’ King.

Originally published in 1981, King’s nonfiction book Danse Macabre is, as described on the front cover, an essential overview of the horror genre, and the 2010 reissue of the book included a brand new forenote wherein King shared some opinions on the then-current state of horror cinema. Within that introduction was a short essay on The Blair Witch Project , and with Adam Wingard’s sequel Blair Witch now out there in the world, we wanted to share that with you.

Here’s Stephen King on The Blair Witch Project !

One thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing looks real. Another thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing feels real. And because it does, it’s like the worst nightmare you ever had, the one you woke from gasping and crying with relief because you thought you were buried alive and it turned out the cat jumped up on your bed and went to sleep on your chest. The first time I saw Blair Witch was in a hospital room about twelve days after a careless driver in a minivan smashed the shit out of me on a country road. I was, in a manner of speaking, the perfect viewer: roaring with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers, and looking at a poorly copied bootleg videotape on a portable TV. (How did I get the bootleg? Never mind how I got it.) Around the time the three would-be filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams, who, coincidentally, happen to be played by Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams) start discovering strange Lovecraftian symbols hanging from the trees, I asked my son, who was watching with me, to turn the damn thing off. It may be the only time in my life when I quit a horror movie in the middle because I was too scared to go on. Some of it was the jerky quality of the footage (shot with a Hi-8 hand-held and 16-millimeter shoulder-mounted camcorders), some of it was the dope, but basically I was just freaked out of my mind. Those didn’t look like Hollywood-location woods; they looked like an actual forest in which actual people could actually get lost. I thought then that Blair Witch was a work of troubling, accidental horror, and subsequent viewings (where I actually finished the film) haven’t changed my mind. The situation is simplicity itself: The three kids, who start out making a documentary about a clearly bogus witch legend, get lost while making their movie. We know they are never going to get out; we’re told on the title card that opens the movie that, to date, they have never been found. Only the jumpy, disconnected, haunting footage they shot remains. The idea is complete genius, and a big budget would have wrecked it. Shot on a shoestring (a ragged one), this docu-horror movie gained its punch not in spite of the fact that the “actors” hardly act at all, but because of it. We become increasingly terrified for these people – even the annoying, overcontrolling Heather, who never shuts up and continues to insist everything is totally OK long after her two male companions (and everybody in the audience) knows it’s not. Her final scene – an excruciating close-up where she takes responsibility as one tear lingers on the lashes of her right eye – packs a punch that few Hollywood films, even those made by great directors, can match. The Fearless Girl Director who confidently proclaimed “I know exactly where we’re going” has been replaced by a terrified woman on the brink of madness. And, sitting in a darkened tent after six nights in the woods, with the Hi-8 camcorder held up to her own face, we understand that she knows it. Blair Witch, it seems to me, is about madness – because what is that, really, except getting lost in the woods that exist even inside the sanest heads? The footage becomes increasingly jerky, the cuts weirder, the conversations increasingly disconnected from reality. As the movie nears the end of its short course (at just eighty minutes and change, it’s like a jury-rigged surface-to-surface missile loaded with dynamite), the video actually disappears for long stretches, just as rationality disappears from the mind of a man or a woman losing his/her grip on the real world. We are left with a mostly dark screen, panting, elliptical lines of dialogue (some we can understand, some we can only guess at), noises from the woods that might or might not be made by human beings, and occasional blurry flashes of image: a tree trunk, a jutting branch, the side of a tent in a close-up so intense that the cloth looks like green skin. “Hungry, cold, and hunted,” Heather whispers. “I’m scared to close my eyes, and I’m scared to open them.” Watching her descent into irrationality, I felt the same way. The movie climaxes when Heather and Michael find a decaying house deep in the woods. Shot almost completely in 16mm black-and-white at this point, the movie confronts us with a series of images that are simultaneously prosaic and almost too awful to bear – the wreckage inside seems to glare. Still carrying the camera, Heather bolts up the stairs. At this point, her two friends seem to be calling from everywhere, and the camera’s randomly shifting eye flows past the handprints of the children who have almost certainly been murdered in this house. There’s no dramatic music here or anywhere else; Blair Witch needs no such cinematic steroids. The only sounds are shuffling footsteps, yelling voices (from everywhere!) and Heather’s escalating moans of terror. Finally, she plunges down to the basement, where one of the hokey stories they were told before their rash entry into the woods turns out to not be bullshit after all. Michael (or is it Josh?) stands in the corner, dumbly waiting for the thing from the woods to do what it will. There is a thud as that unseen thing falls on Heather from behind. The camera drops, showing a blurred nothing. The film ends. And if you’re like me, you watch the credits and try to escape the terrified ten-year-old into whom you have been regresse d.

