Carrie’s classmates Billy Nolan (John Travolta) and Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen).
Margaret is telekinetically impaled by various kitchen implements.
TRANSLATING KING
GOING GLOBAL
Doubleday initially printed just 30,000 copies of Carrie—and fewer than half actually sold. (Today those originals fetch upwards of $1,000.) Over 40 years King has become one of the best-known, most prolific authors in the world. He has published more than 200 novels, novellas, short stories and essays, and his work has been translated into more than 50 languages. He writes at least 2,000 words a day.
RUSSIA (2013)
SPAIN (1977)
ARGENTINA (1999)
GERMANY (1983)
JAPAN (2011)
ITALY (1977)
ITALY (1988)
FRANCE (1976)
FRANCE (2013)
SPAIN (1976)
Fear Factory
25 Scariest Moments
MONSTERS, MADMEN AND MANIACAL MACHINES. SEVERED LIMBS AND BISECTED BOVINE. BEHOLD, THE BEST, THE BOLDEST, THE BLOoDIEST MOMENTS FROM STEPHEN KING’S BODY OF WORK. By Darren Franich
LET’S BE HONEST. THE PROM SCENE FROM Carrie and literally any clown appearance in It are scarier than any five Saw, two Paranormal Activity and a Blair Witch Project combined. King’s creative output spans galaxies of grotesquerie and freaky terror, with monsters that run the gamut from otherworldly to terrifyingly human to reminds-you-way-too-much-of-someone-you-know. Selecting 25 moments from his impressive catalog is no easy feat—creating this list meant that whole epochs of King-conceived horror ended up on the cutting-room floor. We set out to highlight some lesser-known but still stellar scenes, choosing just one moment to represent each project. It is entirely possible, though, that a couple of King’s greatest hits landed at the top of the roster (“Here’s Johnny!”).
9 CREEPSHOW
One of the anthology film’s most memorable moments is complete with an abominable monster living inside a wooden crate. When Professor Northrup (Hal Holbrook) realizes the beast can’t stop killing, he introduces it to his wife. Divorce, King-style.
25 DOLORES CLAIBORNE
With all the wild nightmares that populate King’s work, one shouldn’t forget his ability to capture brutal real-world fear. An interlude between housewife Dolores (Kathy Bates) and good ol’ boy husband Joe (David Strathairn) takes a sudden—and assaultive—U-turn when he slams her in the back with a piece of firewood.
24 SALEM’S LOT
Freshly undead youngster Ralphie Glick (Ronnie Scribner) floats scratching at his brother’s window, his silent smile a request for entry. Danny (Brad Savage) obligingly opens the window. We don’t see much of what happens next.
23 THE WASTE LANDS
Of all the phantasmagorical creations populating the Dark Tower saga, none is more memorably deranged than Blaine the Mono, a monorail gone rampant in apocalyptic old age. Blaine is a tauntingly strange figure, a suicide machine that just wants to have fun.
22 CREEPSHOW
A classic moment from the Creepshow anthologies: A King-scripted short finds germophobic Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall) living every New Yorker’s nightmare when his apartment is invaded by cockroaches. And then Pratt’s body is invaded by cockroaches—and inevitably there’s nothing left but roaches, roaches, roaches.
21 THE MANGLER
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper overcooked a short story about a killer laundry press, but there’s a terrifying power to the film’s first death scene, when a worker gets swallowed whole.
20 SLEEPWALKERS
Frequent King collaborator Mick Garris helmed this low-key horror thriller, which features an absolutely memorable moment. “People really should learn to keep their hands to themselves,” energy vampire Charles (Brian Krause) tells meddling Mr. Fallows (Glenn Shadix) after he pulls off Fallows’s hand.
19 MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
King remains apologetic about his sole directorial effort, but it does include one brilliant sequence: A Little League baseball coach tries to get soda from a faulty vending machine—only to be killed when the homicidal machine launches cans at high speed straight at him.
