Tony Magistrale-Hollywood's Stephen King-Palgrave Macmillan (2003) PDF
Tony Magistrale-Hollywood's Stephen King-Palgrave Macmillan (2003) PDF
Tony Magistrale-Hollywood's Stephen King-Palgrave Macmillan (2003) PDF
STEPHEN KING
Tony Magistrale
HOLLYWOOD’S
STEPHEN
KING
TONY MAGISTRALE
HOLLYWOOD’S STEPHEN KING
Copyright © Tony Magistrale, 2003.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
or reviews.
3. Maternal Archetypes:
Cujo, Misery, Dolores Claiborne 51
4. Paternal Archetypes:
The Shining, Pet Sematary, Apt Pupil 85
6. Technologies of Fright:
Christine, Maximum Overdrive, The Running Man,
The Mangler, The Night Flier 147
This book would never have reached your hands without the invaluable
assistance of many people and institutions. Dawn Pelkey, Mary Findley,
Eric Rickstad, Liz Paley, Sid Poger, Brian Kent, Bobby Haas, Corey
Malanga, Mary Pharr, Allison Kelly, Keith Silva, Michael Stanton, and
especially Hilary Neroni each read multiple drafts of successive chapters
and supplied me with counsel that was both illuminating and encourag-
ing. My editors at Palgrave, Kristi Long, Roee Raz, Debra Manette,
Donna Cherry, and Erin Chan, were simultaneously nurturing and
tough-minded with my writing—an important combination for any edi-
tor to possess. Early conceptual thinking about the horrors inherent in
bathrooms in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining found its initial audience at
Cecil Community College in Maryland, where I viewed the film for the
first time on a theatrical-size screen and then presented a lecture to the
college community; my thanks to Paul Haspel and Polly Binns for ar-
ranging this opportunity to explore such private places in public. The
first half of chapter 5 is an expanded version of “Cronenberg’s ‘Only Re-
ally Human Movie’: The Dead Zone,” an article first published in a spe-
cial edition dedicated to the films of director David Cronenberg in the
journal Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 15 (1996): 40–45.
The Arts and Sciences dean’s office of the University of Vermont pro-
vided me the opportunity to present “The Many Redemptions of The
Shawshank Redemption,” a lecture based on another section of chapter
5, when I accepted the Dean’s Lecture award for 2003. Associate Dean S.
Abu Turab Rizvi also supplied me with funds to travel to Bangor, Maine,
to interview Stephen King. My appreciation to Steve King for taking
time from his recuperation and busy schedule to indulge my request for
this insightful interview, published for the first time in chapter 1. My re-
spect for Stephen King as an artist and human being has been steadily
enriched over the years because of similar examples of his immense gen-
erosity. Dear friends and family members—Larry Bennett, Ken Wagner,
Annalee Curtis, Lynn Bessette, Kay and Norman Tederous, and Jennifer,
Daniel, and Christopher Magistrale—reminded me consistently that
there is life beyond the computer screen, and these inimitable excur-
sions, in turn, allowed me to return reinvigorated to the task of writing
this book. One of the great joys of attaining tenure in academe is the
freedom to teach courses that reflect a scholar’s area of interest and ca-
pacity for imaginative design. In twenty years of teaching untraditional
courses offered through the English department such as “The Films of
Stephen King,” “Poe’s Children,” “The Horror Film,” and “The Literary
Vampire,” undergraduate and graduate students at the University of
Vermont provided critical insights that have indelibly shaped, confirmed,
challenged, and altered my understanding of Stephen King’s films. My
only regret is that I cannot thank all these students personally—there
are just too many—but their sensitive and intelligent voices from class-
room discussions and writing assignments most definitely resonate
throughout these pages.
Several years ago, when I first began seriously thinking about authoring
a book on the films made from Stephen King’s fiction, I mentioned my
intentions to a colleague in the English department. His initial response
was an unenthusiastic “Why would you want to write about Stephen
King’s films? Especially when there have been so many unremarkable
movies made from his fiction.” Any volume entitled Hollywood’s
Stephen King must at least acknowledge the partial truth inherent in this
negative opinion. After all, Children of the Corn in all its unnecessary
permutations is a persuasive case in point. However, what is truly re-
markable about the extensive body of celluloid work interpreted from
King’s novels, novellas, short stories, and teleplays—at this writing, an
oeuvre that contains over seventy titles and is still growing—is just how
many of these productions have turned out to be excellent films. For the
sake of my skeptical colleague, even if we adopt a cruelly conservative
estimate that only 25 percent of these movies are worthy of the special-
ized attention that a book such as this one seeks to provide, how many
novelists, screenwriters, directors, or production companies would not be
ecstatic with seventeen films that have proven to be both financially and
artistically successful?
There is little doubt about Stephen King’s marketability in Holly-
wood. When his name is connected with a film—either a theatrical release
or a television miniseries—the production is virtually guaranteed to make
money. New Line Cinema sought to capitalize on this nexus while adver-
tising The Lawnmower Man (1992), a film that contained so little of King’s
original short story from which it was adapted that the author filed a law-
suit demanding that his name be removed from the credits. Bob Shayne,
New Line Cinema’s CEO, defended his company’s position by insisting
“that’s what we paid for. . . . King’s name was the most important thing we
were buying [in purchasing the rights to the short story]” (Jones 75).
In spite of the obvious marketability associated with King’s name,
and ironically, sometimes because of it, the vast majority of films adapted
from his fiction have failed to garner much formal critical attention over
the years. In 1986 Michael R. Collings published The Films of Stephen
King, the only book-length scholarly analysis ever published on King’s
movies. Collings’s work, now out of print, is, of course, restricted to films
released prior to 1986. Four other magazine-books, oversized and lavishly
illustrated with movie stills, have been published since the Collings vol-
ume appeared: Jessie Horsting’s Stephen King at the Movies (1986), Jeff
Conner’s Stephen King Goes to Hollywood (1987), Ann Lloyd’s The Films
of Stephen King (1993), and Stephen Jones’s Creepshows: The Illustrated
Stephen King Movie Guide (2002). Each of these texts is primarily con-
cerned with satisfying the average fan’s curiosity about the making of
King’s movies—cataloging technical data, plot line evolution, credits,
budgets, on-location gossip, King’s own evaluation of the finished prod-
uct—essentially, the data behind the production history of each film. While
certainly valuable and interesting on their own terms, none of these recent
publications offers much by way of serious film interpretation.
The majority of the King films that are released through conventional
Hollywood theatrical premieres attain critical notice in the popular press—
e.g., newspaper and periodical reviews of current cinema—but these five-
to ten-paragraph reviews differ substantially from the type of focused and
comprehensive analyses found in academic film journals and books. The
notable exceptions, Carrie and The Shining, have received considerable
and consistent attention in various scholarly publications. The reason for
this, I suspect, has little to do with these films as adaptations of Stephen
King novels and everything to do with the fact that Brian De Palma and
Stanley Kubrick respectively directed them. Carrie (1976) and The Shining
(1980) have obtained their critical due because they are part of larger di-
rectorial oeuvres that have nothing to do with Stephen King. On occasion,
an insightful reading of an individual picture has appeared in popular
fanzines devoted to the genre of the horror film, such as Cinfantastique or
Fangoria, and sometimes one of King’s movie adaptations is the subject of
a critical article published in an obscure academic journal, an independent
essay in a collected volume dealing with a larger topic to which the film
somehow relates, or a chapter in a book committed to analyzing King’s lit-
erary fiction. Generally speaking, however, the academic world has tended
to view cinematic versions of Stephen King with the same level of dubious
disaffection with which it treats his published prose. It is notable, for exam-
ple, that no film journal has ever produced a special issue devoted to critical
readings of various Stephen King movies (or, for that matter, any film
adaptation of one of his books), even as the corpus of distinguished work
• The films, like the books that have inspired them, are linked to an
enormously popular writer, arguably the most successful author in
the history of publishing. Despite the diverse thematic range and
nuanced skills of this writer, his popularity has called his artistic se-
riousness into question, at least in the minds of academic snobs.
Moreover, King’s popularity likewise affiliates him with children
and young adults, who have always constituted a large portion of
his audience and the major demographic for the horror genre in
general. For certain teachers and critics, the same issues that make
him attractive to adolescents serve to weaken the gravity of his fic-
tional and cinematic art. Indeed, regarding this issue, the writer has
often been his own worst enemy. At a 1999 party at Tavern on the
Green to celebrate King’s twenty-fifth anniversary as a published
author, an event that was attended by many important members of
the New York literati and publishing worlds, the host ended the
evening by screening a highlight tape of the bloodiest scenes from
his film canon. Sometimes Stephen King, the serious artist, comes
into direct conflict with Stephen King, the mischievous kid.
• The seventy-plus films that have been released since 1976 make the
King adaptations a true cultural phenomenon worthy of deeper in-
terpretation and understanding as independent works and as a col-
lection. Unfortunately, some of these films are, as my English
department colleague reminds us, similar in quality to Children of
the Corn and Maximum Overdrive: difficult for an adult to watch—
much less appreciate—and nearly impossible to write about. Many
critics have unfairly repudiated the entire King canon after viewing
one or two of these celluloid disasters.
• Several of the best examples that have successfully made the tran-
sition from printed page to screen include The Dead Zone (1983),
Stand by Me (1986), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores
Claiborne (1995), Apt Pupil (1997), and The Green Mile (1999). It
is remarkable how many people, both in and outside of universities,
still fail to associate these films with Stephen King. Because his rep-
utation was established around predominant subject themes in the
PREFACE | xiii
fields of fantasy, horror, the supernatural, the bizarre, and the oc-
cult, pictures such as The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, and
Dolores Claiborne, which are devoid of the requisite supernatural
monsters and concerned instead with the monsters of everyday re-
ality, are not readily linked to him. Despite the tremendous com-
mercial potential of King’s name, Hollywood producers will often
downplay his connection to a “mainstream film” in order to avoid
typecasting a movie that does not belong to the “horror genre.”
• As a corollary to this preceding point, academics tend to associate
King with the gothic genre exclusively, and many scholars—ironi-
cally in spite of the wealth of superb critical attention applied to
the genre (horror films in particular) over the past thirty years—
still continue to view horror art as too unsettling to their aesthetics
or, worse, dismiss it categorically. Robin Wood’s generalizations on
horror film can be accurately applied to our discussion of King:
“The horror film has consistently been one of the most popular
and, at the same time, the most disreputable of Hollywood gen-
res. . . . They are dismissed with contempt by the majority of re-
viewer-critics, or simply ignored” (29–30).
• Scholarship does not occur in a vacuum; it relies on a history of dia-
logue among different minds to stimulate opinion and debate. There
simply has not been sufficient scholarly attention paid to Stephen
King’s films to foster such an environment. It is my hope that this
book will establish at least an initial context for viewing many of
these films, and that this will spark further critical discussion. While
it is difficult to locate the highly varied King films neatly under the
comprehensive umbrella of any single poststructuralist paradigm,
individual pictures inspire a range of theoretical readings. For exam-
ple, Carrie has long attracted psychoanalytical feminist criticism
(see the work by Barbara Creed and Shelley Stamp Lindsey) be-
cause it at once addresses the abjection of the female body and its
eventual empowerment. Additionally, as Fredric Jameson posits,
The Shining lends itself to a Marxist critique of class warfare be-
tween the ruling hegemony ensconced at the hotel and Torrance’s
working-class positioning (serving as the Overlook’s “caretaker”).
The present volume frequently relies on the influence of both Marx-
ist and feminist theory in interpreting other cinematic texts.
In the last analysis, this writer must admit to being as baffled as King
himself (see the chapter 1 interview) in explaining to complete satisfaction
PREFACE | xv
Filmmakers are also drawn to Stephen King’s world because of his
inimitable ability to tell an interesting story. King himself has often acknowl-
edged that the best fiction is plot driven, comprised of characters the audi-
ence identifies with and cares about. It is certainly no surprise that these are
likewise the same fundamental traits that all good movies share in common.
Many of King’s commentators have already noted that the author’s pub-
lished work is readily suited for presentation on the screen because he
writes extremely visual, action-centered narratives. And certainly movies
themselves have impacted King’s authorial vision and narrative style; his
novels frequently allude to specific titles from horror cinema, and the partic-
ular brand of terror he usually unleashes has a filmic quality to its unfolding.
King’s nonfiction book Danse Macabre (1981) chronicles the history of hor-
ror films as well as the classics of horror literature. It is evident throughout
his analysis that movies such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Alien
(1979) have proven to be at least as influential on King’s own work in the
genre as has the literature of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe: “The real
movie freak is as much an appreciator as the regular visitor to art galleries
or museums,” King insists. “For the horror fan, films such as Exorcist II form
the setting for the occasional bright gemstone that is discovered in the dark-
ness” (210). Born in an era of visual media—television as well as theatrical
films—King is a novelist who often writes like a screenwriter, although, as
Bill Warren cautions, “Stephen King is not the best possible person to adapt
Stephen King to the screen” (139). Warren’s point underscores the curious
fact that the most successful cinematic interpretations of King’s work have
emerged from screenplays written by other people.
What I have undertaken in this volume is not so much an analysis of
the films of Stephen King but an analysis of the films of a variety of pro-
ducers, directors, and screenwriters who have adapted Stephen King’s fic-
tion. Some of these cinematic artists have been extremely faithful to
King’s primary source material (Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone and Gar-
ris’s The Stand), while others have imposed their own creative vision on
King’s original text to create an inimitably different work of art (Kubrick’s
The Shining and Hackford’s Dolores Claiborne). Another way to put this
is that this is a book more interested in what other people have done with
their skills in making movies that use King’s stories and themes as a basis
for filmmaking than it is an exegesis of King’s fiction per se. On the other
hand, since the films treated in this volume all share at least a genesis in
King’s authorial creation, they must necessarily possess important ele-
ments of similarity, and I try to explicate these elements in relationship to
one another by assigning them to relevant chapters. Thus, while this book
PREFACE | xvii
“get busy living” and tunnel out of Shawshank prison, he is traveling in
the footsteps of generations of American cinematic rebels, from James
Dean and Steve McQueen to Jack Nicholson and Mickey Rourke. Two
mainstream American institutions—the judicial and penal systems—
have failed Andy miserably on two separate occasions. His prison break
and appropriation of the warden’s illicit monies is thus as much a repu-
diation of these corrupt and oppressive institutions as it is a bid for free-
dom and a personal claim to the rest of his life. As Andy acknowledges,
fully aware of its implicit irony, to his friend Red (Morgan Freeman),
“On the outside I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to
come to prison to be a crook.” What other national cinema could make
a hero out of a man whose criminality appears not only justified but
also is duly rewarded?
PREFACE | xix
CHAPTER 1
STEVE’S TAKE:
AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN KING
King: We moved here in 1979. At that time, when we decided the kids
would be needing more contact with other kids rather than just the
woods—we had been living down in Lovell—we had two choices: There
was Portland and there was Bangor. Tabby wanted to go to Portland, and I
wanted to go to Bangor because I thought that Bangor was a hard-ass,
working-class town—there’s no such thing as nouvelle cuisine once you
are north of Freeport—and I thought that the story, the big story that I
wanted to write, was here. I had something fixed in my mind about bring-
ing together all my thoughts on monsters and the children’s tale, “Three
Billy Goats Gruff,” and I didn’t want it to be in Portland because Portland
is a kind of yuppie town. There had been a story in the newspaper about
the time we decided to move up here about a young man who came out of
the Jaguar Tavern during the Bangor Fair. He was gay and some guys got
to joking with him. Then the joking got out of hand, and they threw him
over the bridge and killed him. And I thought, that’s what I want to write
about. Tabby did not really want to come here, but eventually we did.
Before I started writing IT, I did just what you did today: I walked all
over town, I asked everybody for stories about places that caught my atten-
tion. I knew that a lot of the stories weren’t true, but I didn’t care. The ones
that really sparked my imagination were the myths. Somebody told me
something that I still don’t know if it is true or not.Apparently, you can put a
canoe down into the sewers just over across from here at the Westgate Mall
and you can come out by the Mount Hope cemetery at the other end of
town. It’s one of the stories that you say to yourself, if it isn’t true, it ought to
be. I like very much the idea of a Plutonian canoe race. This same guy told
me that the Bangor sewer system was built during the WPA and they lost
track of what they were building under there. They had money from the fed-
eral government for sewers, so they built like crazy. A lot of the blueprints
have now been lost, and it’s easy to get lost down there. I decided I wanted
STEVE’S TAKE | 3
to put all that into a book and eventually I did. But there was one image that
remained with me through all this. Whenever I would walk through the two
beautifully kept cemeteries that are on this side of town, where the ground
slopes down into the woods I would notice these four-foot-deep drifts of
dead flowers. This is stuff that came off the individual graves and washed
down into the gully, and I thought to myself,This is the truth of the dead, this
is where the dead end up. This is what we don’t see aboveground.