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

‘Ju-On: The Curse’ – The Original Movies That Spawned ‘The Grudge’ Franchise

In a world where over-polished corporate products dominate the media landscape while the ever-growing threat of AI-generated “art” haunts the horizon, I can’t help but remember a story about how Wes Anderson insisted on using real fur on the stop-motion puppets of his animated opus, Fantastic Mr. Fox . When the animators complained that using fur would result in obvious thumbprints and erratic hair movement that would ruin the “illusion” of lifelike movement, the filmmaker explained that these imperfections were the point.

Why am I bringing this up on a horror website? Well, I’ve always been of the opinion that low production value is simply part of the appeal of independent cinema, and nowhere is this more evident than in the horror genre. Rubber monster suits and watery blood effects are a big part of what make even the cheapest scary movies so endearing, and horror fans are uniquely predisposed to look beyond technical limitations in order to appreciate a good story.

One of my favorite examples of this is a certain micro-budget duology that kicked off one of the scariest film series of all time despite some undeniably janky presentation. And as a lifelong fan of low-budget scares, I’d like to invite you to join me down a J-Horror rabbit hole as we explore the criminally underrated origins of the Ju-On/The Grudge franchise.

While most of you are likely already familiar with 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge , the film that helped to kick off the J-Horror craze and established Takashi Shimizu as a master of the craft, a lot of folks don’t realize that this was actually the filmmaker’s third attempt at telling the Saeki family story. In fact, the very first appearance of Kayako and her ghostly son occurred in a couple of 1998 short films made by Shimizu while he was still in film school.

Part of a made-for-TV anthology showcasing the work of up-and-coming Japanese filmmakers ( Gakkô no Kaidan G ), the shorts attempted to update classic Japanese folk tales for a new generation by incorporating modern elements like helpless high-schoolers and cellphones into old-fashioned ghost stories.

The original Toshio!

Despite some cheap camerawork and drama class make-up effects, Shimizu’s Katasumi and 4444444444 (so titled because the Japanese pronunciation of the number 4 is similar to that of death ) were the clear highlights of the spooky collection despite being much shorter than the other segments. That’s why it was only natural that the director’s next project would be a feature-length expansion of these ideas produced for the direct-to-video market.

Coming up with an extensive mythology surrounding his murderous ghosts and realizing that he had a potential hit on his hands, Shimizu ended up making the risky decision to split his original two-hour story into two smaller films shot back-to-back. And while the sequel would suffer from this decision, the focus on serialized storytelling is what would ultimately turn this indie experiment into a global phenomenon.

Released in 2000, the first entry in this duology, simply titled Ju-On: The Curse , weaves an interconnected web of paranormal incidents surrounding a cursed house and the ill-fated families that inhabit it. While the film would actually reference the events of Shimizu’s shorts, it’s here that audiences were first introduced to the iconic opening text explaining how a violent death may spawn an infectious curse that self-perpetuates by causing even more deaths in a never-ending cycle of violence.

At first glance, The Curse feels a lot like an anthology meant to repurpose Shimizu’s existing ideas for ghostly short films into a feature format, but narrative details eventually add up as worried teachers, unsuspecting teenagers and psychic realtors unravel bits and pieces of the Saeki family history in a tragic tapestry of death. Curiously, this attempt at crafting a complex narrative puzzle would become a staple of the franchise as future entries (and even the video game ) used non-linear storytelling to breathe new life into familiar yarns.

Of course, it’s really the scares that put this franchise on the map, and that’s why you’ll find plenty of expertly orchestrated frights here. Sure, the pale makeup effects and stock sound design aren’t that much better than what we saw in Gakkô no Kaidan G , but the suspenseful execution of moments like Toshio’s slow undead reveal and Kayako’s first contortionist crawl down the stairs – not to mention the incredibly disturbing sequence with a baby inside of a trash bag – are the stuff of horror legend regardless of budget.

I’d even argue that the low production value actually adds to the experience by making everything feel that much more down to earth. The Saeki house isn’t a stylish haunted manor from the Vincent Price era, it’s just a regular Japanese home inhabited by regular people, making it easier to believe that this modern urban legend could also happen to you. Hell, I even think Toshio is scarier when he can pass as a living kid even if the screaming cat effects aren’t as good as the sequels.

Cheap can still be scary.

Unfortunately, quality scares can’t solve everything , and that’s where Ju-On: The Curse 2 comes in. Released the same year as its predecessor, this bizarre sequel only features about 45 minutes of new footage, with the rest being recycled segments from the first film meant to pad out the runtime. While this is a surprisingly dishonest move on Shimizu’s part, with the decision likely resulting in confused viewers thinking that there was something wrong with their rented videotapes, it’s still pretty hard to call this a bad movie.

That’s why I’ve come to respect the flick as a rare instance of a cinematic expansion pack, as the first film didn’t really need to be any longer, but the new segments still do a great job of adding to the existing mythology. This time around, we learn that you don’t even have to come into direct contact with the haunted house in order to be affected by the curse, with characters only tangentially connected to the Saeki tragedy still meeting terrible fates.