18 THE RAGE: CARRIE 2
Poor tormented Sue Snell (Amy Irving, left) returns for another round of high school terror in the by-default best of the many shoddy sequels to King adaptations. Grown-up Sue’s a guidance counselor trying to guide Carrie’s half sister away from mass homicide. For her troubles Sue winds up skewered by a fire poker.
17 CHILDREN OF THE CORN
The never-ending franchise kicked off with an intense sequence the author only hinted at in his original short story: the fine citizens of Gatlin getting massacred by their own smirking children.
16 “QUITTERS, INC.”
King’s talked openly about his past struggles with addiction, which gives this short story a searing subtext. A longtime smoker contracts a company to help him kick the habit. Soon he discovers the company’s brutal policy: smoke a cigarette, and his family can pay with their lives.
“None of us adults remember childhood. We think we remember it, which is even more dangerous”
—Stephen King
15 THE DEAD ZONE
In King’s novel, madman murderer-rapist Frank Dodd slashes his throat when he suspects his jig is up. In director David Cronenberg’s brilliant adaptation, the demented deputy sheriff goes one step further, chomping on the blades of a pair of scissors.
14 UNDER THE DOME
Adapted from one of King’s later lengthy masterworks, the small-town-snowglobe series never quite lived up to its initial promise. But what promise! When a mysterious dome descends over Chester’s Mill, a poor bovine citizen is caught inside and outside. It’s maybe the single grossest visual CBS ever allowed on television.
13 TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE
A professional hit man (David Johansen) gets an unusual assignment: kill a black cat. It’s a Monty Python-worthy premise gone Lovecraftian, and the scary part isn’t when the homicidal feline actually kills the hit man, crawling inside his mouth and devouring his insides. The scary part’s when the cat crawls back out.
12 CHRISTINE
When horror legend John Carpenter turned King’s novel into a cult-classic film, he gave new meaning to the phrase “car chase.” The possessed vintage Plymouth Fury hunts down bullying Moochie (Malcolm Danare), chasing him into an alleyway. The car leaves the alley; Moochie doesn’t.
11 “SURVIVOR TYPE”
A surgeon is stranded on a Pacific island. He keeps a diary. It’s all very Robinson Crusoe, except he has little food, and rescue won’t come. When he injures his ankle, he has to amputate— and maybe now has food.
“King’s facility with striking narrative gold was and is an inspiration. He sets the standard, sets the bar, for us to aspire to”
—J.J. Abrams
10 PET SEMATARY
By the last page Louis Creed has put his dead wife in the mystical Indian resurrection mound. In his empty house he awaits her return. The novel leaves Louis hanging on a freaky final sentence: “ ‘Darling,’ it said.”
9 CREEPSHOW
One of the anthology film’s segments plays like an old-school creature feature.
8 CREEPSHOW 2
The standout entry from the King anthology film is “The Raft,” which finds a group of coeds terrorized by, of all things, a man-eating oil slick. In the middle of a lake the last survivors think they’re safe—and then the oil slips through the cracks.
7 1408
Locked in a haunted hotel room, Mike Enslin (John Cusack) tries to get the attention of a man across the street. When Mike holds a lamp to his face, so does the man—and that’s when Mike realizes the man is him. Mike turns—just in time to avoid the SLASH.
6 CARRIE
The jump scare as high art. At the end of Brian De Palma’s teen-terror classic, lone survivor Sue (Irving, again) has a somber dream about laying flowers
at the grave of Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). It’s a moment of quiet serenity. And then the bloody hand grasps out of the ground.
5 CUJO
Mom Donna (Dee Wallace) leans over her son (Danny Pintauro) to unbuckle his safety belt. The camera moves up behind her, as if ready to attack—and then slobbering, rabid Cujo the Dog almost jumps through little Tad’s window.
4 THE MIST
What’s in the mist? Nothing: That’s what bag boy Norm (Chris Owen) thinks when he volunteers to walk outside and restart the supermarket’s generator. But when the loading door opens, he’s grabbed by constricting tentacles, pulled screaming into the ether. As in much of King’s work, the greatest scare is what you don’t see. What the hell are those tentacles even attached to?