Eventually, at least in the geography of my mind, Bangor became
Derry. There is a Bangor in Ireland, located in the county of Derry, so I
changed the name of the fictional town to Derry. There is a one-to-one
correlation between Bangor and Derry. It’s a place that I keep coming
back to, even as recently as the novel Insomnia. And the same is true of
Castle Rock. There was a piece that appeared last week in the Sunday
Telegram called “Stephen King’s Maine.” The writers said that Castle
Rock was really Lisbon Falls, which is where I went to high school, but it’s
not. Castle Rock is a lot more fictionalized than Derry. Derry is Bangor.
TM: There are also the civic landmarks that you have appropriated, such
as the Paul Bunyan statue and the Standpipe water tower.
SK: And don’t forget the Bangor Auditorium, which is called the Derry
Auditorium in the books. It figures very large in Insomnia, where a guy
turns a plane into a missile and tries to kill everybody inside.
TM: Before we get much further into this interview, I’d like to tell you
something about the scope of the book I am writing. It’s divided into chap-
ters that contain close readings of three to five films that share much in
common thematically. But I’m not trying to cover all the films that have
been made from your work. Ultimately, perhaps about half.
SK: I hope that in the course of your study you intend to pay some atten-
tion to the films that haven’t been “done to death.” You might find some
worthwhile things in these movies that will encourage others to have an-
other look [at these films].
SK: I wonder why this is. Why haven’t these movies received more extensive
and serious critical attention? Do you know why? I hope you will address
this issue somewhere in your book because, quite frankly, I don’t have a clue
to answering this question and I would be very curious to understand it.
TM: From the eighteenth century to our own era, the horror genre has al-
ways maintained a wide popular interest. Do you feel that the reasons for
the genre’s popularity changed over time, or has horror sustained a consis-
tently constructed audience?
SK: I think that the appeal of horror has always been consistent. People
like to slow down and look at the accident. That’s the bottom line. I went
out this past week and picked up a copy of The National Enquirer because
I wasn’t supposed to. They featured a story about Dylan Klebold and Eric
Harris, the Columbine shooters. This issue of the newspaper, which was
censored in some places, had death photos of these two boys. There were
also several sidebars that accompanied these photos explaining, no, justify-
ing why The National Enquirer was doing the country a real service in run-
ning these photographs. Well, that’s bullshit. It was all just an attempt on
the part of the publishers to justify running the pictures of those two boys
lying in a pool of blood. And of course I picked up a copy because that’s
what I wanted see: I wanted to see the photographs of those two boys
lying in a pool of blood.
Now, over the years I have had to answer a lot of questions regarding
the scrapbook that I kept about Charles Starkweather when I was a kid. I
STEVE’S TAKE | 5
would argue that there was a constructive purpose behind my scrapbook:
It was proof, at least to myself, that the boogeyman is dead. But there is
something else at work here as well. There is always the urge to see some-
body dead that isn’t you. That was certainly the central premise behind the
journey those kids take in Stand by Me. And that urge doesn’t change just
because civilization or society does. It’s hard-wired into the human psyche.
It’s a sign of low taste, perhaps, but it’s a perfectly valid human need to say
“I’m okay,” and the way I can judge that—the yardstick, if you will—is
that these people are not.
TM: In Danse Macabre, you say that the horror genre has often been able
to exploit “national phobic pressure points. . . . Such fears, which are often
political, economic, and psychological rather than supernatural, give the
best work of horror a pleasing allegorical feel—and it’s the sort of allegory
that most filmmakers seem at home with.” When you look back at how
Hollywood has treated your own work, which films have been most suc-
cessful at capturing and allegorizing “national phobic pressure points”?
SK: Carrie. It is a film that covers everything that we are afraid of in high
school. Also, it explores the feelings we all had in high school: That every-
body is laughing at us. The bottom line is Piper Laurie’s warning, “They’re
all going to laugh at you.” We’re all afraid of that, in high school, and even
after we graduate from high school.
SK: Well, in the book they all do laugh at her, but it’s a reaction brought on
by hysterical horror. To return to your question, I would say that in addi-
tion to Carrie, Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone manages to present strongly
developed elements of political allegory, and ’Salem’s Lot: The Movie talks
about small-town life as vampiric culture. Dreamcatcher, a film that has
TM: Could you make some comments from the perspective of a novelist
about the production process that takes place in the transformation of a
literary text into a film? How much do you get to work with the directors
and screenwriters?
SK: Pretty much as much as I want to. I’ve had a deal for years with Castle
Rock Entertainment that goes back to Stand by Me. I have told them that
you can have my work for a buck. What I want from you is script approval,
director approval, cast approval, and I want to have the authority to push
the stop button at any point regardless of how much money you [the pro-
duction company] have invested, because none of the money you have put
in has gone into my pocket.
What I get on the back end, if things work out, is 5 percent from dol-
lar one. This means that for every dollar that is spent at the box office, I get
five cents of it. In most cases, that hasn’t amounted to a whole hell of a lot,
because most movies made from my work haven’t made tremendous
amounts of money. But still, even on a movie such as Needful Things,
which didn’t succeed very well, I do okay. Its domestic gross was only
twenty million dollars, and out of that sum I got half a million dollars. Now,
that doesn’t sound like much, especially if I had decided to sell the rights
outright, but then, sometimes a picture comes along like The Green Mile,
and I make twenty-five million dollars, and that makes up for all the rest.
TM: And you also have an investment regarding your reputation. To this
end, I can see why you would want approval over a film’s cast and director.
Perhaps at this point in your career this issue may be more important to
you than the money?
STEVE’S TAKE | 7
That movie was a special case. The first cut was shown on TNT. I have a
copy of it, and the length of this film was four hours long. As a four-hour
miniseries, it works. When edited down to “movie length,” it is almost inde-
cipherable because it doesn’t have time to tell all the stories and do all the
setups. It’s a complicated book.
SK: And none taken. When Tobe Hopper finished this movie, there was a
lot of serious talk about buying it back from CBS and releasing it as a fea-
ture-length motion picture instead of a miniseries. The reason this never
happened is that they couldn’t cut it in a way to make it decipherable.
The opposite thing happened with a Danish miniseries called King-
dom Hospital directed by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. I saw this
when we were in Colorado remaking The Shining, and it scared the hell
out of me. I thought, This is a wonderful thing; we have to get it and show
it on American television. As soon as The Shining came out and did well in
the Nielsen ratings, I went to ABC and told them I wanted to adapt King-
dom Hospital as a miniseries. Well, by then Columbia Pictures had it, and
they didn’t want to give it up. Their intention was to make a feature film
out of it. They paid for four different scripts, and every one of them had
the same problem. It’s what I call the hotel towel problem: You steal all
the towels in the hotel room and you try to get them into a single suitcase.
You sit on it and move the towels around, and it still won’t shut because
you are working with too much material. It’s a problem that all moviemak-
ers have when they buy novels. In a way, film producers are like the sharks
you see in horror movies. They are eating machines that buy and option ti-
tles, and then these projects sit on their desks while they wonder what the
fuck to do with them. Columbia tried to make a motion picture out of
Kingdom Hospital, while I was praying, Please let it all fall through. I
mean, if they get it made, it will be just another piece of garbage that will
be out for two weeks, put on video release, and then forgotten. And we
could really do something with it.
Finally, Columbia Pictures came back to me and asked if I would trade
something of mine for theatrical release if they gave me Kingdom Hospital.
Ultimately, this is the way a lot of what goes on in the movie business gets
done. It’s the barter system; it’s just beads. So I traded them Secret Window,
STEVE’S TAKE | 9
are still looking for some manner of expression. One of the things that I dis-
covered after my accident was that I was having a lot of problems with nar-
cotic drugs and their effect upon my body. Your whole system gets clobbered
into the middle of next week, and everything falls out of sync. Things that I
had taken for granted, especially about going to the bathroom, changed radi-
cally. And I got to thinking about these things. In 1956, in Peyton Place, we fi-
nally got to see beyond the bedroom door. Since then, graphic sex is just
something we take for granted in the movies. I don’t know if you have seen
Unfaithful yet, but it’s a terrific film. It is a sexually candid movie and it oper-
ates on a number of interesting levels. But I thought to myself that no one in
novels, let alone in movies, talks about one of the primal fears that we have:
That one day we will stand up from taking a shit only to discover that the toi-
let bowl is full of blood.This event could signal many things: It could just be a
hemorrhoid, or it could be colon cancer.We don’t talk about this because it is
a function that we are raised not to discuss in polite society. But I thought, If
we have gone behind the bedroom door, let’s go behind the bathroom door
and talk about what is there. In Bill Goldman’s script of Dreamcatcher, these
guys find blood in the woods that leads up to the bathroom door of the cabin
where they are staying.This is all very effectively rendered in the rough cut of
the film that I have seen. You see the trail of blood going from the bedroom,
which is empty—and that’s symbolic in a way, because in my story the bed-
room stays empty, as I don’t care what goes on in the bedroom, only the bath-
room—and these guys are standing in front of the bathroom door wondering
what to do. All this time, the audience is getting more and more nervous
about what is happening behind that bathroom door. And then one of the
guys says, “I don’t think I want to see this.” For me, that’s the point where the
horror story begins to do its work. The audience is in the dark, particularly if
it’s a theatrical situation, the suspense has been building steadily, and we are
faced with exactly the same issue: Do we want to see what is behind that
closed door? The audience is perfectly suspended over this point: The desire
to look, the repulsion against looking.
When it comes to films, I want people to try to go beyond what we
have seen already. I’m willing to let a director try anything, including Tobe
Hooper with The Mangler. I knew it wasn’t a good idea. The screenwriter
that he selected looked like a college sophomore, but he was awfully eager
for the chance, and you never know what someone like Tobe Hooper is
going to do. Texas Chainsaw is still one of the scariest movies ever made.
Now, there’s a film that did wonderful things with the hidden terror that
lurks behind closed doors. So, my idea is always to give a director the
chance, because I am not very personally invested in these things once
TM: In On Writing you say: “What I cared about most between 1958 and
1966 was movies.” You go on to recall that your favorites were “the string of
American-International films, most directed by Roger Corman, with titles
cribbed from Edgar Allan Poe.” You even had a name for these movies—
Poepictures. To what extent did these movies influence your writing? Were
you influenced more by Poe’s written work or by movies based on his work?
SK: Poe influenced me plenty, but not so much through the Poepictures.
The best of the Poepictures was the last one, The Masque of the Red
Death. It was choreographed beautifully, like a Kabuki play. The big scare
moments of these films I still treasure. I remember when they discovered
Vincent Price’s wife in the iron maiden in The Pit and the Pendulum. All
you see are the horrified eyes of Barbara Steele gazing out through a small
opening in the contraption that encases her. She can’t talk because she is
sealed up to her eyes in the device. She has this horrified, frozen expres-
sion that she conveys directly to the audience. And then the picture ends.
Brilliant. I’ve been trying to do something like that ever since.
TM: The merging of horror and humor characterizes some of the most
memorable cinematic adaptations of your work. I’m thinking of films such
as Carrie, Misery, Stand by Me. Why do these apparently oppositional ele-
ments appear to work so harmoniously with each other in these films?
SK: We can only speculate here. I think that what happens is that you get
your emotional wires crossed. The viewer gets confused as to what reac-
tion is appropriate, how to respond. When the human intellect reaches a
blank wall, sometimes the only thing left is laughter. It is a release mecha-
nism, a way to get beyond that impasse. Peter Straub says that horror
pushes us into the realm of the surreal, and whenever we enter that surreal
world, we laugh. Think of the scene with the leeches in Stand by Me. It’s
really funny watching those kids splash around in the swamp, and even
when they try to get the leeches off, but then things get plenty serious
STEVE’S TAKE | 11
when Gordie finds one attached to his balls. Everything happens too fast
for us to process. We all laugh at Annie Wilkes because she is so obviously
crazy. But at the same time, you had better not forget to take her seriously.
She’s got Paul in a situation that is filled with comedy, and then she hob-
bles his ankle. Like Paul Sheldon himself, the viewer doesn’t know what to
do. Is this still funny, or not? This is a totally new place, and it’s not a very
comfortable place. That’s the kind of thing that engages us when we go to
the movies. We want to be surprised, to turn a corner and find something
in the plot that we didn’t expect to be there.
What Billy Nolan and Christine Hargenson do to Carrie is both cruel
and terrifying, but the two of them are also hilarious in the process. [Actor
John] Travolta in particular is very funny. His role as a punk who is manip-
ulated by his girlfriend’s blow-jobs suggests that he’s not very bright. But a
lot of guys can appreciate Billy Nolan’s predicament: He’s got a hot girl-
friend who wants to call all the shots. He’s the one character in De Palma’s
film that I wish could have had a more expanded role. He’s a comic char-
acter who behaves in an absolutely horrific manner.
The character of Roland LeBay in Christine starts off to be a funny
character, almost a caricature, but if you watch him carefully through his
time on the screen, you’ll note that he grows ever more horrific, getting
uglier and uglier all the time. When I wrote Christine I wanted LeBay to
be funny in a twisted sort of way. He’s the same blend of horror and
humor that you find in the car itself. Christine is a vampire machine; as it
feeds on more and more victims, the car becomes more vital, younger. It’s
like watching a film running backwards. The whole concept is supposed to
be amusing but scary at the same time.
TM: In the “Walking the Tracks” section of the DVD edition of Stand by
Me, you indicate that [director Rob] Reiner’s film was the “first com-
pletely successful adaptation” of one of your books. Have there been
other films that have satisfied you to the same degree?
SK: Shawshank did. I thought Shawshank was a terrific piece of work, and it
is not a one-to-one adaptation. There are a lot of things in that film that are
not in my book. The scene where Andy is playing the opera music in the yard
is a good example. It’s a film about human beings—and human beings are
not secondary to the theme of horror. That’s an important thing to remem-
ber: You cannot scare anyone unless you first get the audience to care about
these make-believe characters. They have to become people with whom you
identify. After all, they are only as thick as the screen, which means about as
TM: This is a good place for me to ask you this next question. Spike Lee,
among other commentators, has been critical of John Coffey’s character in
The Green Mile, arguing that his portrayal is insulting to blacks because
his role is essentially to suffer for the sins of white people. According to
Lee: “You have this super Negro who has these powers, but these powers
are used only for the white star of the film. He can’t use them on himself or
his family to improve his situation.” How accurate is this criticism?
SK: It’s complete bullshit. Coffey was black for one reason only: It was the
one sure thing about his character that was going to make certain that he
was going to burn. That was the situation I was trying to set up. It was com-
pletely plot driven and had nothing to do with black or white. I’ve heard
this same argument advanced by Toni Morrison about the so-called
“magic Negro.” If you want to get me on this, then you should talk about
Mother Abigail in The Stand. The reason I made Mother Abigail black is
because I wanted a character that was old enough to remember slavery.
And I wanted to write a song to celebrate their moment of emancipation
while Randall Flagg lurked behind the drapes. All this got cut out of the
STEVE’S TAKE | 13
original published version of The Stand and then got reinstated in the
uncut edition. But in the case of Coffey, who is obviously a Christ figure,
he’s black because his color makes certain that he will fry. As far as using
his powers to help his race, he has no family; he’s a total loner. Whatever
past he has is completely lost, and that’s crucial to the story. And the other
thing that is crucial to the story is that he is a Christ figure. Christ figures
are supposed to do good to them that revile you, to turn the other cheek to
those who strike you. By doing good for white people—and particularly
the wife of the warden, the man who is going to put Coffey to death—he is
basically exhibiting his saintliness. You ask most people what was Christ’s
race, and they’ll say white, god damn it.