That final shot featuring multiple Kayakos is also one of the most incredibly chilling moments in the entire franchise, with the amount of care put into these scenes suggesting that this was probably all meant to have been included in the first film before Shimizu decided otherwise. Either way, I’d still recommend watching this one immediately after Part I in a condensed double-feature – so long as you skip the first thirty minutes.

Despite their humble origins, these low-budget scare-fests would go on to inspire a ghostly media empire, with Shimizu eventually being given the chance to bring his creations to the big screen with one of the best J-Horror flicks of all time. And while I won’t argue that these direct-to-video precursors are necessarily better than 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge (or even the American duology which was also helmed by Shimizu), I still think that something special was lost each time the series was tasked with pleasing a wider audience, as the story slowly became glossier and less real .

That’s why I’d urge hardcore horror fans to seek out Shimizu’s early experiments, as his creative fingerprints are the duct-tape that keeps this janky collection of horrific vignettes together. It may not always be pretty, but I’ll take the grimy actors caked in cheap blood and white clown makeup over corporate-approved movie monsters any day of the week.

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Ten things I learned about writing from Stephen King

The novelist James Smythe, who has been analysing the work of Stephen King for the Guardian since 2012 , on the lessons he has drawn from the master of horror fiction

Stephen King short fiction competition – send us your stories

Stephen King is an All-Time Great, arguably one of the most popular novelists the world has ever seen. And there’s a good chance that he’s inspired more people to start writing than any other living writer. So, as the Guardian and King’s UK publisher Hodder launch a short story competition – to be judged by the master himself – here are the ten most important lessons to learn from his work.

1. Write whatever the hell you like

King might be best known – or, rather, best regarded – as a writer of horror novels, but really, his back catalogue is crammed with every genre you can think of. There are thrillers (Misery, Gerald’s Game), literary novels (Bag Of Bones, Different Seasons), crime procedurals (Mr Mercedes), apocalypse narratives (The Stand), fantasy (Eyes Of The Dragon, The Dark Tower series) … He’s even written what I think of as being one of the greatest Young Adult novels of all time: The Long Walk. Perhaps the only genre or audience he hasn’t really touched so far is comedy, but most of his work features moments that show his deft touch with humour. It’s clear that King does what he wants, when he wants, and his constant readers – the term he calls his, well, constant readers – will follow him wherever he goes.

2. The scariest thing isn’t necessarily what’s underneath the bed

Horror is a curious thing. What scares one person won’t necessarily scare another. And while there might be moments in his horror novels that tread towards the more conventional ideas of what some find terrifying, for the most part, the truly scary aspects are those that deal with humanity itself. Ghosts drive people to madness, telekinetic girls destroy whole towns with their powers, clowns … well, clowns are just bloody terrifying full stop. But the true crux of King’s ability to scare is finding the thing that his readers are actually worried about, and bringing that to the fore. If you’re writing horror, don’t just think about what goes bump in the night; think about what that bump might drive people to do afterwards.

3. Don’t be scared of transparency

One of my favourite things about King’s short story collections are the little notes about each tale that he puts into the text. The history of them, the context for the idea, how the writing process actually worked. They’re not only invaluable material for aspiring writers – because exactly how many drafts does it take to reach a decent story? King knows! – but they’re also brilliant nuggets of insight into King himself. Some people might think that it’s better off knowing nothing about authors when they read their work, but for King, his heart is on his sleeve. In his latest collection, The Bazaar of Broken Dreams, King gets more in-depth than ever, talking about what inspired the stories in such an honest way that it couldn’t have come from another writer’s pen. Which brings us to …

4. Write what you know. Sort of. Sometimes

Write what you know is the most common writing tip you’ll find anywhere. It’s nonsense, really, because if we all did that we’d end up with terribly boring novels about writers staring out of windows waiting for inspiration to hit. (If you like those, incidentally, head straight for the literary fiction section of your nearest bookshop.) But King understands that experience is something which can be channelled into your work, and should be at every opportunity. Aspects of his life – addiction, teaching, his near-fatal car accident, rock and roll, ageing – have cropped up in his work over and over, in ways that aren’t always obvious, but often help to drive the story. That’s something every writer can use, because it’s through these truths that real emotions can be writ large on the page.

