"Sometimes Dead is Better"
The horror of Stephen King in 2023
To celebrate Halloween, today’s post delves into one of my favorite genres — horror! — and the one writer who has become synonymous with it.
I love the work of Stephen King. His book On Writing is what first convinced me that anyone can be a writer, and taught me the only way to get there was to put in the work. I’ve read countless of his novels since I was a teenager, and he’s a huge reason I love the horror genre. My personal favorite is Misery, but I think about the Lincoln Tunnel scene from The Stand every time I go to New York. His contribution to popular culture extends into his film adaptations, which I see as a genre unto themselves. He brought us the killer dog from Cujo and the bloody prom from Carrie and the sentient car from Christine and the murderous clown from It (not to mention contributions outside of the genre, like Stand by Me or The Shawshank Redemption). As an insanely prolific author, of course he has lesser works, but the classics are well worth the filler.
He’s also given us enough alcoholic writers from Maine to form a congressional district. It’s not hard to spot a King story, and in their conventions I find a great deal of comfort. And this is the main argument I want to make here: Stephen King stories are many things, but they aren’t going to keep me up at night in 2023.
At this point his contributions feel more like the classic Universal monsters and the nineteenth-century novels that inspired them — staples of the horror genre, and good creepy fun for the whole family. Or more accurately, King’s work is closer to the 1950’s B-movies that he devoured as a kid, more The Thing from Another World (1951) than The Thing (1982). His campy performance in the great anthology film Creepshow (1982), in which he plays a dull farmer dealing with an invasive alien species taking over his property, leans right into this core affection of his. For King, horror and sci-fi are realms for the imagination, a playground for ideas that can bend or ignore the rules of reality. His is a populist horror that embraces camp, the escalation of a spooky hook into a well-structured story, and just enough scares to satisfy before leaving you smiling at the end.
What it comes down to is King’s generally optimistic philosophy about human nature. Stephen King believes in Good and Evil, and all the horrific events and characters in his stories have a protagonist to combat them. The kids in It are the heroes — no matter how omnipotent Pennywise may seem, and no matter what setbacks they face, we trust that Good will triumph in the end. The same goes for the sprawling cast of The Stand who, eventually, all manage to band together and take down the rising forces of evil in Las Vegas. There’s little of the prevailing madness we see from Shirley Jackson, or the sinister antiheroes of Edgar Allan Poe, or the philosophical subtext of Brian Evenson, or the stomach-dropping twists of the most memorable Twilight Zones. King certainly mines and builds on these elements, but more often than not, the heroes will defeat the monsters.
Of course, there will be blood in King stories (see: Carrie), but that’s usually not where he’s going to leave you (with the exception of: Carrie). We might lose some friends along the way, but Paul Sheldon will, somehow, escape from his murderous super-fan Annie Wilkes. The Losers Club will defeat It, their collective greatest fears incarnate (which — spoiler alert — turns out to just be a giant spider in the sewer). And, crucially, Jack Torrance will defeat the Overlook Hotel and its (literal) ghosts in The Shining.
The Shining is one of the greatest horror films ever made. Its sense of dread and pacing, the imagery, the unforgettable performances of Jack Nicolson and Shelley Duvall (under infamously abusive conditions from the director, it must be acknowledged), the spine-tingling score, the ambiguity and malevolence of the Overlook setting. It’s a stone-cold classic, and this is because of — not despite — its many divergences from the novel.
Stephen King famously disliked Kubrick’s interpretation of his novel. But if Kubrick had gone with King’s original script, the world would be missing a foundational horror masterpiece. A big part of what makes The Shining so scary is the bleakness of its worldview — a worldview that is absent from the source material.
The Jack Torrance of King’s novel [40+ YEAR-OLD SPOILERS INCOMING] does not freeze to death in murderous pursuit of his wife and child through a hedge maze. He is not immortalized in an old framed photograph in the lobby, absorbed into the hotel’s timeless menace. In fact, he doesn’t kill a single person on his rampage (the hotel chef Hallorann does not get an axe to the back [and in this alternate universe, neither does Groundskeeper Willie on The Simpsons]). The hotel does not win in Stephen King’s original — Jack sacrifices himself, fighting off the possessive madness, to destroy it in a furnace explosion while his family escapes. Jack is a martyr, not a monster. We get an epilogue. We get a sequel.
Stephen King — or at least the version of him that we meet on the page — trusts the inherent goodness of mankind more than Stanley Kubrick does. Kubrick’s is not a story of an alcoholic’s selfless redemption; it’s about being consumed by internal demons and the ghosts of the past, that ceaseless gravity toward evil that has animated human history and defies easy explanation. What’s scary about it is that sometimes, those forces win. Sometimes good people fall prey to them, and take others down with them. And what lies at the bottom is an unknowable void.
If I had been around in 1977 to read the novel before seeing the film, maybe I would agree with King that Kubrick had bastardized his story. But as it stands, to me at least, the novel is a decent haunted house story, and the movie is a trailblazing work of horror that pushed the genre forward and influenced countless filmmakers.
There are other King adaptations that push the needle further in the “existential dread” direction to more of a mixed (or even detrimental) effect. The Mist (2007) comes to mind — Frank Darabont’s adaptation ends [16 YEAR-OLD SPOILER INCOMING] with our hero mercy killing his family as the world seems on the brink of destruction, only to realize seconds later that the it is definitively not. A twist perhaps more hopelessly bleak than any of Rod Serling’s, and a pivotal deviation from the novella that literally ends on the word “hope,” with none of the familial bloodshed. Rather than transcending the source material, this ending just leaves the viewer feeling manipulated, replacing ambiguity with cold (and improbable) brutality.
Horror as a genre relies on a constant push toward more, as each new convention or concept inevitably loses its power through sequels, reboots, imitators, and the new fictions that more closely align with the central fears and obsessions of a given cultural moment. Today’s horrifying monsters are tomorrow’s camp, immortalized in the pop-up aisles of Spirit Halloween.
For a reboot or homage or sequel to translate to contemporary viewers, it needs to adapt the source material to fit their fears. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is a classic example of this, twisting a straightforward alien/monster story into a harrowing depiction of paranoia, that Cold War fear that any one of us could be one of “them” (see also: John Carpenter’s They Live (1987)). Stephen King adaptations show no sign of abetting, but even the most successful recent ones — despite some fun new scares — don’t transcend the conventions of the source material. The post-war optimism of Stephen King’s working class Maine childhood reads differently in the post-truth fragmentation of 2023, where the most acclaimed horror auteurs are creating genre-bending social commentary or pitch black “prestige” films about the inevitability of our darkest impulses.
And there’s nothing wrong with that! This may all seem like criticism, but I assure you it is not. I’m glad we live in the universe we do (well, excluding all the real-world horror offscreen), where Stanley Kubrick rejected King’s original screenplay and took things in a darker direction, and I’m glad that Stephen King didn’t change his style in response. I don’t go to Stephen King for existential dread or nihilism or gore or shock-value. I don’t want Ari Aster to adapt one of his books for A24. I go to Stephen King for curses that make you lose weight and “evil fucking rooms” and crash-landed UFOs emitting alien brain parasites that make you ravenously write Western novels. He’s the drive-in monster feature, the pulp comic strip, that Halloween balance of tricks and treats. The carnival ghost train that’s a little rickety but still leaves you laughing with your friends when you come climb out.