I am not surprised that this is Spike’s reaction. It’s a knee-jerk reac-
tion of a man who sees everything in terms of his race. And for an artist of
his stature, it’s a hobbling factor in his creative life. If I took my pants
down right now in front of you, you would see that my right leg is withered
where there used to be muscle. This is a result of my accident. But the mus-
cles in my left leg are bigger than ever because that leg has had to do all
the work. This is the way it is with Spike. He sees things exclusively in
racial terms. It has made him a spectacular artist, but the idea of Coffey
being a superman is just plain wrong.
TM: Does John Coffey have to be black? What happens to the film’s
meaning if he is a white character?
SK: In most cases you can cast a character in either race. Morgan Freeman
in Shawshank could have been cast as a white man. But in the case of John
Coffey, he’s supposed to be black because that puts him in a situation
where the minute he gets caught with those two little blond girls in his
arms, he’s a doomed man.
TM: But isn’t that at least part of what Spike Lee is trying to argue? What
chance does Coffey, a black man in Depression-era Louisiana weeping
over the dead bodies of two little blond girls, have to save himself in spite
of his redemptive powers? In one sequence the warden’s wife asks Coffey,
“Who hurt you?” Why does he have so many wounds, and where did they
come from? Much of this seems suggestive, at least to me, of the legacy of
being a black man in America.
SK: I am going to ask you a question now. Can you visualize a giant of a
white man in that same situation? A dimwitted white man living in the
TM: Maybe bearing the same physical scars, but not the same psychologi-
cal scars as Coffey. The internal wounds he carries are particular to his
race. If John Coffey is a Christ figure, he’s also a black Christ; his suffering,
it seems to me, becomes all the more profound because he is black and a
victim of wounds that are particular to his racial history.
TM: Have you been satisfied with the televised miniseries that have been
done of your work? Do you feel that your novels are better suited for the
miniseries genre? What are the limitations of the televised miniseries? Do
you have a favorite Stephen King miniseries?
SK: I think my novels are much better suited for miniseries presentations. I
didn’t care very much for The Tommyknockers because it just didn’t seem
that the people doing it got behind the project sufficiently and felt the
story. As with a feature-length film, again it’s a crapshoot to have all the dif-
ferent parts to fall into place. My favorite made-for-television production is
Storm of the Century. I love that as a piece of work, and I am still very
proud of it. In my mind, it is as good as the best of the novels. Everything
worked the way it was supposed to: The setting of the harbor town, the con-
vincing sense of snow piling up, and Colm Feore was terrific in the role of
Andre Linoge. ABC’s Standards and Practices was so obsessed with
whether they would see blood on the faces of the some of these children
that they totally ignored the fact that the bad guy wins and takes the sher-
iff’s son away with him. The Storm of the Century is fairly hard-edged for
television. It’s not like any other miniseries that you’ll see on any of the
other networks—you know, the happy-time, everything-works-out-happily-
in-the-end program. It’s very realistic. And everyone who was involved
with that show—from my screenplay, to the director, to the set designer, to
the producer—we all did Rose Red, and Rose Red is just not as good.
TM: This is good place to ask about the group decision in Storm of the
Century to sacrifice the child, Ralph Anderson. Besides the destruction of
STEVE’S TAKE | 15
Molly and Mike Anderson’s marriage, what are the other consequences—
especially to the town of Little Tall Island itself—that occur as a result of
this sacrifice?
SK: Everybody that takes part in that decision is a worse person, a smaller
person as a result. Whatever flaws they have are worse afterward. The
sheriff’s wife is in therapy; she remarries, but she is not very happy in her
new marriage. One of the guys commits suicide. The sheriff ends up on the
other side of the country, and he is the one person who has a chance at re-
building his life. He knows that he was the one person who stood up for
what was right. Everybody else pays a price for the town’s collective lapse
in moral judgment.
TM: Why did the citizens make this choice? Why was the sheriff the only
one who stood up for what was right? I keep thinking of Shirley Jackson’s
short story “The Lottery,” and how much you admire it.
SK: Let’s put it this way: In all of our lives we are faced with situations in
which we are tested. Generally, it isn’t until years later that we find out
that we actually failed the test. We come to understand that our morals
gave out a little here, or our sense of right and wrong slipped, or our mis-
placed sense of expediency got the better of our morality. I’ve always been
fascinated with the story of Job. The sheriff tells a version of the story of
Job in Storm of the Century. He faces God and says, You took my kid, you
wrecked my crops, and you ruined my marriage and left me alone to wan-
der the earth. And God says, I guess there’s just something about you that
pisses me off.
We all have a duty to look at our lives. What do we see? Children
falling down wells to die, we send our loved ones off to work and crazy
people hit their office towers and we never see them again. I was in New
York for a screening of Hearts in Atlantis at Columbia University the week
after the twin towers were destroyed. My taxi driver wanted to show me
something. He took me down about four blocks from Ground Zero. He
said, “Do you see all those cars in that parking lot?” There were several
hundred parked cars all covered with white dust. He told me that the city
doesn’t know what to do with those cars. They belong to the people who
drove in from New Jersey to work at the twin towers the day of the attack.
They are never going to come back and claim their cars. The people who
escaped the tragedy, who are still alive, came and drove their cars away.
You could see by the empty spaces in the parking lot that God had de-
SK: Why should it? Think of how many references you have heard to this
event over the past several months. You’ll be watching a talking head on
television discussing the Star Wars movie and somebody will begin a ques-
tion to George Lucas, “In light of September 11, do you feel . . .” The event
has totally pervaded the American consciousness. I read a lot of new fic-
tion in galleys, and I have noticed the first ripples of awareness in the artis-
tic consciousness—not conscience, it’s too early for conscience, that comes
much later—that represent the first droplets of a rainstorm that will con-
tinue for years.
TM: On several levels, the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center
was very much a “cinematic event.” The planes were timed to hit at least
twenty minutes apart from one another so that after the first plane plowed
into the first tower cameras would be already in place to record—from a
variety of angles and perspectives—the second plane’s explosive arrival.
And of course, the world learned of the tragedy through its graphic visual-
ization on film. I suppose that is the goal of any terrorist action: To make it
as visual and as personal as possible.
SK: And don’t forget the desire to traumatize as many people as possible,
which occurs when singular events in time are recorded on film and then
televised to millions. In The Stand, my own rendering of cataclysmic pro-
portions is always brought down to the individual, personal level. Franny
Goldsmith trying to bury her father, and saying to Harold Lauder when he
shows up in a car, “I’m just so tired.” To me, one of the great scenes in the
television miniseries is when Harold and Franny are sitting around listen-
ing to records. These two people sitting at the end of the world, drinking
STEVE’S TAKE | 17
warm lemonade, and listening to records for what may be the last time in
their lives. As an artist, I can show you the end of the world on a microcos-
mic level, but no one can deal with it the way it actually comes down from
the sky.
TM: Your cameo appearances in your films have become something that
fans enjoy and anticipate with each new film. Is this something you inher-
ited from Hitchcock? How much control do you have over your cameo?
The most original and humorous may have been your role as a weather-
man on the broken TV in Storm of the Century. Was this your decision?
SK: I generally pick the cameo. I picked, for example, the pizza guy in
Rose Red, the weatherman in Storm of the Century. I gave myself a bigger
role in The Stand. It’s fun. And yes, I’m playing Hitchcock here; I’m just a
frustrated actor.
TM: I’d like to spend a few minutes with you talking about the eclipse scene
in Dolores Claiborne. You told me once that you labored hard to get that
scene written right for the novel. Do you feel that the film did it justice?
SK: I loved the way they did that; it’s probably my favorite scene in the
film. I didn’t notice this the first time I saw the movie, but the filmmakers
of Dolores Claiborne actually flip-flop our ordinary perceptions of the
world. That is to say, we generally view what is going on right now as bright
and colorful, crisp and clear. The past has a tendency to be a little bit misty,
even as there are certain things that stand out among all the other things
that are faded and fading, just as the color red is the last thing to fade in a
photograph. This is how the human mind and its capacity for recollection
work. But Taylor Hackford shoots his movie so that everything in the pres-
ent is dull and monochrome, even the clothes are dull. In contrast, every
moment in the past is bright and the colors really jump. It’s the best color
photography I’ve seen since the Godfather films, particularly Godfather II,
which is filmed like no other movie before it. It’s the difference between a
color photograph and one that has been hand-tinted. I think Dolores Clai-
borne is a remarkably beautiful film to watch, if simply as an exercise in
cinematography and the technical possibilities of using a camera and col-
ors as active vehicles in the presentation of a story.
TM: As horrible and as violent as the moments leading to the eclipse are,
the actual scene of Dolores gazing down into the well where she has just
SK: Yes. If there is anything wrong with Dolores Claiborne, it was the deci-
sion on the part of the filmmakers to try to tack on this artificial reconcili-
ation between Dolores and her daughter. It’s a very human desire, and it’s
understandable that producers would want to cater to it.
When you go to the movies and put down your cash to see a film, I
don’t think it out of line to ask for people up on the screen to behave a lit-
tle bit better than they do in ordinary life; certainly we expect people to
look a little bit better than in ordinary life. This urge to make things a little
bit nicer than in real life has a tendency to carry over into other aspects of
the movie. I have always been interested in emotions. And the difference
between books and movies is that when I have you in one of my books I
want to move you emotionally, to establish some kind of intense emo-
tional reaction—terror or laughter or serious involvement. But because I
am one person and I do everything myself, the creative instrument I use is
like a scalpel, it cuts deftly and deep. With films, every time you add an-
other layer of production, the surface gets blunted more and widens. So
that when you consider a big Hollywood production such as Pearl Harbor,
you get a beautifully produced, eye-popping spectacle that does absolutely
nothing to you emotionally or spiritually because what should be a hypo-
dermic point has become blunted into a sledgehammer. All you can do is
to swing it as hard as you can.
Unfortunately, Dolores Claiborne is a film, like Kubrick’s The Shin-
ing, that is nearly overwhelming because of its beautiful photography, but
the story that surrounds the photography is flawed.
TM: I think I have a good spot for us to end. Your film Maximum Over-
drive has a lot in common with The Terminator and Blade Runner insofar
as these are films about the general paranoia our culture has about our
overreliance on technology and machines. Were these conscious consider-
ations as you were writing and directing Maximum Overdrive?
SK: I had a very clear image of technology having totally overrun our
ability to control it. You know, when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, all the
men who were part of the Crew of Light were technological men. Seward
compiled his medical records on a phonograph; Van Helsing was one of
the first doctors to pioneer the use of transfusions. All this fascinated
Stoker; these men were his heroes, and their technologies were used to
STEVE’S TAKE | 19
help defeat the evil of a supernatural past embodied in Dracula himself.
But look at what has become of technology now. Think of the situation
right now between India and Pakistan. These are two countries that do
not have very highly developed skills and attitudes about problem solv-
ing. They may have a long religious history, which I would argue is in itself
very dangerous to the modern world, but they also possess nuclear
weapons. That’s really what I was thinking about when I did Maximum
Overdrive. Technology may be its own dead end.
The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all
through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing [as the
director of the film]. I learned a lot from the experience, however, and I
would like to try directing again some time. Maybe I’ll direct Gerald’s
Game.
TM: Gerald’s Game remains one of my favorite books. I have always pre-
sented it to students as an appropriate bookend to Misery: Its limited set-
ting, the gender conflicts, and the bedroom as a battlefield.
SK: I had all these things in mind when constructing both these books, and
I’ve always thought to myself that Misery was a kind of trick. You have
two people fighting it out in a cabin. That’s all it is. Gerald’s Game is kind
of a trick on the trick: one person in a room fighting it out with herself. I’ve
been telling people that the third book in the trilogy will be called Sofa,
and it’s just going to be a sofa in a room.
Carrie was the first Hollywood adaptation of a Stephen King novel. King’s
book told the story of a young woman’s supernatural powers, specifically
the ability to move things telepathically. The novel is a fragmented, experi-
mental narrative featuring a blend of pseudodocumentary elements, diary
entries, and frequent flashbacks to Carrie’s youth all in an effort to present
the young woman’s history through the eyes of other observers. We learn
her history through the commentaries of Sue Snell (Amy Irving) and oth-
ers, through the occasional newspaper clipping or scholarly article pub-
lished in an effort to explain Carrie’s extraordinary talents, or through
third-person narrative renderings of events from her past. King constructs
his portrait of Carrie as if she were the object of a Cubist painting or sculp-
ture: The reader is meant to view her from multiple perspectives, but she
herself is not permitted to contribute to her own experience, which in itself
effectively underscores the degree of her victimization. In short, the novel
Carrie is not only Stephen King’s first published book; it is also representa-
tive of the author’s fascination with experimental narrative stylistics
(William Faulkner remains one of King’s favorite novelists) and a harbin-
ger of future efforts in this vein.
Brian De Palma’s film rendition abandons the book’s pseudodocu-
mentary perspective, as well as its efforts to provide a history of Carrie
White’s (Sissy Spacek) telepathic experiences. Instead, De Palma focuses
exclusively on a relatively short span of Carrie’s life—roughly two
weeks—and concentrates on events leading up to and including the cli-
matic night of her high school senior prom. The eternal scapegoat who is
always mocked because of her drab clothing and because she is “different
Carrie starts with what has become one of the most famous opening
sequences in Hollywood history. Behind the credits that begin to appear
on the screen, we witness a girls’ volleyball game in session. In the back-
ground, an authoritative voice proclaims, “Game point,” while another,
younger voice commands, “Hit it to Carrie. She’ll blow it.” Meanwhile, the
camera makes a slow but steady zoom toward a blond adolescent girl play-
ing the top corner position. Her hair hangs down in her face while another
girl, who is obviously trying to limit the blond girl’s access to the game, is
slowly pushing her toward the extreme corner of the court. Inevitably the
ball comes to the blonde on whom the camera is focused. She takes a lame
swat at the ball with her right hand, only to miss it completely. As the cam-
era zooms in on Carrie White and she is pushed deeper into the upper cor-
Carrie and Charlie McGee (Drew Barrymore), the young girl in possession
of pyrokinetic abilities in Firestarter (1984), are separated more by mere
chronology than either chromosomes or destiny. Both films link the super-
natural powers of each protagonist to their hormonal cycles (Charlie’s fire
starting intensifies in the course of the film and is associated with the devel-
opment of her pituitary gland, while Carrie’s telekinesis commences at the
advent of her menstruation), and other similarities between Carrie and Char-
lie are indeed striking: Neither is permitted the luxury of a near-normal child-
hood, each has parents who have either abandoned her or have been forcibly
removed from interaction with her, even their respective supernatural pow-
ers serve only to isolate each of these girls further from a normal main-
stream. In short, Firestarter takes place in the same social siege atmosphere
of Carrie. Carrie’s life is irrevocably distorted by a warped religion imposed
by her mother, while the zealotry of an intrusive government that ends up
murdering her parents likewise complicates Charlie’s life. In both cases, the
violence initiated by Carrie and Charlie is directly related to adult manipula-
tion and abuse.Violence constitutes the last resort for these children stripped
of their opportunities for normal life and forced to conform to behavior that
is arbitrarily imposed. Many of the more obscure scenes in Firestarter feature
Charlie performing acts that are typical of a ten-year-old girl, but the near-
ecstatic enjoyment she takes from feeding chickens with Norma Manders
(Louise Fletcher), horseback riding, or fishing with her father, Andy McGee
Both Carrie and Firestarter detail the dire consequences of youths who, for
whatever reasons, are precluded from feelings of acceptance and a collective
identity with other children. Carrie’s plight appears on the verge of radical
improvement when she begins to assert herself against her mother’s will.
Her decision to attend the prom with Tommy must be viewed as a tremen-
dous risk on her part, and undertaking it is both laudable and significant.
But it also leads to the most poignant horror moment in the film. Just when
Carrie appears on the verge of discovering an alternative identity, she has it
violently and unfairly stripped away. The desperation that definitively marks
Carrie’s and Charlie’s isolation from their peers is less obvious an issue in
Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of King’s novella The Body, retitled Stand by
Me. The four principal characters—Gordie (Wil Wheaton/Richard Drey-
fuss), Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman), and Vern (Jerry
O’Connell)—seemingly possess such a close-knit bond with one another
that it is easy to overlook the fact that these boys, like Carrie and Charlie,
are estranged from their families, from the community of Castle Rock, and
even, to a very real extent, from one another.