5. Aim big. Or small

King’s written some mammoth books, and they’re often about mammoth things. The Stand takes readers into an apocalypse, with every stage of it laid out on the page until the final fantastical showdown. It deals with a horror that hits a group of characters twice in their lives, showing us how years and years of experience can change people. And The Dark Tower is a seven (or eight, or more, if you count the short stories set in its world) part series that takes in so many different genres of writing it’s dizzying. When he needs to, King aims really big, and sometimes that’s what you have to do to tell a story. At the other end of the spectrum, some of King’s most enduring stories – Rita Hayworth & Shawshank Redemption, The Mist – have come from his shorter works. He traps small groups of characters in single locations and lets the story play out how it will. The length of the story you’re telling should dictate the size of the book. Doesn’t matter if it’s forty thousand words or two hundred, King doesn’t waste a word.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption

6. Write all the time. And write a lot

King’s published – wait for it – 55 novels, 11 collections of stories, 5 non-fiction works, 7 novellas and 9 assorted other pieces (including illustrated works and comic books). That’s over a period of 41 years. That’s an average of two books a year. Which is, I must admit, a pretty giddying amount. That’s years of reading (or rereading, if you’re as foolishly in awe of him as I am). But he’s barely stopped for breath. This year has seen three books published by him, which makes me feel a little ashamed. Still, at my current rate of writing, I might catch up with him sometime next century. And while not every book has found the same critical and commercial success, they’ve all got their fans.

7. Voice is just as important as content

King’s a writer who understands that a story needs to begin before it’s actually told. It begins in the voice of the novel: is it first person, or third? Is it past or present tense? Is it told through multiple narrators, or just the one? He’s a master at understanding exactly why each story is told the way it’s told. Sure, he might dress it up as something simple – the story finding the voice it needs, or vice versa – but through his books you can see that he’s tried pretty much everything, and can see why each voice worked with the story he was telling.

8. And Form is just as important as voice

King isn’t really thought of as an experimental novelist, which is grossly unfair. Some of King’s more daring novels have taken on really interesting forms. Be it The Green Mile’s fragmented, serialised narrative; or the dual publication of The Regulators and Desperation – novels which featured the same characters in very different situations, with unsettling parallels between the stories that unfolded for them; or even Carrie’s mixed-media narrative, with sections of the story told as interview or newspaper extract. All of these novels have played with the way they’re presented on the page to find the perfect medium for telling those stories. Really, the lesson here from King is to not be afraid to play.

9. You don’t have to be yourself

Some of King’s greatest works in the early years of his career weren’t published by King himself. They were in the name of Richard Bachman, his slightly grislier pseudonym. The Long Walk, Thinner, The Running Man – these are books that dealt with a nastier side of things than King did in his properly attributed work. Because, maybe it’s good to have a voice that allows us to let the real darkness out, with no judgments. (And then maybe, as King eventually did in The Dark Half, it’s good to kill that voice on the page … )

10. Read On Writing. Now

This is the most important tip in the list. In 2000, King published On Writing, a book that sits in the halfway space between autobiography and writing manual. It’s full of details about his process, about how he wrote his books, channelled his demons and overcame his challenges. It’s one of the few books about writing that are actually worth their salt, mainly because it understands that it’s about a personal experience, and readers might find that useful. There’s no universal truths when it comes to writing. One person’s process would be a nightmare for somebody else. Some people spend years labouring on nearly perfect first drafts; some people get a first draft written in six weeks, and then spend the next year destroying it and rebuilding it. On Writing tells you how King does it, to help you to find your own. Even if you’re not a fan of his books, it’s invaluable to the in-development writer. Heck, it’s invaluable to all writers.

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Shocking Horror Movie ‘The Coffee Table’ Is Earning Raves From Stephen King. Its Director Wants Audiences to ‘Suffer’ and ‘Hate Me’

By William Earl

William Earl

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Shocking Horror Movie ‘The Coffee Table’ Is Earning Raves From Stephen King. Its Director Wants Audiences to ‘Suffer’ and ‘Hate Me’ 4 days ago

THE COFFEE TABLE, (aka LA MESITA DEL COMEDOR), David Pareja, 2022. © Cinephobia Releasing / Courtesy Everett Collection

The poster for the innocuously named “ The Coffee Table ” notes that it is “A Cruel Caye Casas Film.” The unique designation is certainly fitting, given the storm of controversy it’s stirring up among horror fans. The comically vague logline for the Spanish film — new parents buy a coffee table that will change their lives forever — hides a shocking incident that happens early on. Said incident is not for the faint of heart, and director and co-writer Casas is eager to not only lean into the controversy but take willing audiences on an emotional journey of horror without monsters or the supernatural. Without spoiling the central incident, Casas explained his film to Variety , including how much he wanted to push audiences, the unique title and how he reacted when Stephen King recommended his work. (Note: This interview was conducted over email for accuracy between the Spanish and Catalan-speaking Casas and the English-speaking author.) How did the idea for this film come about?

Popular on Variety

Who do you think the audience for this movie is? Are there some people who wouldn’t be able to handle it?