3 IT
A little boy named Georgie Denbrough loses his paper boat in a storm drain. Inside the sewer lingers Pennywise, a clown with tufts of blood-red hair. He offers the boy balloons. “They float . . . they float.” Georgie reaches his hand into the sewer and quickly loses it. Our nation’s Clown Terror began here.
2 THE TOMMY-KNOCKERS
Why would Sheriff Merrill (Joanna Cassidy) collect scary dolls? Of course they attack her when she tries to call for help. They. Are. Scary Dolls. Also, they’re controlled by aliens, or it’s a hallucination or something. The point is: SCARY DOLLS. DON’T BUY THEM.
1 THE SHINING
No one ever watched Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show the same way again. The freaky-hilarious announcement Daddy Torrance delivers through the freshly axed-in door is somehow vintage King: pure pop-referential nuclear-family mania. What sells it is Jack Nicholson’s murderous smile. He’s broken all-the-way bad, and he’s never been happier.
The Shining
STANLEY KUBRICK’S ADAPTATION OF KING’S HAUNTED-HOTEL NOVEL RECEIVED MIXED REVIEWS UPON ITS RELEASE—THE AUTHOR HIMSELF HAS REMAINED A FERVENT CRITIC OF THE 1980 FILM. TODAY IT’S REVERED AS A HORROR CLASSIC. By Darren Franich
THE MOMENTS PILE UP, LIKE DEAD BODIES IN a bloody hallway. The little girls saying “Come and play with us, Danny” in eerie unison. The blood flooding out from the elevator. Those typewritten pages repeating “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” And there is Jack himself: Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a failed author and a maniac father. He carves through a door with an ax and yells, “Here’s Johnny!”
That line was improvised by Nicholson, but The Shining is often praised for the exacting detail of Kubrick’s filmmaking process. To bring the Overlook Hotel to life, the filmmaker oversaw the construction of massive interior sets at London’s Elstree Studios. The director used the relatively new Steadicam rig to follow young Danny (Danny Lloyd) as he pedaled his tricycle through the Overlook’s seemingly infinite hallways.
Filming lasted more than a year and took an infamous toll on lead actress Shelley Duvall, who told Roger Ebert in 1980, “I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week.” Because the movie never explains its ghostly surrealism, it created a cottage industry of theorizing. In 2012 the film Room 237 documented some of the more popular insane ideas: That The Shining is about the Holocaust; that it’s Kubrick’s explanation for faking the moon landing; that it’s meant to be played forward and backward simultaneously.
Stephen King, while he offered some praise for the film in his 1981 essay-book Danse Macabre, has openly criticized many of the decisions Kubrick made. He was most vocal about the casting of Nicholson and was quoted in 2016: “When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know then he’s crazy as a shit-house rat. All he does is get crazier.” The dearth of supernatural elements at the Overlook also struck a nerve. Kubrick’s film also ends much differently from the book: A key character dies, but the hotel remains standing.
In 2013 King released a sequel novel, Doctor Sleep. In the afterword, King mentions the film adaptation only briefly. “Of course, there was Stanley Kubrick’s movie,” he wrote, “which many seem to remember—for reasons I have never quite understood—as one of the scariest films they have ever seen.”
Under the guidance of his imaginary friend Tony, Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd) uses his mother’s red lipstick to write “Redrum” on a door.
THE SHINING (1997)
King brought his own vision to life in an ABC miniseries adaptation starring Wings star Steven Weber, Rebecca De Mornay and Courtland Mead. EW TV critic Ken Tucker called it “the most frightening TV movie ever made.”
Nicholson and Kubrick relax between takes.
Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) cowers in the bathroom as Jack breaks down the door with a firefighter’s ax.