The title Stand by Me suggests a parallel to the words of the famous
song: That this will be a film about undying friendship and commitment in
the face of all obstacles. And yet it is noteworthy that its title song is more
a plea than it is an assurance, with its implied question “Stand by me?” left
decidedly unanswered. In spite of the male bonding that is clearly in place
among these four boys, Stand by Me is a film that continually stresses the
theme of betrayal. In fact, the degree to which these boys are betrayed
For Chris and Gordie, Ray Brower’s mutilated corpse comes to symbol-
ize the dead world of Castle Rock. Its homes and community are emblematic
Throughout Stephen King’s fiction, older adults who possess the gift of
prophecy, a highly developed sense of moral integrity, and an instinctive
understanding of how the world operates often aid vulnerable children. In
The Shining, The Stand, and The Talisman, these adults are all African
Americans, and, by virtue of their race and class, outcasts from main-
stream American life. As such, they are in the position to instruct and
guide King’s younger, highly impressionable white protagonists through
the wastelands of each respective novel and toward a vision of greater
self-perception and moral growth. Neither the black outcast nor the white
adolescent outsider occupies a secure place in American society. Their re-
lationship challenges the core limitations of this society, and therefore
must remain secretive and illicit. Based initially on a common danger or
sense of exclusion and psychic correspondences, this bond belies a loneli-
ness that demands love; its very vitality highlights the disavowal of oppres-
sive social conventions in favor of a broader-based spirit of acceptance. In
her essay “Reading King Darkly: Issues of Race in Stephen King’s Nov-
els,” Samantha Figliola argues persuasively that King “returns to the ro-
mantic pairing of white youths with ‘savage’ mentors again and again,
drawn to its ideological possibilities. . . . As surrogate parents, King’s black
characters educate their ‘children’ to seek alternatives to the many evil in-
stitutions that surround them: War, environmental destruction, psychologi-
cal abuse, racism, and patriarchal domination” (147).
The film Silver Bullet (1985), based on the Stephen King novelette
Cycle of the Werewolf (1983), restates the theme of the adult outsider
bonding with the vulnerable child. In Stephen King’s films and fictions, this
is one of the few positive relationships that is allowed to exist between
child and adult; the latter must occupy some position that is divorced from
traditional notions of an adult as either a parent or an authority surrogate.
Although Uncle Red (Gary Busey) is not African American, he is viewed
as uniquely different from the other adults in Tarker’s Mills, an outsider to
their bourgeois values and work ethics. A “chronic drunk” working on his
third divorce, even his own sister, Nan (Robin Groves), barely tolerates his
presence in their suburban home. She is especially fearful that Red’s nega-
Stephen King has often revisited the highly Freudian remark that writing
for him is like archeology—the digging of something up from deep be-
neath the surface—uncovering that which has been lost or buried. The
“site” or ground that perhaps has been most productive for the majority of
King’s literary and cinemagraphic excavations exists somewhere between
the ages of five and twelve, childhood. King identifies this period with an
innocent magic that is forever in danger of being exploited or squashed or
forgotten. But it is also a time of great power, for as King’s notes in Danse
Macabre, children “may not see things with the clarity of an adult, [but
they] see events more intensely” (107) because their experiences are often
more visceral, they are of a more tactile nature, and they are apprehended
instinctually as much as cerebrally. Sometimes the children in Stephen
King’s films are placed in situations where they must experience a severe
fall from grace; their innocence, as we have seen in the examples of Carrie
White and Charlie McGee, shattered by the abuses and machinations of
others. The destruction of childhood in King’s world is often more than a
simple restating of the fall-from-grace theme: It enlarges into a specific cri-
tique of the adult world—its values and priorities. And in nearly every
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES:
CUJO, MISERY, DOLORES CLAIBORNE
Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have observed that the roles Stephen
King has traditionally allotted women in his fiction and specifically female
sexuality itself are patronizingly restricted and frequently negative. His
women characters, especially those populating his earliest fiction, tend to
fall into the category of either diabolical sorceress or passive victim. Critic
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was first to lament that “it is disheartening when a
writer with so much talent and strength of vision is not able to develop a
believable woman character between the ages of seventeen and sixty”
(65). Mary Pharr, in a seminal essay that broadens and deepens Yarbro’s
position, noted that “despite his best efforts, King’s women are reflective
of American stereotypes. . . . His most convincing female characters are
precisely those who are least threatening to men” (“Partners” 21). And in
her discussion of the novel IT (1986), Karen Thoens reduced the monster
in the text to an essentially feminine archetype: “It could be repulsive fe-
male sexuality. But mostly It is actually She. . . . It is your mother. It, name-
less terror. It is bloody, filthy, horrible. The boy-men heroes have returned
to Derry to face IT again, HER, the bitch, the force that is really responsi-
ble for their lost youth” (137).
Sharply aware of such criticism and generally concurring with it,
Stephen King has labored to create more human and less stereotypical fe-
male personalities, at least since the publication of Misery (1987). In the
novel Dolores Claiborne (1993), for example, the author completely es-
chewed his traditional third-person narrative form to provide Dolores
with an autobiographical voice and consciousness. This departure from
omniscient point of view to a first-person monologue signals the weight of
King’s investment in legitimizing Dolores’ perspective and the domestic
issues her narrative explores. Perhaps the truism that middle-age males
begin to explore their “feminine” side is another explanation for King’s
evolving interest in developing better women characters. Also, in focusing
on women’s issues, King’s more recent writing has become more circum-
scribed, centering on one or two individuals almost exclusively, especially
when compared to his early works, such as ‘Salem’s Lot or The Stand,
which feature a large and diverse cast of characters.
The majority of women who populate Stephen King’s fiction are
often judged by the same rules that determine the fitness of romance-
novel heroines. Kay Mussell has described a “domestic test” such heroines
must pass to prove their worthiness. This test conforms to “the three tradi-
tional and interrelated roles of female socialization: wife, mother, and
house maker” (89). To pass the test, individuals must possess “the innate
traits of good women—sexual control, modesty, intuition, selflessness, car-
ing—[and] use those qualities actively to benefit others” (90). (These are,
incidentally, some of the same qualities that constitute King’s definition of
masculine heroism, as will be discussed in a later chapter.) More often
than not, the “good women” personality traits, when applied to King’s fe-
males, are found in mothers and pregnant women, who possess highly im-
pressive levels of inner strength and intuitive knowledge. And like King’s
male hero counterparts, the heroines of his books and films are situated at
crisis points in their lives where they must either rise above their oppres-
sion or capitulate to it entirely.
King’s mother-heroines distinguish themselves from the negative as-
sociation between evil and feminine sexuality found elsewhere in his
canon, particularly his early novels and stories. King frequently portrays
feminine sexuality—when it is not moored in a loving, heterosexual rela-
tionship—as dangerous because it serves only itself or, more precisely, the
evil that is just beneath the surface of its lascivious hunger. In much of his
work, female sexuality, when not grounded in such a relationship, func-
tions as a mask that hides an unsavory agenda. It is a force of manipula-
tion that really seeks control and perversion under the guise of sexual
seduction. Like the many examples of masculine evil in his fiction—the
steady maintenance of dark secrets that connect Jack Torrance to Louis
Creed, the obsessive power politics of Greg Stillson, or the spectral guest
list animating the Overlook Hotel—King’s characterizations of feminine
evil are delineated by an absence of compassion and the urge to isolate
and destroy. His mother figures, on the other hand, tend to represent a
more nurturing collection of personalities.
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 53
Yet as many commentators have noted, there is certainly an ample
array of negative mother figures throughout King’s canon. The novel IT,
for example, presents a nearly exhaustive club of mothers who either ob-
sess neurotically about their sons or have abandoned them altogether. In
either case, whether from excessive nurturing or from not enough, these
women tend to thwart healthy masculine development in their offspring.
Linda Anderson makes the point that the various mothers in IT not only
fail to protect their children but are actually aligned with the monster
that preys upon them: “It [the monster] is an objectification of the book’s
many monstrous mothers, who are powerful but un-nurturing” (120). In
Gerald’s Game (1992), Sally Mahout senses prophetically that there is an
unnatural bond between her husband and daughter, saying “sometimes
you behave as if she were your girlfriend instead of your daughter!”
(144), but she does nothing to impede the progression toward father-
daughter incest that occurs in this novel. In fact, the argument could be
made that her deliberate physical withdrawal the day of the eclipse pres-
ents the opportunity for her husband to molest their daughter and per-
haps represents her tacit surrender to the inevitability of the act.
Similarly, the mothers in Carrie and Hearts in Atlantis have lost touch
with the unifying bond that King feels should exist between mothers and
their children. Interestingly, when a mother-child separation does occur in
King’s art, it is always the adult’s fault—the result of some fundamental
warping of the woman’s personality due to mental illness, alcoholism, reli-
gious zealotry, or emotional indifference. As Gail Burns and Melinda
Kanner insist, King’s “mothers and maternal figures alike are very often
the agents of destruction . . . at the mercy of their hormones, a force of na-
ture that he links with the supernatural and which results in death rather
than life” (159–160).
But not always. On several notable occasions, King’s women show
themselves to be as strong as the supernatural agents they encounter and
stronger than the men with whom they associate. The moral centers of nar-
ratives such as The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), Cujo (1981), Dolores
Claiborne, and Bag of Bones (1998) revolve around the special relation-
ship that exists between a mother and her child. King’s “simple” American
wives and mothers may not always emerge as paragons of radical feminist
consciousness, but neither are they wholly simpering or passive. In a final
analysis, the women characters, at least in the aforementioned texts, act in
a manner that is more courageous than their husbands or mates. And in
the last decade or so, Hollywood has provided a medium for portraying—
and perhaps even advancing—this evolution of King’s female characters.
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 55
Gary’s body. These two attacks sandwich the sequence where Steve Kemp
assails Donna in her own kitchen. Kemp’s aggression forces Donna to spill
eggs, milk, and sugar on the floor, effectively illustrating the chaos and dis-
ruption he has brought to the Trentons’ domestic sphere. Immediately
after this altercation, both Tad and Donna’s husband enter the kitchen.
While cleaning up the mess, Donna is forced to acknowledge her affair to
Vic, and this sets in motion the three-day encounter Donna will have with
Cujo that will finally conclude with the shooting of the dog, which occurs
in yet another kitchen.
Cujo’s advanced illness also turns a sweet-tempered pet into a formi-
dable foe. He demonstrates the degree of his raging madness when he at-
tacks the car with his head or howls in pain on hearing the telephone ring,
and yet, at the same time, he remains rational enough to stalk Donna with
a patient and determined cunning. When Sheriff Bannerman’s (Sandy
Ward) police cruiser approaches the Cambers’ driveway, Cujo knows
enough to hide so that his attack will be a surprise. Perhaps what is most
impressive about the rabid Cujo is what links him to the traditional gothic
monster: The dog is at once both irrational and cunning, producing ran-
dom violent outbursts that are effectively planned and executed. This sub-
tle blending of masculine violence and omnipresent survival skills
effectively links Cujo with the film’s human males. Both Donna’s husband
and her lover barely control—and often fail to control—their rage to pun-
ish Donna for decisions she makes. Just as Cujo views her as an object to
be dominated, the human men in her life demand her compliance to their
wills. They remain both uninterested and unaffected by what she wants out
of life, refusing to engage her in dialogue whenever she changes her mind
about the status of her relationships with them. Cujo at least has the ex-
cuse of rabies; Vic and Steve suffer only from the disease of rabid egotism.
When Teague was asked to direct Cujo, his initial reaction was unfa-
vorable: “I wanted to do something more ambitious. But when I read the
book, I got very excited about the dynamics of the family—they were
completely plagued by their fears. Cujo was only part of the story”
(Horsting 42). Since the movie’s central theme is the essential inability of
men and women to coexist harmoniously, Cujo’s attack on Donna and Tad
Trenton—a brutal three-day ordeal that is rendered in graphic detailing
that often resembles a rape—represents a climax to the sexual tensions as-
sociated with all the film’s impaired male-female interactions. Similarly,
the film’s secondary emphasis on the Camber relationship should be seen
as an exaggerated dark mirror to the Trentons’ marriage. When the se-
verely oppressed Charity Camber (Kaiulani Lee) prepares to take her son
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 57
domestic protection purchased through affluence are displaced by an un-
known terror.
Michael Collings further notes the film’s propensity for contrasting
imagery in the scene in which Donna and Tad are trapped inside their car
with the windows raised. “We see the characters through their car win-
dows; yet those same windows simultaneously reflect an alternate world of
pastoral-seeming trees. What is in fact an epitome of terror is screened by
an illusion of peaceful, pastoral nature” (85). This is an excellent observa-
tion, but every sense of a “peaceful, pastoral nature” in this film is a
screened illusion. The pastoral nature surrounding the Camber house
stands indifferent to the plight of Donna and Tad; it is devoid of any
human presence. We also know that Cujo contracted rabies in these
woods, and that he now returns to them as a place to hide from his human
foe and as a place from which to launch his surprise assaults. In short, all of
nature appears pitted against the Trentons and thus in league with the
rabid Cujo—from the hot sun that bakes them during relentless summer
afternoons to the woods that are reflected darkly in their car windows.
All through the first half of the film Teague performs a similar job of
setting up a series of ironic contrasts between appearances and actuality,
light and dark. And these contrasts underscore the unstable nature of real-
ity, as families are revealed riddled with duplicity and violence, the
friendly affect of a good-natured carpenter is a guise for coveting his
neighbor’s wife, and monsters are not so easily contained in reality as they
are in language. Tad’s father keeps reminding the boy “Nothing will hurt
Tad here. . . . There’s no such thing as real monsters. Only in stories.” His
reassuring—albeit ultimately empty—words echo the sophomoric pro-
nouncements issued from the Sharp professor Vic has invented to as an
advertising ploy to sell cereal. And just as the advertising slogan—“Noth-
ing wrong here”—turns into a public relations disaster when people begin
to get sick from the breakfast food, Vic’s confident sense of masculine con-
trol over his wife, his career, his cant assurances to his son, his language,
and the world around him creates a false level of complacency that the
film systematically exploits and undermines.
Donna Trenton’s perceptions, on the other hand, are always more
trenchant than her husband’s. Perhaps because of the insight into her own
heart of darkness that she has obtained as a result of her illicit affair,
Donna possesses an intimate understanding of human frailty and the vari-
ous disguises of false innocence. When she first spots Cujo cresting a hill
on the Camber property, her instinctive reaction is to grab her son and run
in terror. While the Camber family assures her that the dog is harmless
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 59
late. In the film, it is significant that she saves the child and the manner in
which she does so. For in the screenplay, written by Don Carlos Dunaway
and Lauren Currier, Donna defies the stereotypical Hollywood formula of
the besieged female as an object of terror, the victim who is forever at the
mercy of the genre’s seductive monsters and psychopathic villains.
In most horror films and psychological thrillers, the heroine usually
finds herself entrapped—often bound and gagged, or at least held captive
in some imposed configuration or environment—where she remains pas-
sively confined, forced to await rescue from a heroic male. The way Donna
is dressed on the afternoon her siege begins, in a flowing skirt and high-
heeled shoes, signals her initial vulnerability as well as her nexus to tradi-
tional femininity. Trapped inside the Pinto, which becomes for Carol Senf
“a symbol of her entire life as a dependent, Donna slowly begins to take
control of her life” (“Donna Trenton” 97). At first, she expects to be res-
cued—by Joe Camber, by her husband, by the mailman when he delivers
mail to the house—but she gradually comes to realize that none of these
males will be forthcoming. If she is to be rescued, Donna will have to effect
her own salvation; she and her son survive not because of the timely intru-
sion of a male but as a result of a lone mother’s bravery and self-reliance.
Senf concludes that Donna is “a new kind of heroine,” not only in Stephen
King’s world but also for the larger culture, as she learns to accept responsi-
bility for her own life while “abandoning the notion that the heroine is
someone who needs to be rescued” (“Donna Trenton” 97, 91). Addition-
ally, Donna’s emergence as a heroine appropriates the terms and intensity
of male fury; what has been done to her, she now does to Cujo. Like the
battered Pinto that nonetheless manages to survive Cujo’s relentless as-
sault, Donna wins her family’s reunion through her ability to endure, pro-
tect, and defend. It is important to point out that during her battle royal
against Cujo, one of Donna’s high heels breaks off. This becomes a symbol
for the internal change in feminine status that occurs to her character: In
the course of her ordeal, Donna progresses from an embodiment of the ar-
chetypical gothic maiden—a trapped and passive victim of forces beyond
her control—to an emerging heroine who appropriates the phallic imagery
of masculine power (a baseball bat and a pistol) and uses it to defend her-
self and her child. By the end of Cujo, Donna comes to resemble more the
bandaged and muscular, zealously driven mother-warrior, Sarah Connor
(Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, than the cringing and
weepy suburban housewife who left home to get her car fixed.