I have always thought that the film is aimed at audiences who want strong, extreme, unforgettable emotions. The horror audience is like that. I am a member of the horror audience and my great hope is to make them suffer, have a terrible time, hate me, but above all make them feel strong emotions. Now many productions are made with a lot of money that don’t make you feel anything, which is always the same, that you forget about them two days after seeing them. I think that “The Coffee Table” makes anyone who sees it feel an unforgettable experience, whether they like it or not. In fact, it is not for everyone, there are people who will not tolerate it, and I understand that.

What have audience reactions been like so far? Have you seen walkouts?

People’s response has been fucking incredible. I have gone to many festivals with the film, to many countries, and people always react by being shocked, they can’t believe what they see. Some leave the room, they can’t stand it, but there is also laughter about it. Black humor, the most macabre laugh, others feel guilty for laughing, but the majority have a very bad time, tension, anxiety. It is very fun to see the faces of the audience. In Mexico, they insulted me while watching the film. It was a joke, but they insulted me for torturing them — although, later, that same audience gave me the audience award at the Macabre Festival.

As a filmmaker, were you trying to show empathy for any of the characters, or just portray the events neutrally?

All the characters have something personal, they have something of mine, all of them. With these characters, I wanted to convey how any of our lives can change in a second, we can experience real hell and we don’t need monsters or zombies or anything to live in hell. Let everyone judge the characters as they want, I don’t, they came from my head and there is no one that is my favorite. What is important is that only the protagonist and the audience know what has happened, and that makes the tension unbearable, it makes the audience suffer as much as the protagonist, and that is what works like a time bomb.

How did you decide how much of the key incident in the movie you wanted to show onscreen?

I was clear that I did not want to make a gore film, and I was clear that imagination is an important weapon that the public has. Why show certain things when in your thinking it could be worse? You have to make the viewer’s mind work, sometimes less is more, and imagining what is happening is sometimes stronger than seeing it. It was very clear that some scenes were going to be shot out of frame, so that they could be seen as little as possible, the audience already knows that what happened is horrible.

There is lighthearted music playing during some dark moments. What was the inspiration behind that juxtaposition?

To be contradictory. When a great tragedy happens, sometimes it is better not to play the typical scary music and instead play a children’s song, as in this case. It is more disturbing, and with the composer of the OST, Bambikina, we were clear that we did not want to make the typical horror movie soundtrack, because this is not the typical horror movie. It’s different from everything, and the soundtrack had to be too.

Did you always have the ending in mind while writing the film?

What was the inspiration behind naming the film, simply, “The Coffee Table”?

All horror movies have powerful, dark, scary names. I wanted to make a terrifying film but with a harmless, ridiculous, everyday name… “The Coffee Table,” and in Spanish, “La Mesita Del Comedor.” Seriously, is a movie like that, that disturbing? The answer is yes. I also wanted to trick the viewer, I’m going to watch this movie with this silly name, and wham! They are left speechless. Besides, it is clear that the coffee table is the main protagonist of the film… don’t you think?

Do you want to focus on more horror movies and dark dramas in the future?

I have several projects for which I am looking for money. I have a very terrifying, unbearable, brutal but also philosophical one that would make horror audiences’ heads explode. It is titled “Dreams” and it is brutal. I have others that are incredible black comedies, so that people have a good time laughing at death, like a movie called “Bad Death.” Another cruel and macabre horror titled “Welcome,” another about a really disturbing television show titled “Luciferio.” But I also have films that are not 100% genre, like “Nothing Co” (which is one of my favorite stories) or “Mom’s Wish,” which is an original and different comedy. I like almost all genres, but I have a great time writing horror. Now the important thing is to find financing so that they exist and the public has fun… Is there anyone interested?

Stephen King tweeted that he loved the movie. What does it mean to have a horror master praise your work?

There is only one King of Terror, and that is Stephen King. What more can I say? That the King recommends your film to his audience, that he says that it is the darkest thing he has ever seen… It’s so exciting, it’s one of those things that I will explain to my grandchildren (although I don’t have children). It’s one of those things that you think will never happen and it does. The King has recommended an independent Spanish film shot in 10 days at a friend’s house and with a ridiculous budget. And not only the King has done it, but also teachers like [director] Mick Garris, who was the one who sent the film to Stephen King because he loved it. It’s an orgasm. I won’t tell you that I masturbated watching the King’s tweet talking about my movie (did I?), but I will die with a smile on my face just thinking about it.

“The Coffee Table” is now available on VOD. Watch the trailer below.

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The Book-Banners: Adventure in Censorship is Stranger Than Fiction

Published as a Guest Column in the March 20, 1992 issue of The Bangor Daily News

"When I came into my office last Thursday afternoon, my desk was covered with those little pink message slips that are the prime mode of communication around my place. Maine Public Broadcasting had called, also Channel 2, the Associated Press, and even the Boston Globe. It seems the book-banners had been at it again, this time in Florida. They had pulled two of my books, "The Dead Zone" and "The Tommyknockers," from the middle-school library shelves and were considering making them limited-access items in the high school library. What that means is that you can take the book out if you bring a note from your mom or your dad saying it's OK.