Misery
NEARLY THREE DECADES AGO KATHY BATES SHATTERED JAMES CAAN’S ANKLES ONSCREEN IN BONE-CRUNCHING DETAIL. SHE EARNED AN ACADEMY AWARD FOR HER MESMERIZING PERFORMANCE AS AN UNHINGED SUPERFAN WHO TAKES HER FAVORITE WRITER CAPTIVE. By Devan Coggan
SLEDGEHAMMERS HAVE NEVER BEEN THE same. Adapted from Stephen King’s 1987 novel, Misery weaves a claustrophobic tale of injured writer Paul Sheldon (Caan), who’s taken in by his self-professed No. 1 fan, Annie Wilkes (Bates). As the snow piles up outside her Colorado cabin, Annie tries to nurse Paul back to health—until she learns that his latest book kills off her favorite character. Annie’s cheery facade slips, and she becomes increasingly unhinged, eventually forcing Paul to remain her captive while he writes a manuscript with a happier ending.
Original director George Roy Hill (The Sting) backed out over the now-infamous ankle-breaking scene, making way for producer Rob Reiner, who had previously directed King’s Stand by Me, to step in behind the camera. As the hunt was on for stars to headline the horrific two-hander, screenwriter William Goldman suggested stage actress Bates play Annie. “When I first saw it at, like, a private screening, I went out, and I was like, ‘Oh, f---. I’m in trouble,’ ” Bates told EW in 2015. Instead the film launched the actress’s screen career. “I decided when I die, it’s going to be Kathy ‘Misery’ Bates,” she said.
William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino all turned down the role of Paul. Warren Beatty was interested, but he was busy filming Dick Tracy. Eventually Caan signed on, and since then he’s become inextricably linked to the embattled novelist. “Because of that [role] I heard maybe 100,000 times, ‘How are your legs, Jimmy?’ ” Caan told EW in 2015.
Misery’s most iconic moment was a bit of artistic license. In King’s novel Annie chops off Paul’s foot with an ax and cauterizes the wound with a blowtorch. Goldman was outraged when Reiner rewrote the script but later admitted it was the right call. “It became instantly clear when we screened the movie,” Goldman wrote in Four Screenplays with Essays. “If we had gone the way I wanted, it would have been too much. The audience would have hated Kathy and, in time, hated us.”
Instead audiences—including King—fell in love with Paul and Annie’s cockadoodie saga. Recalled Caan of an early screening: “When she comes in at the end, it’s dead quiet . . . and you hear, ‘Watch out. She’s got a gun!’ And it was Stephen.”
James Caan as Paul Sheldon.
Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes.
Director Rob Reiner chats with Bates on-set in 1990.
Paul and Annie duke it out after he brains his captor with a typewriter.
Nasty Women
Hell Hath No Fury
CARRIE WAS JUST THE FIRST. KING HAS MADE IT HIS MISSION TO WRITE COMPELLING HEROINES WHO HAVE ENDURED AND INFLICTED HORRIFYING ABUSE—AND WHO ARE UNITED BY A POWERFUL, TROUBLING THREAD. by Carina Chocano
Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance in 1980’s The Shining
STEPHEN KING WAS A SLEEPOVER STAPLE when I was in middle school. We’d stay up late and read the gory parts out loud, then freak out until we got in trouble and lie awake anxiously the rest of the night. King revealed that, beneath the flimsiest of protective veneers, the familiar could be bleak, dark and terrifying. Chi
ldhood was a trap. So were adulthood and marriage and being a girl. Potentially nice things turned horribly bad on a dime: being voted prom queen, for instance, or a beloved pet St. Bernard or even your very first car.
We read King because he manifested all the terrible unseen things that we sensed were there and validated all the scary, lurking things that girls learn to fear on the path to adulthood. He went to the worst places and returned to them again and again. His stories hinged on trauma and functioned like it too—the compulsion to return to the source of one’s pain, to relive old wounds, seeking healing. The solution always turned out to be owning your rage.
EW the Ultimate Guide to Stephen King Page 3