Indeed, Donna Trenton emerges as a version of Carol Clover’s con-
ception of the Final Girl, the sole female survivor in many modern horror
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 61
Furthermore, King’s writing in the 1990s, in addition to being gener-
ally more compact, also tends to include a more realistic treatment of
women. The novels Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder
(1995)—a trio that should be considered together because the narratives
share similar themes and were written and published consecutively—dif-
fer markedly from King’s previous fiction. Feminist in orientation, the
novels present most of the action from a woman’s point of view. If the first
half of King’s literary canon can be generalized as a potent rendition of
Everyman wandering amid the expansive wastelands of a postapocalyptic
America, the second half of this body of work has tended to focus on rep-
resentations of the American Everywoman and her disgruntled home life.
In their introduction to the unfortunately titled collection of essays
Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, edi-
tors Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson write that the
writer’s female characters “often provoke hostility as well as admiration.
When analyzing King’s depiction of women, it is tempting to relegate him
to the category of unregenerate misogynist or conversely to elevate him to
the status of newly sensitive male” (4). This patronizing and unfairly nega-
tive evaluation notwithstanding, Lant and Thompson are correct in noting
that the more women-centered novels published in the 1990s are a clear
departure from King’s earlier portraits of women. These later books like-
wise represented a substantial risk in potentially alienating King’s popular
readership. After his first two decades of writing, his loyal audience had
come to expect tales of supernatural horror and epic fantasy rather than
reality-based stories depicting the horror of domestic dysfunction. The
publication of Misery must be viewed as a harbinger of change in King’s
career, as the novel signaled a new focus on “mainstream” subject mat-
ter—domestic and gender issues. At least in terms of market sales figures,
this emphasis change helps to explain the minor erosion of King’s estab-
lished reputation as a mega-seller, since books that follow Misery gener-
ally remained on the New York Times Bestseller List only half as long as
those published prior to it (Carvajal 1, 8). Yet, ironically, during this period
his audience base did not enlarge to the point where his more female-
centered work was included (as it legitimately should be) on the syllabi of
women’s studies curricula.
Misery thus holds a pivotal position in Stephen King’s canon; the
novel marks a transition that begins to emphasize a new significance for
women characters. In Misery, the reader encounters one of King’s first at-
tempts to create a fiercely independent woman who is neither madonna
nor whore. Unlike Cujo’s Donna Trenton, who moves from passive victim
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 63
the relentless claustrophobic perspective afforded the reader of King’s
novel, where Annie is not only Paul’s jailer, she is also his sole connection
to the rest of the world.
Paul Sheldon is a highly successful romance novelist whose fortune
and fame is the result of a series of novels featuring a plucky heroine
named Misery Chastain. Although these books have proven highly suc-
cessful, Paul views himself as a “serious” writer capable of producing bet-
ter work. His most recent manuscript, which he has just finished writing
when the film commences, is a complete departure from the romance
genre. Before Paul can deliver the book to his publisher, however, his car
slides off the road during a blinding snowstorm. Rescued from certain
death by Annie Wilkes, an unemployed professional nurse (an occupation
that is normally nurturing and healing) who is also Sheldon’s “number one
fan” as well as a psychopathic killer, Sheldon spends the winter recovering
in her secluded Colorado farmhouse. He learns quickly that under
Wilkes’s care his life is still very much in jeopardy; his broken legs (the re-
sult of the car accident) make him captive to her capricious whims and
wishes. Although he is proud of his new novel, Annie declares it obscene,
and she insists that Paul burn the only copy of the manuscript. This is the
first in a series of fascinating albeit paradoxical behaviors that highlight
Annie’s mental illness: She judges Paul’s writing objectionable when it
employs language or moments that deviate from the strict standards of the
romance genre, yet she cannot recognize her own obscenity in committing
against her guest various acts of increasing cruelty and humiliation when
he has displeased her; she is a professional nurse whose duties have in-
cluded murdering former patients, especially infants, when she deems it
appropriate; she is a hard-edged survivalist who passionately identifies
with an extremely vulnerable and feminine romance heroine.
Through a combination of drugs, threats, and violent acts against him
(including the breaking of his ankles), Annie forces Paul to spend his recu-
peration writing one last Misery Chastain novel. King’s novel contains
whole sections of this work in progress—which make for a mesmerizing
metatextual parallel to Paul’s own plight—but Reiner’s film unfortunately
only alludes to selected passages and plot lines that Annie reads aloud.
Sheldon is initially reluctant to write this new book, but he learns that his
survival is linked to his writing: As long as he can keep Annie interested in
the evolving narrative, she will keep him alive. At the conclusion of the
film, Sheldon tricks her by pretending to burn his story’s conclusion before
she learns how the book is ultimately resolved, an ironic payback for her
destruction of his other novel. The now partially recuperated writer is able
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 65
from Paul’s prone or wheelchair-bound point of view. In these scenes, the
camera moves upward and ever closer to reveal the distortions of her face.
For example, after Annie has read the part in Paul’s new novel where Mis-
ery dies, she enters Paul’s bedroom unseen, presumably in the middle of
the night, while a thunderstorm rages outside. Like Paul, we feel her pres-
ence before we actually see her. As Annie rants against Paul’s “murder-
ing” Misery, moving toward his bed, half of her face disappears into the
dark shadows that fill the bedroom. The scene highlights her role as a hor-
ror monster, the terror she invokes all the more intense because her body
and head fragment into the shadows of the bedroom even as her rage is
being unleashed and fills up the room. The camera, therefore, helps con-
tribute to the intrusive and violating presence associated with Annie’s
character. Moreover, throughout the film the camera’s angle and perspec-
tive is almost exclusively Paul’s, cementing the audience’s identification
with his victimization while distancing us from Annie herself. This is an-
other element that distinguishes this film from a woman-centered or femi-
nist orientation; if it took such a view, we would be getting at least some of
the angles from Annie’s point of view.
Aware that her authority is in constant jeopardy—from the police
and from Paul himself as he regains his strength to rebel against her
(Annie tells Paul: “You’ll never know what it’s like for someone like me to
love someone like you.”)—Annie’s every action reflects her need for dom-
ination. And to this perversely independent end, she is willing to sacrifice
everything: The farm and its animals, the officious local sheriff who comes
in search of Sheldon, whatever is left of her nursing ethics, Paul himself,
and, eventually, even her own life. The audience is led to identify wholly
with Sheldon’s desperate plight throughout, but both the viewers and Paul
learn to respect Annie for her cunning intelligence and resolute commit-
ment to having her will carried out. And certainly, at least some women
who watch this film must feel some degree of poetic justice in Misery’s
gender role reversal: Watching a kidnapped, helpless male forced to obey
the imperious and capricious commands of a strong-willed female captor.
In the end, however, Annie is more dominatrix than feminist, and
perhaps this explains why her reaction to Misery Chastain remains so
puzzling. Paul’s plight links him unequivocally to his intrepid heroine in
this film, but any effort to explore Annie’s personality must likewise ad-
dress her intense identification with this fictional character. For Misery—
the lovely, highly feminized romantic heroine—is, at least superficially, an
oppositional personality to Annie Wilkes. Annie may be attracted to the
literary character precisely because of their differences, as Misery is capa-
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 67
When the two are first brought together, Annie is highly solicitous of
Paul, genuflecting at the altar of his fame and talent. Her mood darkens,
however, when she reads his new manuscript and objects to its level of
profanity. In a very real way, Paul’s writing is the only thing Annie and he
ever share in common, and it is therefore appropriate that her mood
swings are frequently tied to his writing. When he frustrates her by failing
to perform this task to her liking—as with the untitled new manuscript or
when he tries to “cheat” the reader by resurrecting Misery in an unrealistic
fashion—Annie punishes him severely. Paul does not view himself as
Annie does; the new novel is an attempt to prove to himself that he is a
“real” writer instead of just a hack. Although his literary agent (Lauren
Bacall) reminds him that “Misery put braces on [his] daughter’s teeth and
is putting her through college,” Paul is embarrassed by what he has be-
come, for he feels his talents have been prostituted in the writing of eight
Misery novels. Typecast into a genre that has made him wealthy and fa-
mous, he feels a captive to its form and to his audience. As the film unfolds,
Annie’s initial sense of awe degenerates into a less-than-respectful atti-
tude toward her favorite writer. Conversely, in writing for his life, Paul is
forced into a position where for the first time he can begin to appreciate
the skills he does possess. While Annie gradually demystifies his godliness,
Paul gains a healthy insight and level of respect for the writer in himself—
even the writer of romances—which he has doubted as a result of his pop-
ular acclaim. Like Rocket Man who cheats his audience in Annie’s
recollected chapter play, Paul believed he had been cheating his fans as
well as himself. But his ordeal with Annie brings him to a deeper—more
humble—awareness of his craft. Misery’s character not only educates his
daughter, she also educates Paul.
Although he will probably never walk normally again, having been
crippled permanently by both the accident and Annie’s efforts to hobble
him, Paul emerges from his experience a more complete human being than
when he began it. Before his enforced recuperation at Annie’s farmhouse,
Paul appears to have had much in common with Harry in Ernest Heming-
way’s short story “The Snows of Kilamanjaro.” Like Harry, Paul has not
been true to his literary craft; he has not lived up to his potential as a writer
or as a human being. He sold out his talents as an artist for the commercial
success of the Misery series just as Harry has abandoned his own writing
after marrying a woman with money. But it is significant that Paul Sheldon
survives while Harry dies a slow and painful death from gangrene.
The film documents Sheldon’s subtle transformations as a writer and
a human being. Nearly his last words in the movie are a self-acknowledg-
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 69
throughout his own fictional canon and the important roles they frequently
play: “I’ve written so much myself that writing has become a vital part of my
life. It’s the biggest figure in my landscape, the analogue of the statue of the
Bourka Bee goddess in Misery. Wherever you go in my little part of land-
scape, the writer is always there, looking back at the reader. . . . [Writers] do
have powers. [They] are the only recognized mediums of our society” (11).
Without his craft, Paul Sheldon could not have survived his sentence
as a prisoner in Annie Wilkes’s haunted farmhouse; similarly, novelist Ben
Mears is one of the few inhabitants of ‘Salem’s Lot with the childlike con-
duit to his imagination still open enough to believe in the reality of vam-
pires—and thereby in his ability to destroy them.
The vast majority of writers in Stephen King’s universe are male. The
only notable exception is Jessie Burlingame in the novel Gerald’s Game, a
book that begins in King’s typical third-person narration but concludes in a
long first-person letter that Jessie writes to her friend Ruth Neary. This is a
significant signal to readers, since Jessie’s new role as a writer—telling her
own story in her own voice and through her own words—is indicative of an
emerging unified selfhood and the continuing process of her rehabilitation.
As a writer, Jessie is linked to the many other authors who populate the fic-
tional and cinemagraphic landscapes of Stephen King—all of whom are in-
variably invested with impressive powers of self-understanding, imagination,
and even magic—and all of whom are invariably male. In “The Rape of Con-
stant Reader: Stephen King’s Construction of the Female Reader and Viola-
tion of the Female Body in Misery,” feminist critic Kathleen Margaret Lant
has noted this gendered exclusivity and interprets it in explicitly sexual
terms: “In Misery, creativity is solely a masculine prerogative, for the artist is
male, and both the reader and the character/antagonist—made one in Paul
Sheldon’s vicious and dangerous fan Annie Wilkes—are female. The artist’s
power, moreover, is conveyed in terms of his sexuality; as a sexually potent
male, Paul Sheldon is creative” (93).
Lant’s provocative insight may well be applied to other King novels
and films where the masculine hero is likewise a writer. But what of those
narratives, however few, where a woman is in control, occupying the role
of the central protagonist? Since women are typically not creative artists
in King’s world, what powers belong to them, and where do these powers
come from?
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 71
Wilkes is an unmoored being, bereft of the social and familial bonds criti-
cal to making life meaningful for the majority of King’s adult females. As
Mary Pharr reminds us in the beginning of this chapter, motherhood is
often a stabilizing force in King’s universe, while single women appear sus-
ceptible to all the corrupting forces that define his portraits of both female
and male self-absorption.
Dolores Claiborne begins with its protagonist charged with the mur-
der of her employer, Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt). When the film opens,
the audience sees only the moment of Vera’s death, where it appears that
Dolores is about to hit her with a rolling pin. Later on, we learn through a
revealing flashback that the invalid Vera wishes to commit suicide and has
deliberately thrown herself down a flight a stairs. When Dolores finds her
crumpled at the base of the stairs, Vera begs her maid (and, as we learn
later, her best friend) to finish the job.
After she is arraigned for murder at Little Tall Island’s Town Hall,
Dolores is reunited with her daughter, Selena St. George, who is now a
magazine reporter living in New York City. The detective in charge of the
investigation, John Mackey (Christopher Plummer), summons Selena
back to her Maine hometown with a newspaper clipping describing Vera’s
death and Claiborne’s arraignment. Foiled in his efforts to convict Dolores
in the murder of her husband years earlier, Mackey takes the Donovan
case personally, insisting that this time he will not “underestimate” Do-
lores. Mother and daughter have not seen one another for fifteen years.
Much of the rest of the film is an exploration of their estrangement. Se-
lena’s memories of her childhood are partial at best. She recalls her
mother’s acts of violence against her father but has completely repressed
any understanding of why her mother behaved in such a manner. Selena
also believes that her mother caused her father’s “accidental” death when
he fell into the shaft of an abandoned well. As Selena reveals her incom-
plete and flawed understanding of the past, Dolores sets about trying to fill
in her daughter’s memory gaps. Dolores and the audience learn together
that Selena has, with the help of powerful prescription medications, alco-
hol, and physical distance from Maine, repressed her recollection of Joe St.
George’s incestual molestation during her adolescence. Dolores forces her
to revisit this experience, and although she tries to deny its veracity, Selena
comes to a startling epiphany on a ferry taking her away from the island
when she revisits a scene of her own molestation. Instead of continuing
her flight from both her past and her mother, Selena returns to attend the
murder investigation’s preliminary hearing and argues convincingly
against the report submitted by Detective Mackey. The ending of the film
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 73
except for the final one, which occurs to Selena on her way off the island—
are intense color portraits meant to suggest the nearly overwhelming sig-
nificance of the past. Indeed, Dolores and Selena are like two characters
trapped in a Faulkner novel: The events that occurred years ago exert such
an overwhelming presence on their contemporary lives that neither woman
is free of their influence.
In one memorable scene, Dolores uses an ax to shatter a broken win-
dow in the house where many of these events had taken place. The win-
dow, already cracked by vandals, can be seen as a symbol of the present for
both Selena and Dolores, and when the latter breaks through it, shards of
glass fall away in slow motion to reveal a different moment in time—a
telephone conversation between Selena and the editor at the magazine
that employs her. Once Selena and her mother move back into their old is-
land house, linear time is similarly subverted: The intrusive nature of the
past breaks through and shatters their unsettled present. The latter, in
turn, is like a window offering a continual view of past events that cannot
be forgotten. Selena and her mother are often pictured looking out from
the St. George house—standing on the porch, in the driveway, gazing out a
doorway or window—and toward the yard where Joe was killed in what
was officially declared an “accident by misadventure.” It is as if the site of
his death creates an inexorable pull on both mother and daughter, but es-
pecially Dolores. While Selena continues to labor hard at repressing her
incest memories, when Dolores returns to the St. George house she is
forced to re-confront the murder she perpetrated years ago—a crime that
she has apparently managed, at least until her return to its scene with her
adult daughter, to repress quite successfully.
Thus, the sheer dominance of the past explains why Selena must
struggle to block her recollection of it and why for fifteen years both
women have been reluctant to communicate with one another. (Dolores
fails to recognize her daughter when they are reintroduced at the island’s
Town Hall in the beginning of the film, while Selena is reluctant to em-
brace her.) The contrasting use of the camera’s color filters to define the
film’s shifting sense of time and place thereby underscores the fact that
Dolores and Selena remain suspended in a gray and murky present be-
cause the tumultuous events of their shared past have yet to be mutually
confronted and resolved.