My news-media callers all wanted the same thing -- a comment. Since this was not the first time one or more of my books had been banned in a public school (nor the 15th), I simply gathered the pink slips up, tossed them in the wastebasket, and went about my day's work. The only thought that crossed my mind was one strongly tinged with gratitude: There are places in the world where the powers that be ban the author as well as the author's works when the subject matter or mode of expression displeases said powers. Look at Salman Rushdie, now living under a death sentence, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a prison camp for calling Josef Stalin "the boss" and had to run for the west to avoid another stay after he won the Nobel Prize for "The Gulag Archipelago."

When the news stories about my latest adventure in censorship came out, however, I didn't like the way that "the author could not be reached for comment" stuff looked. To me, that line has always called up images of swindlers too cowardly to face up to what they've done. In this case I haven't done anything but my job, and I know it's all too possible to make a career out of defending one's fiction -- for a while in the mid-1980s, Judy Blume almost did make a career out of it -- but I still didn't like the way it felt.

So, just for the record, here is what I'd say if I still took time out from doing my work to defend it.

First, to the kids: There are people in your home town who have taken certain books off the shelves of your school library. Do not argue with them; do not protest; do not organize or attend rallies to have the books put back on their shelves. Don't waste your time or your energy. Instead, hustle down to your public library, where these frightened people's reach must fall short in a democracy, or to your local bookstore, and get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don't want you to know. In many cases you'll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition. It doesn't hurt to remember that John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and even Mark Twain have been banned in this country's public schools over the last 20 years.

Second, to the parents in these towns: There are people out there who are deciding what your kids can read, and they don't care what you think because they are positive their ideas of what's proper and what's not are better, clearer than your own. Do you believe they are? Think carefully before you decide to accord the book-banners this right of cancellation, and remember that they don't believe in democracy but rather in a kind of intellectual autocracy. If they are left to their own devices, a great deal of good literature may soon disappear from the shelves of school libraries simply because good books -- books that make us think and feel -- always generate controversy.

If you are not careful and diligent about defending the right of your children to read, there won't be much left, especially at the junior-high level where kids really begin to develop a lively life of the mind, but books about heroic boys who come off the bench to hit home runs in the bottom of the ninth and shy girls with good personalities who finally get that big prom date with the boy of their dreams. Is this what you want for your kids, keeping in mind that controversy and surprise -- sometimes even shock -- are often the whetstone on which young minds are sharpened?

Third, to the other interested citizens of these towns: Please remember that book-banning is censorship, and that censorship in a free society is always a serious matter -- even when it happens in a junior high, it is serious. A proposal to ban a book should always be given the gravest consideration. Book-banners, after all, insist that the entire community should see things their way, and only their way. When a book is banned, a whole set of thoughts is locked behind the assertion that there is only one valid set of values, one valid set of beliefs, one valid perception of the world. It's a scary idea, especially in a society which has been built on the ideas of free choice and free thought.

Do I think that all books and all ideas should be allowed in school libraries? I do not. Schools are, after all, a "managed" marketplace. Books like "Fanny Hill" and Brett Easton Ellis' gruesome "American Psycho" have a right to be read by people who want to read them, but they don't belong in the libraries of tax-supported American middle schools. Do I think that I have an obligation to fly down to Florida and argue that my books, which are a long way from either "Fanny Hill" or "American Psycho," be replaced on the shelves from which they have been taken? No. My job is writing stories, and if I spent all my time defending the ones I've written already, I'd have no time to write new ones.

Do I believe a defense should be mounted? Yes. If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. No book, record, or film should be banned without a full airing of the issues. As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them."

Inspiration

Stephen's response to requests for his opinion on the banning of two of his books.

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Stephen King's Prediction About 2024 Election Goes Viral

Horror writer Stephen King has stated that Republican voters will only accept the results of the November election if they win.

The 2024 presidential election is widely expected to be unusually bitter, following the contested 2020 outcome, with both main candidates accusing the other of being a danger to American democracy.

During a speech in January President Joe Biden claimed "democracy is on the ballot" in the upcoming election, while during a rally in April, Donald Trump —the presumed 2024 Republican nominee—shot back at the Democratic incumbent claiming "he's the threat to democracy."

King, who joined the Democratic Party in 1970, often takes to social media to share his thoughts on a variety of political issues —and Thursday was no different.

"The Republicans will accept the results of the election. If they win, that is," the author and vocal Trump critic said in a post on X, formerly Twitter .

At the time of writing it had been viewed 495,300 times.

Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for King and Trump for comment Friday.

People flocked to the comment section of King's post to agree with the author and criticize Republican voters.

"Nothing has changed since the last election. If they don't win they will claim it's rigged. They are already planting that seed again. Same tactics," one person commented.