The published articles reverently collected in Dolores’s scrapbook
suggest that her daughter is particularly adept at authoring professional
portraits about men and women who mirror in some way her own per-
sonal situation. Richard Nixon and Jean Harris, the subjects of two of her
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 75
her nails appear manicured and her fingers adorned with expensive rings.
Unlike Dolores, Vera has performed very little manual labor with her
hands; among the few physical actions that the audience sees her perform
with them is needlepoint and ringing a bell for a maid to service her. At
one point Vera implicates herself in the “accidental” automobile death of
her husband, but it remains doubtful that she herself performed the actual
tampering with his brakes, as her hands indicate she is incapable of such
technical work. Actually, the only time Vera literally relies on her hands is
at the end of her life, where she is left with the use of only one hand, which
she employs to help her commit suicide.
Joe St. George’s hands reflect deeply his blue-collar background; he
uses them to make a living fixing boats. When Joe’s hands are shown in
close-ups, they often appear embedded with black dirt, and they are always
capable of instantaneously inflicting hurt on others. Indeed, he is an abusive
man who constantly works his hands to pound things, from the top of the
television set to his own wife. By exerting this physical power, he gains at-
tention and authority to live in the world at the cost of the women who are
with him. A major activity that Joe engages with his hands is the feeding of
his addictions: So many of his scenes begin with close-ups of his hands
holding an alcoholic drink or a cigarette. And, of course, he uses his hands
to teach Selena how to satisfy him sexually with her own hand. Ironically,
the only successful action Joe performs with his hands is the infliction of
pain and suffering on others and statisfying his own addictive behavior. In
the end, these tainted hands, which he has misused throughout the picture,
prove incapable of saving him as he clings to a rotted plank across the top
of an open well and tries desperately to grab at Dolores’s legs.
In the course of the film, each character’s hands transform in some
way, and each of these transformations signals something about the char-
acter’s relative behavior and life experience. Vera’s manicured and pam-
pered hands become gnarled and useless as a consequence of old age and
her debilitating illness. Joe’s strong and forceful hands are reduced eventu-
ally to a helpless thrashing among shattered wood splinters as he falls to
his doom. Dolores’s once-young and supple hands bear the results of
twenty-two years of performing domestic work for Vera Donovan. And
Selena’s hands change from being overly cared for and concealed by
gloves that hide at the same time as they protect to being accepted for
what they are. In light of this particular discussion, it is important to note
that after Selena so eloquently comes to her mother’s defense at the police
inquest hearing, she reaches out her hand to Dolores, and the latter, in
turn, accepts it. In the film’s final scene, again on board a ferry, Selena’s
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 77
The movement of a solar eclipse across the landscape of this film be-
comes a defining moment in the lives of its women characters; the eclipse’s
passage parallels the plot’s emphasis on evolving female empowerment. As
noted already, the atmosphere of Dolores Claiborne is intentionally con-
structed to highlight the secreted domestic abuse issues that drive the
film—from the frequent portraits of dense clouds that suggest the layers of
dark memories that must be penetrated (the only time the sky is clear is on
the day of the eclipse), to the many occasions when major moments in the
film occur in transitory or “suspended” conditions: The indeterminable sea-
son of the year, two critical ferry rides across the water that separates the
island from the mainland where on each occasion important truths about
the past are revealed, the time during the solar eclipse itself. While the ac-
tual physical eclipse is important, its metaphorical significance is even more
so. Joe St. George has interposed himself between daughter and mother, es-
sentially “eclipsing” the latter. On the afternoon of the eclipse, Joe is mur-
dered by his wife who lures him into an abandoned well where he falls to
his death. Hackford’s camera work is extremely evocative all through this
scene, as the murder occurs precisely at the time of the sun’s total eclipse.
At one point, Dolores’s full vertical figure is cast in-between the hole in the
ground and the corresponding hole in the sky, and she appears to assume
similar mythic proportions to the eclipse itself. Indeed, she reveals the ex-
tent of her supremacy in the voiceover that accompanies her flashback to
the “accident,” that killing Joe “was easier than I thought.”
The fully exposed well in the earth, certainly a vaginal image, is linked
to Dolores (full of sorrow) Claiborne (clay-born: earth mother) while the
“death” of the sun, the latter associated with masculine archetypes in
Greek and Roman mythologies, underscores the symbolic destruction of
the father patriarch. Indeed, while Joe’s actual fall into the pit signals the
“eclipsing” of his husband-father phallic dominance, the entire scene prior
to that moment emphasizes the steady erosion of his potency and power.
Just before the total eclipse occurs, Joe, thoroughly intoxicated on Black
and White scotch, struggles to “erect” his white reflector box, and ulti-
mately fails to do so as the cardboard device keeps collapsing in on itself.
His loss of potency becomes even more exaggerated when he is con-
fronted with Dolores’s knowledge that he has been sexually molesting
their daughter. Joe abruptly pulls back from his physical assault on his wife
in a posture that indicates both his humiliation and shock, as he claims
sheepishly that Selena’s “a little liar” and a “tease” in need of a whipping
from his patriarchal belt. Dolores is relentless in her verbal emasculation,
however, employing highly sexualized language designed to throw her
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 79
when she acts on the recognition that “sometimes being a bitch is all a
woman has to hold on to”—and escapes from beneath the sexual shadow
cast by a man—be that man her father or her husband. Silence is equiva-
lent to darkness, and this film insists that true survival, physical as well as
psychological, depends not upon silence, but in confronting the past and
understanding its secrets and becoming an active agent as a result. This is
why Selena’s reflected image in the ferry’s bathroom mirror is reversed.
Until this moment in the picture, she has been reluctant to confront the
truth of her own past; she has “turned her back” on her mother, herself,
and her father’s culpability.
In contrast to the singular and self-serving actions that characterize
male behavior in Dolores Claiborne—stealing money from Dolores’s
bank account; secretive drinking of alcohol; sexist language and behavior;
Selena’s molestations—which essentially climax in masturbatory actions,
women are defined in this film by virtue of their relationships with other
women. When women work together, the film implies, they can overcome
even the trauma of domestic abuse. Dolores and, to a less direct extent, Se-
lena find the courage to emerge from their eclipsed lives through the guid-
ance and proactive example offered by another abused woman. Vera
(Latin for “truth”) Donovan shapes Dolores’s decision to murder her hus-
band instead of merely running away by providing her own dramatic illus-
tration of how to deal with a negligent husband: “It’s a depressingly
masculine world we live in, Dolores. Husbands die everyday. Why one is
probably dying right now, while you’re sitting here. They die and leave
their wives their money. Sometimes they’re driving home from their mis-
tresses’ apartments and their brakes suddenly fail. An accident, Dolores,
can be an unhappy woman’s best friend.” Selena’s ultimate assessment
that Vera and Dolores loved one another proves to be indisputable, for the
two women, despite their different social classes and financial status, paral-
lel one another in personality and life experiences. Each woman is all that
is left in the other’s life, forming an often contentious, but always brutally
honest and effective support system. Vera wills her entire estate—$1.6 mil-
lion—to Dolores largely because the latter has not only served as her
steady caregiver, but also as her only friend. Most important, Dolores
chooses to care for Vera even after the latter becomes a disconsolate and
self-absorbed invalid because Vera gave her the courage and the hard-
edged example of how to deal effectively with an intolerable marriage.
The two women share and maintain similar dark insights into the murder-
ous actions that were necessary to liberate them both from patriarchal and
financial oppression. In some fashion, Vera and Dolores are married to
MATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 81
use the power of patriarchy against women and children, and they cele-
brate women who manage to carve out positions for themselves” (95).
These sentiments are fundamentally accurate, although there is not a great
deal of evidence to support the fact that King’s work “celebrates women
who manage to carve out positions for themselves,” unless these positions
first embody the conservative nature of “fairly traditional values.” Dolores
Claiborne provides us with a unique collection of the most independent
women in Hollywood’s adaptations of Stephen King. But this film is more
the exception than the rule. Female characters in other King narratives
who do live alone, outside the authority of husbands and the insulation of
domestic obligations, are particularly susceptible to the extreme perver-
sions and psychological aberrations already noted in Annie Wilkes.
Moreover, the main way in which women in King-inspired movies
come to possess integral, powerful lives is initially through violent efforts,
even if their behavior eventually produces positive results. Violence and
murder are more than acts of passion for the females in Carrie, Firestarter,
Cujo, and Dolores Claiborne; they are the only options in their quest to-
ward survival and self-destiny. Dolores, Vera, and perhaps even Selena’s
character at the end of Claiborne, achieve true independence only after
they have completely detached themselves from the various male bonds
that have held them captive and move on to create alternative social
realms devoid of men. The notion set forth by Vera Donovan that “some-
times being a bitch is the only thing a woman has to hold on to” is the neg-
ative model by which many female characters in Stephen King’s films and
novels (e.g., Gerald’s Game and Rose Madder) come to assert their inde-
pendence in a male-dominated world. Perhaps this helps to explain why
all but one of the flashbacks that occur in Dolores Claiborne is initiated by
Dolores herself. She may have long ago reconciled herself to the necessity
of the murder that she was compelled to commit, yet moving back into her
former home summons back the restive ghosts of her violent marriage and
the murder she has since kept secret for many years. Unlike Selena, Do-
lores may not require the help of drug and liquor stores to help her cope
with her personal history, but the intensity and the frequency of her flash-
backs make it apparent that Dolores is still haunted by selected images
from her past.
The strong maternal figures in Cujo and Claiborne (and, as we will
consider in the next chapter, The Shining and Pet Sematary) support the
premise that women may seek alternatives to relationships with abusive
men, but a selfless devotion to their children remains a consistent priority
that guides every one of their choices. At least at this point in its treatment
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CHAPTER 4
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES:
THE SHINING, PET SEMATARY, APT PUPIL
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 87
plain Jack’s madness (that is, the subconscious as a labyrinth in which the
conscious self gets lost) but inspires the Overlook’s floor plan and décor,
as well as the events which occur there” (206). The Native American rug
patterns on the Overlook’s floors and walls, the hotel’s excruciatingly long
corridors exaggerated by the use of a wide-angle lens camera, the maze of
words that Jack types into various convoluted forms on sheets of paper,
and even Danny’s line of snow prints that eventually trap his father deep
within the hedge maze outside the hotel—all of these images of enclosure
are metaphors for the encroaching perimeters of Jack’s mind. In fact, one
scene that few critics of The Shining have noted actually shows Jack look-
ing down into a small-scale model of the outdoor maze. As he stares down
into its green-patterned labyrinth, minuscule figures of Wendy and Danny
appear walking in its center. The image is startling not only because of its
surreal juxtapositions, but also because the maze itself—which can be di-
vided perfectly into two identical halves, or hemispheres—resembles noth-
ing so much as the interior of the human brain. Kubrick implies through
this brief allusion that Danny and Wendy (and, of course, Jack himself) are
lost inside the darkest recesses of Jack’s mind—just as all three of the Tor-
rances are trapped within the abandoned corridors of the hotel and the
sculpted rows of shrubbery in the maze. Ironically, Wendy and Danny es-
cape their entrapment by literally emerging from these various mazes,
Danny from the frozen maze and Wendy from her futile search to locate
the boy on an upstairs floor of the hotel.
The movie’s consistent patterns of imagery—from its utilization of a
variety of mazes and maze-like designs to its abundant reliance on mirrors
and reflected surfaces—creates a hauntingly “atmospheric text” that re-
wards careful and repeated viewings. Throughout the film, Jack Torrance’s
descent into personal psychosis is accompanied and underscored by
Kubrick’s reliance on reflective imagery (as well as the accumulated mazes
that Nelson enumerates). Early in the picture when Wendy brings Jack his
breakfast in their hotel suite, Jack is filmed through a vanity mirror. The
doubling implications are further strengthened in the scene when he re-
veals to Wendy that he possesses a “ridiculous” sense of déjà vu that he as-
sociates with the Overlook. Later in the film, as Jack’s psychosis deepens,
this same bedroom mirror is once again employed. The camera films Tor-
rance’s entire body through the reflective glass as he sits upright on the
bed just before summoning Danny to sit on his lap. In both instances, the
mirror “frames” Jack Torrance exclusively; both Wendy and Danny remain
outside the mirror’s perimeters. Moreover, the verbal discourse is likewise
restricted, as in each scene the subject always centers on the hotel and
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 89
from the moment he steps through its front door and into Mr. Ullman’s
(Barry Nelson) office. He is overwhelmed by the hotel’s physical magnifi-
cence, the affluence and prestige that have been associated with it, and its im-
pressive historical legacy. The beautiful woman in room 237 is merely a
feminized extension of the same fantasy projection Torrance manifests
throughout the film as his identification with the hotel deepens to the point
where he is willing to surrender both himself and his family to it. But just as
the hotel continually deceives Torrance with promises that it has no intention
of keeping, the erotic ghost-woman in room 237 is merely a mask for a mon-
strous reality that is finally revealed in the mirrored projection that Torrance
recognizes only after he has been seduced by its false front. Jack is duped and
manipulated by the hotel each time he interacts with it.This is why at the end
of this scene the crone chases him out of the bedroom with her humiliating
laughter. Like the three vampire women in Stoker’s Dracula, the crone’s de-
risive laughter underscores the scorn that evil ultimately holds for those it se-
duces. Kubrick seems to be suggesting here that evil is an active principle that
is never content with merely asserting its control over individuals—it also in-
sists on their humiliation to complete its design.
Unlike King’s novel—which really focuses on Danny Torrance, his su-
pernatural abilities, and the Overlook’s efforts to subsume the boy’s pow-
ers into it—Kubrick’s film is almost exclusively centered on Jack Torrance.
In part, the movie is about the destruction of his marriage to Wendy, but
even that relationship is secondary to the bond that Torrance establishes
with the hotel. Perhaps this helps to explain why all of Jack’s encounters
with the corporealized revenants—the woman in room 237, Delbert Grady
(Philip Stone), and Lloyd (Joe Turkel) in the bar scenes—are experienced
in isolation, in the physical absence of either Wendy or Danny. Both the
mirrors in front of Grady and Torrance in the red bathroom scene as well
as the long bar mirror that hangs behind Lloyd in the Overlook’s Gold
Room are meant to suggest the sequestration of Jack’s identity apart from
the world of the living and likewise his submersion into the identities of the
ghosts reflected back at him through these mirrored surfaces.
The Shining is about fear in well-lighted places. Its deepest moments
of terror come not from the shadows or claustrophobic crypts of the tradi-
tional horror film, but from within highly reflective surfaces and brightly
illuminated bathroom interiors. Kubrick himself reminds us of this just
after the release of The Shining, when he commented on the ability of hor-
ror stories to “show us the dark side without having to confront it directly”
(Kroll 99). Bathrooms and bathtubs have always held a baleful fascination
for filmmakers (Walker, Taylor, and Ruchti 304). One needs to look no
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 91
forth between Torrance and Grady to create a kind of “dialogue” between
the two men. The camera eventually stabilizes in a closely centered,
medium shot of Grady and Torrance standing face-to-face. The two males
are continually juxtaposed, guest and servant. As the audience listens care-
fully to their dialogue, it becomes clear that the camera’s series of alternat-
ing positions is meant to reinforce the fact that Grady and Torrance are
mirror images of each other. This scene is shot very differently from the
rest of the film, in which the camera is constantly moving and searching up
and down the length of serpentine corridors. The uniquely static and cir-
cumscribed nature of the shots inside this crimson lavatory signal the im-
portance of the scene; it should be read as a turning point in the movie.
The two men enter the bathroom as a result of Grady accidentally
bumping into Torrance in a crowd on the floor of the Gold Ballroom. The
manservant spills a tray of cocktails on Torrance. As Torrance points out
sarcastically, Grady’s drinks mix with the one Torrance is holding, and his
amber bourbon is tainted by the milky Advocaat being transported on
Grady’s tray. Just as the two drinks blend together, forcing valet and guest
into the men’s room in an effort to clean Torrance’s jacket, the identities of
the two men also merge together once they are alone in the red lavatory.
In the first part of this scene, Torrance stares deeply into the mirror
over one of the sinks at Grady’s reflected image, the latter working obse-
quiously to remove a stain from Torrance’s jacket with a white towel and
some cold water. When Grady informs him of his name, which Torrance
immediately recognizes as that of the former infamous caretaker, Torrance
signals his own uneasiness in the valet’s presence: His voice cracks, “You a
married man are you, Mr. Grady?” and the fingers of Jack’s left hand begin
to twitch nervously. That the camera views Torrance intensely focused on
Grady’s bent-over mirrored reflection deepens the association that
Kubrick’s earlier alternating cameras serve to underscore: Jack is losing
his own point of view and the two men are merging into one another.
After Torrance learns Grady’s name, he continues to address the servant’s
mirrored image, reminding Grady of the violent murders he perpetrated
on his own wife and daughters years ago while serving in Torrance’s cur-
rent job as caretaker of the Overlook. Grady professes to be unaware of
this event and “begs to differ” that it is Torrance who has “always been the
caretaker.” The confusing dialogue is deliberately ambiguous in an effort
to force the audience to see that the identities of these two men, one dead
and the other moving closer to the edge of death, are blurring into one an-
other. To underscore this fact, Jack empathetically takes the white towel
from Grady, symbolically stripping him of his role as servant and opening
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 93
“always been the caretaker”), the manservant’s face and upper body are
revealed to the camera in a frontal close-up, his torso framed inside one of
the bathroom mirrors hanging on the wall behind him. At this moment,
the camera also shifts its angle of exposition. In most movies, when the
camera angles up into the face or torso of a character, he or she assumes a
position of dominance. The opposite is also true: A character’s status is di-
minished whenever the camera’s gaze looks down on him or her. By the
end of the red bathroom scene, as he provides Torrance with instruction
about his son and marital situation, Grady is filmed in an upward-angled
medium close-up, signaling his position of dominance. In contrast, Tor-
rance concludes the sequence filmed at an angle of descent, that is, with
the camera looking down at him, indicating that he has lost the narrative
advantage to Grady visually as well as linguistically.
The action that occurs in the red bathroom brilliantly reverses the
roles Grady and Torrance occupy before entering the lavatory. It con-
cludes with the two men establishing a violent paternalistic collusion with
one another, revealing that the valet is no mere servant and that Torrance
is no longer a man who is in control of his own destiny. In fact, by the end
of the sequence Jack’s face has become wildly distorted, he is merely lis-
tening and no longer talking, his unshaven grimaces make him appear in-
sane and frightfully lost, and his head appears completely engulfed in a sea
of red paint. He ends the scene with a primitive smirk of dawning and
grateful recognition: That Grady has informed him of several great truths
and that Torrance now needs to act accordingly.
Kubrick’s reliance on mirrors as visual aids for underscoring the the-
matic meaning of this film portrays visually the internal transformations
and oppositions that are occurring to Jack Torrance psychologically.
Through extended use of these devices, Kubrick dramatizes the hotel’s
methodical assault on Torrance’s identity, its ability to stimulate the myr-
iad of self-doubts and anxieties that have always been part of his nature by
creating opportunities to warp Torrance’s perspective on himself and the
other members of his family. Furthermore, the fact that Jack looks into a
mirror whenever he “speaks” to the hotel means, to some extent, that
Kubrick implicates him directly into the hotel’s “consciousness,” because
Jack is, in effect, talking to himself. The first time Jack is sitting at the bar in
the Overlook’s ballroom facing the mirror at the back of the bar, he places
his hands over his eyes and face. When he removes them, Jack begins to
speak, apparently to himself. Kubrick constructs the scene so that the audi-
ence assumes Jack is merely addressing his own reflection in the mirror.
When the camera shifts to Jack’s point of view, however, we discover that
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 95
Johnson. Michael Collings offers some trenchant advice when he cautions
“that perhaps the best approach to Kubrick’s The Shining is to divorce it
from connections with Stephen King—not because Kubrick failed to do jus-
tice to King’s narrative, but simply because it has ceased to be King’s” (62).
Kubrick’s film remains a devastating portrait of evil as something
negative, weakening, a principle of death. Nicholson plays Jack Torrance as
a man who is ever more isolated (his self-image reflected inside the vari-
ous hotel mirrors help subtly to reinforce this) and mastered by a self-
destructive impulse that attempts to annihilate both him and those
individuals who are closest to him. In the course of the film, Jack appears
alone in scene after scene. Significantly, Jack elects to remain inside the
hotel’s corridors and rooms—especially within the Gold Ballroom, which
appears to be the center of the Overlook’s “brain”—while Wendy and
Danny are free to explore its outdoor surroundings. Until the final chase
through the snow-encrusted hedge maze, Jack is never seen outside the
hotel’s interior. In maintaining this limited perspective, Kubrick restates
the purpose of the scenes where Jack is shown trapped inside mirrors: Tor-
rance is physically and mentally a prisoner inside the hotel. His desire to
isolate both himself and his family is further illustrated in his deliberate
dismantling of the snow cat and the radio. Wendy, in contrast, is frequently
paired with Danny, as is Hallorann. But Jack’s mental anguish and spiri-
tual possession is underscored by his estrangement from his wife and child
as much as it is by his association with the various “mirror ghosts” he
meets in residence at the hotel. When Torrance does share a scene with
Wendy or Danny, the effect is always one of undisguised violent intent or
stilted awkwardness, as when Danny sits on his lap and asks nervously,
“Dad, you would never hurt Mommy or me, would you?”
Late in the film, Wendy Torrance stumbles upon the typed manuscript
of her husband’s new literary opus, a work that is certain to be entitled
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The phrase is written on
successive pages in various permutations: As poetry, dramatic dialogue,
and conventional prose. Whatever the genre form it takes, however, Jack
has typed only this single sentence. While most interpreters of The Shining
have tended to ignore the significance of what this phrase means, even
when they mention the bizarre “manuscript” itself, the typed statement it-
self reflects the twisted sense of humor present in Jack’s very serious men-
tal breakdown and quite a bit more. Jack has literally typed the phrase
thousands of times, signaling to both Wendy and the audience that his
mind now belongs, or at least is in intellectual harmony with, the voice of
the Overlook. Even more disturbing, the grammatically incorrect phrase
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 97
spoiled party brats: That he is dull. At the same time, the phrase serves to
remind the audience and Torrance himself that his five months of sobriety
represent hard work that has come at the great expense of play. The om-
niscient voice of the Overlook apparently wishes Jack to inculcate the
meaning of the idiom at the same time as it challenges him to react to it
(thus the onerous purpose of retyping its exact phrasing so many times).
The only way to escape his currently unfavorable social standing is for
Jack to entertain his decadent hosts by following their own carnival
regime of misrule in subverting all conventional notions of work and play.
If we assume that Jack’s “new writing project” in Kubrick’s film,
which is never defined, is the same as it is in King’s novel—that is, a
drama—then the possible meanings for the word play continue to expand.
“All work and no play” subtly ridicules the dedicated work ethic with
which Torrance began the writing of his new theatrical drama, which has
now been displaced in the typing of this monotonous phrase (work at the
hotel = no play written by Jack). Moreover, the various literary genres that
are visualized on paper in the typed “All work and no play makes Jack a
dull boy” manuscript represent yet another example of the hotel mocking
Jack and his occupation as a writer. Pictured are the standard forms of lan-
guage arrangements that a writer employs in defining himself as a poet,
dramatist, novelist, or essayist. In misusing and subverting them to repro-
duce the same mindless concept over and over, however, the Overlook is
playing with the very work of Jack’s livelihood and potential future.
The endlessly repeated idiom ultimately suggests again another type
of mirroring sequence. As Wendy shuffles her way through page after page
of the same nonsensical language restated in recognizable arrangements, it
is as if she were viewing the successive phrases from within a hall of mir-
rors. The typed forms of repeated words also mirror one of the central im-
ages in the film: The hedge maze. Shaped in simple and identifiable
patterns that become infinitely more complex when multiplied and viewed
as a whole, Jack’s literary “manuscript” and the maze present parallel
structures that initially are easily penetrated, only to grow, as we have
seen, increasingly more convoluted. Just as Jack loses himself geographi-
cally at the end of the film as he moves more deeply within the hedge
maze, his intellectual abandonment is reflected in the linguistic maze cre-
ated from the infinite pursuit of this single idiom.
The use of mirrored sequences in this film is further buttressed by the
manner in which Kubrick measures and regulates time. In a film in which
linear time is warped by both the design of the hotel (where past becomes
present) and in the deathless winter that rages on outside, Kubrick is at
PATERNAL ARCHETYPES | 99
language failure in Kubrick occur between individual human beings—partic-
ularly those in marital relationships—as evinced in Eyes Wide Shut and The
Shining. Throughout his career, Stanley Kubrick directed technically brilliant
masterpieces of postmodern alienation and despair. His genius is most evi-
dent in scenes such as the one that begins The Shining: A long overhead
tracking shot of stunning Rocky Mountain scenery that is coldly intimidating
and capable of reducing its human presence to minuscule dots literally on the
edge of disappearing into nature’s enormity. Lest we forget, Kubrick’s last
film, A. I. (2001), may have received some romantic tweaking in Steven Spiel-
berg’s revisions and final editing, but Kubrick’s own artistic vision neverthe-
less concluded in the end of the world, with the absolute obliteration of the
human race.
Underscoring this misanthropic view of existence, a recurring defini-
tion of madness and monstrosity in Kubrick’s oeuvre is found in the self’s
total absorption with itself to the exclusion of meaningful connections
with other people. Consider, for example, the fate that both HAL in 2001
and Alex in A Clockwork Orange share in common. Although HAL is a
computer, the machine no longer serves the humans who created it. As a
monster, it views human beings as nothing more than servants to its will,
objects to be tossed into space once they are no longer useful to it. Alex
the Droog is another version of HAL, insofar as he is a being without con-
science or humanity. His gratuitous love of violence is a degenerate symp-
tom of his cynicism toward society and interpersonal communication. It is
interesting that in Kubrick’s The Shining there is no attempt to portray a
divided Jack Torrance as he exists in King’s novel, who struggles right to
the end with the two opposing forces—his family and the hotel—that liter-
ally tear him apart. Kubrick’s version of Torrance is much closer to the
tyrannical HAL and Alex than he is to King’s more conflicted, more sym-
pathetically human characterization. In Kubrick’s film, Jack’s loyalties are
never really in doubt.
In the destruction of the Torrance father-son bond, Kubrick exploits
one of humankind’s deepest fears: that we are unwanted by our parents,
repulsive to our children. If a father can turn so irrevocably inward that he
rejects his family completely, then there is nothing inviolable in the uni-
verse, nothing is secure, and there is no basis for hope. At the end of The
Shining, Jack is transformed into a monster—hand wrapped in bandages,
lurching with a limp, the once-articulate language skills of a writer reduced
to an anguished howl indistinguishable from the winds of winter and the
roar of the snow cat’s engine. In his terrible isolation, uncontrolled fury,
and impending doom, Jack becomes an appropriate extension of the hotel
The fathers in both the film versions of The Shining and Pet Sematary un-
dergo elaborate initiations into evil, and neither Torrance nor Louis Creed
(Dale Midkiff), nor the families who must bear witness to the conse-
quences of these male-centered rites of passage, survive the experience
unchanged. In The Shining, Jack Torrance serves the patriarchal design
that operates the Overlook. In doing so, he is often relegated to childlike
status. Not only do the hotel’s ghostly ambassadors instruct him on how to
behave and to maintain the secrets that are disclosed to him, Torrance is
also chastised (e.g., before Grady releases him from the dry food pantry)
when he fails to obey and perform the tasks according to the hotel’s speci-
fications. All through Kubrick’s The Shining Torrance seeks to appease the
unseen yet nonetheless omnipresent patriarchal authority at the Over-
look; the hotel’s very name implies such a relationship. In Pet Sematary,
Louis Creed is initiated into the diabolical realm of the Micmac burial
ground by Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne), an old neighbor who likewise
serves as Creed’s surrogate father. Unlike the patriarchy at the Overlook,
however, Jud is well-intentioned; he introduces Louis to the vampiric mys-
tery of the Micmac cemetery because he sincerely wants to help him deal
with the problem of his dead cat. But in once again transgressing the “bar-
rier that was not meant to be crossed,” Jud is also serving evil’s design. He
becomes, albeit unwittingly, as much manipulated by the powers located at
the Micmac gravesite as the specters Torrance must confront in residence
at the Overlook. As he acknowledges to Louis on the evening of Gage
The 1998 film Apt Pupil is best viewed as yet another example of the male
urge to violate Pascow’s “barriers not meant to be crossed” admonition. If
The Shining and Pet Sematary display similar attitudes toward the natural
world at its most misanthropic, Apt Pupil is a study in the inherent cruelty
of human nature and its propensity for acts of perverse cruelty. Set in an
innocuous American suburb, Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), a precocious
adolescent fascinated with the grisly details of Nazi involvement in World
War II, recognizes an aging war criminal, Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen),
hiding in his neighborhood. Instead of alerting the authorities to his re-
markable discovery, Todd begins an elaborate drama of blackmail: He will
not turn the Nazi over to the police if the latter will describe in detail what
took place in the concentration camps he formerly commanded. Thus,
what begins as a kind of personalized history lesson slowly escalates into
the desire to re-create the past. Both Todd and Dussander are drawn into
the violence that distinguished the Nazi regime, and they begin to perform
their own acts of cruelty, eventually culminating in Dussander’s attack on
an itinerate man whom Todd must finish killing and then bury in the Nazi’s
The Shining, Pet Sematary, and Apt Pupil are films that trace the inextrica-
ble diminution of their male protagonists into varying states of madness.
This descent evokes the emotions of pity and terror from the film audience
because all of the main characters in these movies possess the potential for
greatness. We witness a combination of events—selfish and ultimately
lethal personal choices aligned with the cruel machinations of a determin-
istic fate—that end up destroying these men in spite of their many attrib-
utes as husbands, fathers, sons, and essentially decent, albeit flawed, human
beings. The protection of secrets is a theme that pervades each of the films
discussed in this chapter—and the secrets that are maintained result in the
moral erosion of those who insist on keeping them. While it is true that
these characters derive a certain perverse power from the concealed
Most filmgoers tend to perceive The Dead Zone, The Shawshank Redemp-
tion, and The Green Mile as aberrations in the Hollywood film canon of
work produced from Stephen King’s fiction. I am beyond being surprised
whenever strangers, upon hearing me link these films with King’s name,
comment in shocked disbelief, “Stephen King wrote those stories?” Such
confusion is understandable, as David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone is
more a tragic love story than it is a tale of terror, while Shawshank and
The Green Mile, both directed by Frank Darabont, are essentially prison
narratives. None of these films can be said to be typical of the horror
genre, although all certainly contain sufficient elements of terror and
graphic violence. And while The Dead Zone and The Green Mile rely
heavily on supernatural occurrences, which are totally absent in Shaw-
shank, their inclusion bear a greater affinity with religious, mystical, and
folkloric phenomena than with the abject monsters of horror. All this
notwithstanding, each of these films revolves around similar protagonists
who occupy the respective centers of each narrative and serve to hold the
plots together. Moreover, the unassuming central characters in these
films—a schoolteacher, a former banker wrongly convicted of murder, and
a prison guard—are immediately recognizable as prototypical Stephen
King heroes. The films examined in this chapter are all, to greater or lesser
extents, contemporary versions of Christian allegories. They speak to us of
struggle and anguish, of isolation and human suffering. Yet the emphasis
of each film is less on fear and despair than on the shared will and capacity
to survive. In spite of tragic loss, these narratives are also reminders of
what is good and noble and deathless in the human spirit. And this last
point is a major reason why people who typically do not consider them-
selves as fans of Stephen King so often appreciate these three movies.
Direct references to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” are made on
two separate occasions in Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone. The first allusion
opens in an English class being taught by the film’s central character, John
Smith (Christopher Walken), immediately prior to a fateful car accident
that will place him into a five-year coma and transform the remainder of
his life. The second reference to “The Raven” takes place several years
later, midway through the film, when Smith is again teaching. This time he
is studying the poem with a single student, an adolescent boy whose life
will be saved as a result of the psychic ability that Smith suddenly gains
upon reawakening from the accident and coma. These two deliberate allu-
sions to Poe’s 1845 poem are impossible for a critic to overlook; Cronen-
berg employs the intertextual referencing as a means for paralleling—and
then ultimately contrasting—the particular circumstances that confront
John Smith throughout the movie.
Most obviously, Poe’s most famous poem is about his favorite literary
topic: The death of a beautiful woman and a first-person male narrator’s
inability or unwillingness to shed his romantic melancholia over her loss.