"They most definitely will not accept the results when they inevitably lose," said another.

"Trump has been very clear on that point Stephen for 4 years now. He will not change," a third person wrote.

A fourth added: "Republicans are always the problem."

King's posts are often divisive, which was the case with this tweet. People also took to the comments to disagree with his theory.

"The Democrats didn't accept the legitimate results of the 2020 election! That's why they cheated to 'win'!" one person said.

"The democrats haven't accepted results they've lost since 2000," someone else wrote with another adding: "Get it right. WHEN we win."

While campaigning in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Trump said of the results of the 2024 election in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , "If everything's honest, I'll gladly accept the results. I don't change on that," Trump said. "If it's not, you have to fight for the right of the country."

The former president continued: "But if everything's honest, which we anticipate it will be—a lot of changes have been made over the last few years—but if everything's honest, I will absolutely accept the results."

Trump is the slight favorite to win this year's presidential election, according to the latest odds given to Newsweek by Betfair nearly six months before voters go to the polls on November 5. Trump's odds of a second White House term are 6/5 (45.5 percent) against 7/5 (41.7 percent), with the UK-based bookies.

While favoring Trump to win overall, because of the Electoral College system, Betfair concluded Biden is the firm favorite to win the popular vote. The bookie gave him odds of 2/5 (71.4 percent) for securing the most votes across the U.S. against 4/1 (20 percent) for the Republican challenger. If this does take place in November it would replicate the 2016 contest when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump was the final Electoral College victor.

Betfair did favor the Republicans to take back control of the Senate in November, with odds of 2/5 (71.4 percent) on this happening against 2/1 (33.3 percent) for Democrats maintaining control. Currently, there are 51 Democratic-aligned Senators, including three who sit as independents, against 49 Republicans.

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Stephen King Signs Copies Of His Book "Revival" at Barnes & Noble Union Square on November 11, 2014 in New York City. A post he's made about the November election has gone viral online.

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1 of stephen king's darkest novels was supposed to be a comedy.

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A Movie Of This Never-Adapted Stephen King Story From Over 50 Years Ago Is Way More Likely Now

What stephen king thinks is the best thing he's ever written, 1 stephen king theory completely changes how you see his books.

Stephen King intended his novel "Needful Things" to be a comedy, but dark themes took over.
Despite some funny moments, Needful Things can't be considered a comedy, as it focuses on horror.
Some film adaptations of King's works were unintentionally turned into comedies due to various factors.

Stephen King has rightfully earned the title of “King of Horror”, which is why it’s surprising that one of his darkest novels was intended to be a comedy. Stephen King has terrorized generations of readers for decades, becoming the go-to author for those looking for a good dose of scares and suspense. King’s reign in the horror genre began in 1974 with the publication of Carrie , and since then, King has written over 200 short stories and 60 novels , not just exploring horror but also suspense, crime, mystery, fantasy, and even sci-fi, sometimes mixing one or more of these.

The success and popularity of King’s works have led to their adaptations to other media, most notably film. Many of King’s novels and short stories have made their way to the big screen, some more successfully than others, while others are still in development. Stephen King’s name is rightfully associated with the horror genre, though some novels are more about suspense and/or fantasy, so it might come as a surprise to many that one of his darkest novels (which was also adapted into film) was supposed to be a comedy.

An upcoming film remake of a 1980s Stephen King book makes the likelihood of one of his never-adapted stories getting a movie much greater.

Stephen King’s Needful Things Was Intended To Be A Comedy

Needful things isn’t exactly a comedy.

In 1991, Stephen King published the novel Needful Things , his first work after his recovery from substance use disorder. Like many other Stephen King stories, Needful Things is set in Castle Rock , Maine. Needful Things sees the town’s peace being disturbed by the arrival of the mysterious Leland Gaunt, who opens a shop of collectibles and antiques named “Needful Things”. Gaunt’s shop is unlike any other, as it has items in stock perfectly suited for specific Castle Rock residents. These items are so attractive to the target customers that Gaunt only asks them to play a “prank” on someone else in town .

Needful Things is considered one of King’s darkest novels due to the horrifying events that Gaunt’s “pranks” trigger, but King originally intended the novel to be a comedy.

However, unbeknownst to them, Gaunt knows the long-standing private conflicts between the townspeople . Through those “pranks”, Gaunt provokes these conflicts to escalate, creating chaos across Castle Rock with horrible consequences. Needful Things is considered one of King’s darkest novels due to the horrifying events that Gaunt’s “pranks” trigger, but King originally intended the novel to be a comedy. Speaking to The Paris Review in 2006, King said he thought he had written “ something that’s really funny ” when he finished Needful Things , as he thought of it as a satire of “ Reagonomics in America in the eighties ”, with people buying anything and selling anything, including their souls.

However, Needful Things was marketed as a horror novel , which fits with the story but not with what King felt the book was like. Speaking to Time , King shared that Needful Things turned out to be a satire of “ the whole Ronald Reagan ethos of ‘greed is good, consumerism is good’ ”, which, to him, was a “hilarious concept”. King insisted the novel has a black-comedy and satirical tone , and while it does have some (arguably) funny moments, Needful Things can’t really be considered a comedy or anything else aside from a horror story.

Stephen King has wrote a variety of novels and short-stories, but only one has his favorite line he has written so far. Here's what it is and why.

Has Stephen King Ever Written A Comedy?

Some of stephen king’s works became involuntarily funny.

The film adaptations of some of King's works turned them into unintentional comedies.

Stephen King has never written a full-on comedy novel or short story , but some of his works have a couple of lighter, funnier moments, while the film adaptations of others turned them into unintentional comedies. The 1992 sci-fi horror The Lawnmower Man , based on the 1975 short story of the same name, deviated so much from the source that King sued to have his name removed from the movie, and the performances of the cast and the terrible special effects made it unintentionally funny (and disastrous). The same happened to the 1996 adaptation of Thinner , which failed to explore the novel’s themes.

King’s only directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive , was such a failure that many now see it as an unintentional comedy thanks to its performances, messy direction, stiff dialogue, and more. It’s unlikely Stephen King will ever intentionally write a comedy novel, though he could surprise the audience at any moment, but Needful Things can’t be considered one, and the unintentionally funny adaptations of some of his works did no good to the source material.

Sources: The Paris Review , Time .

Needful Things

Stephen King

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COMMENTS

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What's Scary. Released. Unreleased. "What's Scary" critiques the last decade of genre cinema, from 1999's phenomenon THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT to 2009's surprise smash DISTRICT 9. He also chooses his favorite films and touches on the recent flood of horror remakes and zombie flicks.
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Microsoft Word - horrormovies.doc. Why We Crave Horror Movies. By Stephen King. I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a. better - and maybe not all that much better, after all. We've all known people who. talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces.
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Stephen King's essay, "Why We Crave Horror Movies," delves into the intriguing phenomenon of why people are drawn to horror films. King explores the idea that individuals enjoy challenging fear and demonstrate their bravery by willingly subjecting themselves to scary movies. He suggests that humans have an inherent desire to experience fear and ...
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Summary: "Why We Crave Horror Movies". In the essay "Why We Crave Horror Movies," Stephen King—a novelist and writer known as the "King of Horror"—elucidates what draws people to not just watch but crave horror movies. The essay was first published in the January 1981 issue of Playboy magazine, by which time King had written ...
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The essay "Why We Crave Horror Movies" interweaves point of view, structure, and tone to address the foundational themes of fear, emotions, and "insanity" in relation to horror movies. It examines why horror films allow the expression of fearful emotions linked to irrationality. The essay integrates literary techniques and pop culture ...
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JACK NICHOLSON: (As Jack Torrance) I said I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just gonna bash your brains. DETROW: Or maybe it's your high school prom suddenly turning into a fiery bloodbath ...
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What makes Stephen King horror books and movies so scary. Following is a transcript of the video. "The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years--if it ever did end-- began, so ...
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A complete list of Stephen King's short works., organized alphabetically. Works Upcoming The Author News FAQ The Dark Tower. ... Essay. December 1999. A Night at the Royal Festival Hall: Muriel Gray Interviews Stephen King. Interview. ... What's Scary. Essay. Uncollected. Willa. Short Story. November 2008. Willie the Weirdo. Short Story ...
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The real horror is what's behind us, what we've already done." ... Stephen King's horror movies are known for their ability to push the boundaries of our sensory experiences. By incorporating vivid visuals, spine-tingling sound effects, and suspenseful storytelling, King creates a heightened atmosphere that challenges our senses and ...
List of recommended horror films from "What's Scary" essay
Ah, that was a good idea--had not thought about grabbing the audio book and just having a listen (could not find the ebook online). Could get the audio book, so did that and here are the few that were discussed in detail, and the main list from the end of the essay: Blair Witch Project. District 9. The Objective.
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Analysis of Stephen King's Novels. By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 31, 2018 • ( 3 ) Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a "brand name," describing his style as "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald's.". His fast-food version of the "plain ...
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At the time, his agent warned him about being typecast as a horror writer, but King considered it a compliment and kept writing horror. Related: The Stephen King Adaptation The Author Should Direct Himself. Over the years, Stephen King has sometimes strayed from the horror genre with his forays into fantasy, science fiction, and mystery.
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The Book-Banners: Adventure in Censorship is Stranger Than Fiction. Released. Unreleased. Published as a Guest Column in the March 20, 1992 issue of The Bangor Daily News. "When I came into my office last Thursday afternoon, my desk was covered with those little pink message slips that are the prime mode of communication around my place.
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