Poe’s speaker subsists inside a room where he studies and nurtures his
pain. His isolation is interrupted by the raven, who appears only to in-
crease his misery by ignoring the human command to “Leave my loneli-
ness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!” Poe’s poem, like so many
of his tales, is a study in what Poe himself called perversity, or the human
desire for self-punishment. While at first the narrator is bemused by the
raven’s unexpected appearance, he quickly loses patience with the bird be-
cause its presence serves to deepen his human despair over his lost love,
Lenore. Yet the narrator does nothing to force the bird into leaving, he
never does summon a pest exterminator, and his questions about the des-
Until the release of Cujo and especially Dolores Claiborne, the hero in
most of the films that Hollywood has adapted from Stephen King’s fiction
is typically from the young, white, male middle class—a humble American
Everyman, exemplified in characters such as Dennis Guilder in Christine
or Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone. These individuals find themselves in
situations where their ordinary lives have become suddenly extraordinary.
A film such as The Dead Zone tests the mettle of its unassuming protago-
nist faced with circumstances that are largely beyond his capacity to com-
prehend, much less control. As a consequence of the struggle that ensues,
the protagonist’s personality enlarges to the point at which he becomes
greater than he ever considered himself capable of becoming.
It is significant that of all the films that have been produced from King’s
fictional corpus, only Shawshank and The Green Mile have been nomi-
nated for Oscars in the Best Picture category by Hollywood’s Academy
Awards. I believe this reflects not only the Academy’s ability to recognize
excellent story lines, but also its propensity to reward films that are
morally uplifting, featuring characters that manage not only to endure but
also to prevail. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King provided language that
should be kept in mind as an interpretative key for the films considered in
this chapter: “I believe that we are all ultimately alone and that any deep
and lasting human contact is nothing more or less than a necessary illu-
sion . . . but feelings of love and kindness, the ability to care and em-
pathize, are all we know of the light. They are efforts to link and integrate;
they are the emotions which bring us together, if not in fact then at least in
a comforting illusion that makes the burden of mortality a little easier to
bear” (25–26). Codes of survival in these films center on the most valuable
aspect of human life: The capacity to care for others. And heroic status is
conferred on their central protagonists because of their resistance against
selfish impulses, the will to control the urge for power, and, most impor-
tant, the ability to extend sympathy and love. King’s faith in the endurance
of a traditional morality based on the values of love and the resiliency of
the human spirit power whatever light remains in a world actively pursu-
ing the destruction of itself and everything within it. Most of the examples
of evil traced in this analysis operate from a principle of negation directed
at everything that exists outside the self, ironically poisoning the very self
at its center. Evil’s opposite, then, is the force of selfless commitment to
TECHNOLOGIES OF FRIGHT:
CHRISTINE, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE, THE RUNNING
MAN, THE MANGLER, THE NIGHT FLIER
One of the more curious aspects about the films examined in this book so
far is how few of them actually fit the mold of the “typical” horror movie.
Silver Bullet is the only example where there is the threat of a recogniza-
ble horror monster—the werewolf—at the epicenter of the narrative. The
monsters that most frequently emerge from Stephen King’s imagination
would appear to wear decidedly human faces: They form portraits of se-
vere mental illness (Annie Wilkes, Louis Creed, Jack Torrance); out-of-
control illustrations of bureaucratic perversion and violence (Warden
Norton and his prison guards, commandant Kurt Dussander and his ado-
lescent protégé, and contemporary versions of Nazi mentality employed
by American governmental agencies such as The Shop); and postadoles-
cent rage (Ace Merrill and his gang of thugs; Chris Hargenson and her
fiendish allies, who are far more monstrous than their victim, “creepy Car-
rie”). It is not that King is averse to recalling from the shadows the super-
natural archetypes of the horror genre—in fact, this chapter will acquaint
the reader with several versions of the vampire in mechanized form—but
more to his purpose is a fascination with probing the terrors of the com-
monplace and everyday, the horrors attendant with being human. Even
the resident ghosts in The Shining and the werewolf in Silver Bullet ulti-
mately serve as vehicles for underscoring a core King premise that super-
natural phenomena are far less appalling than the distortions of an
unraveling human psyche. In so many of Hollywood’s translations of
Stephen King’s fiction, we are reminded of Emily Dickinson’s assertion
that “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—” (333).
In addition to anthropomorphizing evil, the films of Stephen King es-
tablish various social contexts in which the apparatus of the supernatural
or speculative worlds forms a direct correspondence with recognizable el-
ements from the everyday or social realm. Collectively these films com-
prise a commentary on—and a critique of—postmodern America’s value
system: Our politics, priorities, interpersonal relationships, and our most
revered and trusted institutions. King’s work describes a particular matrix
in time; it bears a direct association with significant aspects of American
life and the types of human relationships and institutions that this particu-
lar culture has engendered. For instance, in The Dead Zone, the fact that
John Smith, through the aid of his prophetic cognitive abilities, is the only
individual capable of distinguishing the real Greg Stillson from his decep-
tive persona represents a clear indictment of an American electorate inca-
pable of recognizing the separation between truth and illusion, the loud
rhetoric of false patriotism and intellectual substance. That Stillson’s
despotic ambitions are foiled only by an accident of fate—a photographer
captures him using a small child as a shield to protect himself against
Smith’s assassination attempt—highlights the degree of vulnerability in
the democratic political system that Stillson comes close to duping. In an-
other example, American class demarcations subtly contribute to Louis
Creed’s inability to accept the premise that “sometimes dead is better” in
Pet Sematary. His recalcitrance is impossible to separate from the hubris
of his being an American physician. Long accustomed to relying on scien-
tific reasoning as a measure of control while also occupying a position of
privilege in having his own personal desires gratified, Creed’s immense
grief as a parent is exacerbated by the godlike status his culture has con-
ferred on him in his role as a doctor. His social class, in other words, is a
factor in encouraging him to overstep his bounds, to defy barriers “not
meant to be crossed.” When his faith in scientific rationalism—his
“creed”—confronts a mystical energy that stands in opposition to every-
thing he has been trained to believe and that ends up fragmenting his
world order, Louis Creed’s psyche collapses. Of all King’s characters, Dr.
The vision of a motor vehicle invested with a demonic will of its own that
informs the violence of Christine is pushed to its fullest possible extreme
in King’s directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive (1986). While Christine
centers on the intimate relationship between an adolescent boy and his
first car, and thereby instills romantic and melodramatic elements into its
narrative, Maximum Overdrive, loosely based on King’s short story
“Trucks” published in the collection Night Shift (1978), is devoid of such
distractions. In Christine, viewers are made to appreciate the lure of the
machine even as we understand it hides an infernal presence. There are no
similar qualifications in Maximum Overdrive as we are, like the characters
taking refuge at the Dixie Boy diner, overwhelmed by the sheer power
and size of the machine. Maximum Overdrive is Christine fragmented into
hundreds of homicidal internal combustion vehicles and electronic gadg-
ets and distilled into absolute mechanical mayhem. There is, in other
words, no attempt to complicate its plot with an ambiguous love affair be-
tween a human and a vintage automobile.
This is simultaneously both Maximum Overdrive’s attraction and its
undoing. The film’s special effects animate ordinary machinery—a soda
dispenser, an electric carving knife, a lawnmower, and trucks—into treach-
erous hardware. The effects are so convincingly rendered that I challenge
any viewer immediately after watching this movie to remain unaffected
the first time a tractor-trailer truck appears in his or her rearview mirror.
Like Christine and Maximum Overdrive, with which it shares a similar fas-
cination with machines actively engaged in a relentless and obsessive
quest to destroy humans, Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler (1995) cannot be
called a great film. The acting solicited from every character in the movie
is exaggerated to the point of grotesque self-parody. For most of the
movie, its characters suffer stomach distress, scream hysterically at one an-
other, bleed profusely, and experience the most visceral of torments. And
yet there are definitely several compellingly redeeming aspects about this
enlarged adaptation of an early King short story first published in the
early collection Night Shift. Originally intended to be a component of a
tripart film featuring several machine-centered tales by Stephen King, The
Mangler ended up being produced as an independent film.
The Night Flier is based on a King’s short story that was originally pub-
lished in Douglas Winter’s 1988 anthology Prime Evil, a collection of tales
featuring new work by contemporary writers in the horror genre. As in
The Mangler, King’s original narrative is greatly expanded in the Mark
Pavia and Jack O’Donnell screenplay, especially since they initially envi-
sioned the project as a two-hour made-for-television movie. Although the
film elaborates on events in King’s tale—including, for example, the addi-
tion of a major character, Katherine “Jimmy” Blair (Julie Entwisle), who
plays the role of a neophyte investigative reporter—Pavia and O’Donnell
tried to “remain faithful to [King’s] feel of the story and the characters”
(Jones 115). The film premiered on HBO in November 1997 and received
theatrical release across the United States in February 1998.
Just as Christine maintains a vampiric association with the men that
own and drive her, gradually turning them into extensions of the car’s in-
nate evil, The Night Flier poses another unholy union between malevolent
spirits and the machine. The film’s vampire, ironically named Dwight Ren-
field (Michael H. Moss), alludes to Dracula’s asylum-bound acolyte in
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Fascinated by flies and other airborne insects,
Stoker’s Renfield remains confined throughout the novel and upon Drac-
ula’s arrival in London is permanently grounded by his master’s cruel and
vicious silencing. The Renfield in The Night Flier, on the other hand, has fi-
nally found his own wings—or, more precisely, the wings of a black Cessna
airplane that he uses to transport himself to various small towns along the
East Coast where he disembarks for nocturnal feedings. Like Christine’s
relationship with the men who own her, the airplane maintains an intimate
bond with the vampire that pilots it. The Cessna flies only at night, invisi-
ble to radar and the human eye alike, and the machine itself appears to
partake literally in the bloodletting activities of its pilot.
When Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer), the unscrupulous reporter for
the tabloid Inside View, examines the interior of the cockpit, he discovers
the instrument panel covered in dry blood and gore, as if the vampire
somehow has shared his bloody feasts with the airplane itself. Indeed, the
IT (1990)
Just after the 1986 publication of this novel, Stephen King called IT “the
summation of everything I have learned and done in my whole life to this
point” (Winter 184). Indeed, the novel embodies many of the issues, con-
cepts, and narrative stylistics King has been employing since Carrie. Even
characters and objects from earlier books recur or are resurrected for
cameo appearances—the 1958 Plymouth Fury from Christine, a younger
version of The Shining’s Dick Hallorann. The core subject matter of IT—
that an entire town can become a haunted landscape—surely owes its ori-
gins to ’Salem’s Lot and The Body (Stand by Me). But neither ’Salem’s Lot
nor The Body delves into the elaborate historical and sociological evil that
is represented in Derry, Maine. IT is a far more ambitious effort, the work
of a writer who has been preparing for such an in-depth and integrated
analysis in previous narratives, but has finally reached that point in his ca-
reer where he possesses the tools to undertake the challenge. To illustrate
this point, the reader needs only to refer to King’s comments in the chap-
ter 1 interview of this volume regarding the importance of selecting Ban-
gor as the urban prototype upon which Derry was based. The novel details
the interrelationship between the town of Derry and the monster known
as It, a creature that helps to sustain the town’s economic viability in ex-
change for Derry’s willingness to allow the monster to prey on its children.
Even as the novel is a historical portrait of a small town, and It an evil
force linked to human depravity, IT is primarily a novel about child abuse.
As such, this issue connects most intimately to so much earlier work in
King’s canon, for the theme is an obsessive one in his universe. In the
novel, child abuse is an effective means of highlighting the gap that sepa-
rates adults from children, a separation that the seven adult members of
the Losers’ Club must close by returning to the town where as children
they shared a collective experience of battling It years earlier. As in Stand
by Me, Hearts in Atlantis, and Dolores Claiborne, the reactivation of mem-
ory, centered upon a return to childhood, is necessary to vanquish or at
least to balance the destructive energies operating in King’s universe. In
I think the problems are mostly with the scripting, not with the
acting, per se, or the directing. There are weaknesses in the script,
places where Kubrick and Diane Johnson apparently didn’t
think, or maybe where they thought too much. . . . I thought that
Kubrick dealt with things sometimes in a way that was almost
prissy. I wonder if he’s ever seen Dawn of Dead or if he’s ever
seen Alien? If he’s ever had a conversation with himself about
primal terror? What I’m talking about is just going out and get-
ting the reader or viewer by the throat and never letting go. Not
playing games and not playing the artiste. Because horror has its
own artistry, in that never-let-up sort of feeling. That’s what’s
wrong with The Shining, basically . . . [t]he movie has no heart;
there’s no center to the picture. I wrote the book as a tragedy,
and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each
other. Here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing
to be lost. . . . Another big problem, the more I think about it, is
that Jack Nicholson shouldn’t have been cast as Jack Torrance.
He’s too dark right from the outset of the film. The horror in the
novel comes from the fact that Jack Torrance is a nice guy, not
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INDEX | 231
Koontz, Dean, xvii fathers in, 101–2
Kubrick, Stanley, 197–201
see also The Shining nature and, 106–7
Kubrick, Vivian, 202
secrets in, 104–6, 114–15
Langella, Frank, 181
Lant, Kathleen Margaret, 62, 70 spiral imagery in, 108–9
Laurie, Piper, xvii Pet Sematary Two, xvii
Lawnmower Man, The, xiii, xvii, 150 Peyton Place, 10
Lee, Spike, 13–14 Pharr, Mary, 51, 72
Leibowitz, Flo, 87 Playboy (interview with King), 199
Lewis, Sinclair, 180 Poe, Edgar Allan, xviii, 11, 118–20, 204
Lindsay, Shelley Stamp, xvi Porky’s, 24–5, 31
Lloyd, Ann, xiv Pyrokinesis, 34
Lost Boys, The, 182
Lugosi, Bela, 181 Quicksilver Highway, 174
Manchel, Frank, 87 Racial issues, 13–15, 42, 93, 135–7, 139–41, 143
Mangler, The, 10, 162–5, 169, 170, 172 Rage, The: Carrie 2, xvii
demonic imagery in, 164 Return to ‘Salem’s Lot, A, xvii
Marriage of Figaro, The, 129 Rice, Anne, xvii, 144
Marx, Karl, 169–70 Ritter, John, 176
Maximum Overdrive, xv, 19–20, 154–7, 162, 170 Roadwork, 157
demonic imagery in, 155–6 Romance genre, 67, 81
M. Butterfly, 124 Romero, George, 190
Minghella, Anthony, 9 Rose Madder, 62, 215
Misery, 9, 11–2, 20, 61–71 Rose Red, 15, 175, 211–16
novel, 63–4 Rosner, David, 171
Montag, Warren, 171 Running Man, The, 157–62, 171
Morrison, Toni, 13 novel, 158–60
Mother-heroines, 53, 54, 59–60, 71–2, 79, 81–3,
204 ’Salem’s Lot, xxi, 6, 8, 177–84
Mulvey, Laura, 28, 31 novel, 69–70, 108, 177–81, 183
Murnau, F. W., 181 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 159–61
Mussell, Kay, 53 Schreck, Max, 181
Science fiction, 149–50, 170–1
Needful Things, 7–8, 207 Secret Window, Secret Garden, 8–9
Nelson, Thomas Allen, 87–8 Senf, Carol, 60, 81–2
Nicholson, Jack, 199–201, 203 September 11, 16–17, 171
Nielson, A. C. 173–4, 211 Sexuality, 53, 56, 70, 78–9, 152–3, 203
Night Flyer, The, 165–9 Shakespeare, William, 35, 75
short story, 16 Shawshank Redemption, The, xix-xx, xv, 12,
Night of the Living Dead, xviii, 207 14, 49–50, 117–18, 126–38
Nightmare on Elm Street, 25 Academy Award nominations, xvii, 145
Night Shift, 162 novel, 12, 130
rocks and walls in, 127–30, 132, 135
Of Mice and Men, 15 women in, 129–31
Shining, The
Patriarchal institutions and behavior, 78–83, alcoholism in, 200–1, 204
85–7, 94–5, 101–6, 164 bathrooms in, 90–4
Pearl Harbor, 19 fathers in, 101–2
Pet Sematary, 53, 85–6, 101–9, 112, 114–15, King’s televised miniseries, 8, 95–6, 174–5,
148–9 197–206, 217
INDEX | 233
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR