Because King’s heroines are virtuosos of suffering, because they are so epically, chronically abused, he’s sometimes called out for portraying women as victims. His early female characters, especially, were trapped in abusive relationships that they managed to escape only to enter into new ones. But what King was really homing in on was male contempt and hostility toward women and children. He writes stories about the way external forces act on people—sometimes those are supernatural forces. Mostly they are societal. The system King returns to repeatedly is patriarchy and the powerlessness of women and children within it.
With few exceptions King’s heroines suffer the systemic abuse of a power structure that imprisons them in dependent marriages, that isolates and keeps them poor, that shames and intimidates them into complying, that gaslights them constantly. Women, he has seemed to say, for a very long time—and with increasing clarity—are locked in a system that robs them of agency, that drives them crazy, that loathes their bodies and fears their power. It is not that women are inherently weak or monstrous, but that they are trapped in the crumbling Gothic castle of male-dominated society, from which there is no real escape. At least until they wake up and confront the truth.
THE STEPHEN KING HEROINES OF THE 1970S were often helpless and paralyzed or acted unconsciously. Carrie was just the first, the only child of a religious fanatic obsessed with female purity, a woman who thinks of women’s bodies as inherently unclean. Carrie’s domestic life is hell, and the secular world of her high school is a brutal, Hobbesian nightmare: Her peers are savage social Darwinists who pile on her because they sense weakness.
The story starts with a scene of Carrie getting her period for the first time while showering in the locker room after gym. Because she has no idea what’s happening, she thinks she’s dying and reacts with horror. In the book King interrupts the scene with bits of case reports and news clippings—a distancing technique that removes us from Carrie emotionally. But in the Brian De Palma-directed film, we see Sissy Spacek’s Carrie as if in an erotic dream: her own, luxuriating in the shower. Then the dream turns into a nightmare.
When the meanest of mean girls sees what’s happening, she starts yelling, “Gross!” and “Plug it up!” and pelts Carrie with tampons and maxi pads. The others join in. Eventually Carrie is rescued by the gym teacher, who regards her with a mixture of pity and disgust. Nobody can handle her abjection or even wants to. The principal, who can’t be bothered to get her name right, is uncomfortable talking about menstruation. The fourth time he calls her “Cassie,” she flips the ashtray off his desk with her mind. At home, when she asks her mother why she never told her about this particular aspect of feminine biology, her mother locks her in a makeshift prayer closet decorated with a gruesome crucified Jesus with glowing eyes.
Bullied and prude-shamed by her peers, abused and slut-shamed by her mother, Carrie finds herself in a classic double bind. She is locked in victimhood. When her murderous rage finally explodes at the end of the book, it is both unfocused and uncontained—literally scorched earth. Her telekinetic superpowers are a metaphor for her sublimated trauma and rage, but what makes the book (and the movie) truly terrifying is not that Carrie murders her senior class by burning the school to the ground, but that she survived her situation as long as she did.
EARLY ON, KING EXPRESSED A DESIRE TO create female characters who were more complex than the ones usually found in the horror genre. As his career progressed, his vision seemed to crystallize in some consistent ways around this, and in the ’80s his heroines started to come slowly into power. It was in this decade that he created his monstrous female representations of evil (the car in Christine, the pregnant spider in It, the deranged fan in Misery) as symbols of misogynistic fear.
Indeed, female power comes at a cost. In Cujo, Donna Trenton waits, menaced by a rabid dog and trapped in a car with her dying son, for someone to come to her rescue. Nobody does. After she bludgeons the beast to death by herself, her husband looks on in horror: He sees her and her actions as monstrous. Similarly, Carrie’s body is presented as unnatural and abject—her mother tells her she’s dirty and shameful; her peers tell her she’s gross; her gym teacher tells her she’s pitiable; her principal finds her uncomfortable and inconvenient and not worth addressing by her correct name.
(If after four decades it wasn’t entirely clear that King has been getting better and better at understanding the position of women in the culture, it is certainly clear now, given that the President himself talks about women bleeding as a way to denigrate them. Mika Brzezinski, Megyn Kelly . . . bleeders all.)
In the ’90s King wrote a feminist trilogy. In Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game and Rose Madder, abused and disempowered women come into consciousness and fight their way out of different prisons—Dolores might go to jail for murder; Gerald’s wife, Jessie, is left handcuffed to a bed in an isolated cabin; Rose escapes her abusive cop husband—by facing their childhood abuse, reconnecting with their younger selves, their daughters, their friends and their dissociated selves, and tapping into their righteous anger. They become heroes when they get mad. Because without anger a hero’s got nothing.
In King’s recent novel Sleeping Beauties, written with his son Owen, a town where the main industry is a women’s prison becomes afflicted with a plague. “Something happens when women go to sleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent, and while they sleep they go to another place . . .”
The book didn’t turn out to be the return to the ’90s novels of female rage that it promised to be, but in one sense, at least, it paints a familiar picture: When a woman turns out to be immune to the sleeping disease, the men can’t decide whether to revere, study or slay her.
That’s a story we’ve heard before and will hear again. King might not have returned to his righteous heroines yet, but he still has a gift for sensing all the terrible unseen things that we know are there, the things that keep us all lying awake at night.
Sissy Spacek as Carrie White in 1976’s Carrie.
Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro as Donna and Tad Trenton in 1983’s Cujo
Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) battled with a transformed Christine in 1983’s Christine.
“I kept myself separate and lurked in dark corners of the soundstage, brooding, while everybody else had fun ”
—Sissy Spacek, from her memoir My Extraordinary Ordinary Life
The shape-shifting monster manifested as an enormous female spider in the 1990 TV miniseries of It.
Piper Laurie and Spacek as Margaret and Carrie White in Carrie.
Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in 1990’s Misery.
Bates stars as the eponymous Dolores Claiborne; Christopher Plummer (right) as Detective John Mackey.
“[Dolores Claiborne] shows us three unsympathetic, difficult, thorny, neurotic women . . . and why they are that way”
—director Taylor Hackford
King’s feminist trilogy.
The Mist
A FOG SETTLES OVER A SMALL TOWN. MADNESS AND MONSTERS LIE INSIDE. SINCE ITS 2007 RELEASE, FRANK DARABONT’S MASTERPIECE HAS GAINED A MUST-SEE REPUTATION FOR ITS HAUNTING ARTISTRY— AND THE UNFORGETTABLY BLEAK ENDING. By Darren Franich
PEOPLE ARE TRAPPED INSIDE A SUPERMARket; stuff happens. It’s the simplest description of King’s short novel The Mist, first published in 1979, but it hardly does justice to either the story itself or Frank Darabont’s powerful adaptation, which ratchets up the tension to unparalleled extremes. Everyman David (Thomas Jane) struggles to save his son from the horrors outside. The real horror is within the small market where David and other residents of Bridgton, Maine, find themselves after the mysterious mist descends. A skeptical lawyer (Andre Braugher) wants to open the doors. A religious zealot (Marcia Gay Harden) thinks the end times have arrived.
Like his later works Under the Dome and Storm of the Century, The
Mist reflects King’s cockeyed view of Americans, his love and fear of small-town folksy communities. “People are basically good, decent!” says David’s ally Amanda (Laurie Holden). “We’re a civilized society!”
Things get uncivilized quickly, though, as the neighbors begin turning on one another. Throughout the 2007 film Darabont deftly balances the human morality play with genuinely gruesome horror freak-outs. The monsters outside are barely witnessed nightmares: half dinosaur, half insect, all globular gore goop who kill characters in genuinely surprising fashion. Some die with their story arcs only half finished.
And then there’s that ending, one of the darkest in movie history. A few lucky survivors flee the supermarket in a car and drive as far as they can—until they run out of gas, still surrounded by the mist. The five people in the car face certain death. Someone pulls out a gun; four shots ring out. Moments later the sole survivor is rocked by a revelation that leads to unfathomable despair. King ended his short novel with hopeful ambiguity, but he praised Darabont’s revision, telling EW’s Anthony Breznican (then of USA Today) that “the ending is such a jolt—wham!—it’s frightening.”
Although The Mist achieved only a modest box office gross, it has lived on as a new horror cult classic (a black-and-white version available on DVD further enhanced the film’s cinephile bona fides). A few years after its release, Darabont brought several actors from the film’s supporting cast—and creature designer Greg Nicotero—into his AMC adaptation of The Walking Dead.
David Drayton (Thomas Jane) holds his son Billy (Nathan Gamble). Actress Laurie Holden (far left) later reunited with Darabont on The Walking Dead.
TV’S THE MIST (2017)
King’s spooky novella got a short-lived second interpretation in the hands of Danish-born showrunner Christian Torpe. “I thought it was incredibly timely to do a show about what people do when they are blinded by fear,” the executive producer told Entertainment Weekly prior to the series’ debut. Unfortunately the Spike TV series received mixed reviews from critics and viewers and was canceled after a single 10-episode season.
Darabont filming.
David tries to rescue Norm (Chris Owen), a supermarket worker who meets a grim end.
Beyond the Horror
KING’S SENSITIVE SIDE—AND POWERFUL LEGACY
ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT SAMMELIN
Stand by Me
ROB REINER’S BELOVED 1986 COMING-OF-AGE FILM SHOWCASED THE HORROR MAESTRO’S SENSITIVE SIDE, SENDING FOUR BOYS—AND FUTURE HOLLYWOOD STARS—ON THE PATH TOWARD BECOMING YOUNG MEN. By Nicole Sperling
CENTERED ON A QUEST TO FIND A MISSING neighborhood kid, Reiner’s drama, based on King’s short story “The Body,” tracks a quartet of misfits trying to make sense of their own mortality. It wasn’t a sure bet: The contemplative tale had no stars, tough subject matter and no female love interest. But Stand by Me, which came out in 1986, was a box office hit that launched River Phoenix into stardom, solidified Reiner’s directing career and even garnered an Oscar nomination for screenwriters Raynold Gideon and Bruce Evans.
Fresh off comedies This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing, Reiner had deeply personal reasons for tackling King’s short story. Through Wil Wheaton’s Gordie Lachance, an insecure 12-year-old haunted by the death of his adored older brother, Reiner found a vehicle to come to terms with his own complicated relationship with his father, famed writer-director Carl Reiner. “I grew up thinking my father thought I didn’t have any talent,” Reiner told Gene Siskel back in 1986. “Conquering those kinds of feelings is what Stand by Me is about.”
To get there Reiner had to develop authentic characters out of young, inexperienced actors—including Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell—something he achieved with precision casting and lots of coaching. “One of the reasons it’s such an enduring piece of art is that Rob cast four young men who were basically the characters that we played,” Wheaton says. “Even in adulthood, we are still those characters, in one way or another.”
Prior to filming, Reiner set the boys up in an Oregon hotel room so they could spend two weeks together getting to know one another. “By the time we got to shooting they were a well-oiled machine,” he recalled to Variety in 2016. Reiner also wasn’t afraid to yell. He went to great lengths to get the boys terrified of an oncoming locomotive in the climactic train scene. “We did it a bunch of times, and they kept not getting worked up,” he said. “Finally, I start screaming, ‘These guys, the crew, are exhausted because you guys keep messing up, and if you’re not worried that the train is going to kill you, I’ll kill you!’ They started crying and we started rolling, and then they ran off the track and gave me a hug and said, ‘We did it. We did it, Rob!’ ”
King agreed, telling Deadline Hollywood that same year, “I love the Rob Reiner thing.” He’s not the only one.
(From left to right): Teddy Duchamp (Corey Feldman), Vern Tessio (Jerry O’Connell), Chris Chambers (River Phoenix) and Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton).
Ace Merrill (Kiefer Sutherland) threatens the four boys.
Chris comforts Gordie.
The friends prepare for a day of filming.
The Kids Are Alright
What About the Children?
THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR CONJURED TERRORIZED TOTS AND REVENGE-MINDED YOUTHS. BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN HOLLYWOOD CASTS KIDS IN MOVIES AND TV SHOWS MEANT TO TERRIFY ADULTS? WE SPOKE TO FORMER CHILD STARS IN 2017 TO FIND OUT. By Steve Daly
Dan Lloyd, who portrayed Danny Torrance at age 5, said in 2013 that one of the highlights of the film was riding his bike inside the house. He’s now a science teacher, married, with children of his own. “I just personally don’t find [The Shining] scary, because I saw it behind the scenes,” he said.
IN STEPHEN KING’S FIRST 12 YEARS OF DIZZYing success as a writer—from 1974 to 1986—he churned out a string of tales densely populated with tormented, vengeful, paranormally endowed youngsters. He and his wife, Tabitha, happened to be raising three little ones at the time: Naomi, Joe and Owen (born in 1970, 1972 and 1977, respectively). “They say write about what you know,” King told EW’s Anthony Breznican in 2013. “Having kids is like having your own little ant farm in the house.”
But King moved far beyond simply riffing on his offspring (as when he modeled aspects of Firestarter’s pyromaniacal child Charlie McGee on his daughter Naomi). He used childhood as a creative crucible, taking a vast inventory of both natural and supernatural terrors—death, neglect and abuse; vampires, ghosts and demonic possession—and made young adolescents the vessels for exploring the impact of those terrors, fears and phobias. Children are expected to be pure, unspoiled; they lack the experience or knowledge to fight fear with rationality, and thus horrors affect them without mercy. They experience life more intensely than grown-ups—and vicariously, through King’s fiction, we’re along for the ride.
In creating a harried gallery of besieged children, King traveled to and explored some very dark places. But his characters—from youths with unchecked telekinetic temper tantrums to those who meet gruesome deaths by dog, vehicle or supernatural beast—led to more mundane challenges when it came to translating his work to film and TV. Would the roles leave lasting marks on the children who played them?
There’s no youngster in the King canon more knuckle-whiteningly vulnerable than little Gage Creed of Pet Sematary: an unfortunate toddler flattened by a passing truck, then resurrected into an undead, scalpel-wielding zombie-baby fiend. Miko Hughes, now 33, was a toddler when his mom signed him up to play the part in the 1989 film version. “I was really precocious,” says Hughes. “My mom thought I might make it in commercials and got head shots taken. I got lucky.” After Pet Sematary, Hughes scored another role as a kid in peril in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), as well as a recurring role as Aaron on the ABC sitcom Full House from 1990 to ’95, but the work tapered off once he grew up. Hughes (perhaps thankfully) can hardly recall anything about making Pet Sematary, even though he’s asked often about Gage. “My memories a
re more like memories of memories,” he says, “from stories repeated [to me] through the years.” Now planning to study cinematography, he feels that being a child actor has been a mixed blessing. “In a sense it’s been a little bit of a struggle. It’s like I’m living in my own tiny shadow, y’know?”
Wil Wheaton, who was 13 when he filmed his role as Gordie Lachance in 1986’s Stand by Me, can relate. “I’m really proud,” he says of the movie’s place as a nostalgic favorite. But having a bright success at a young age casts deep shadows. “I managed to hit a grand slam by accident in my first at-bat ever,” Wheaton recalls. “I’m going to spend the rest of my career trying to prove to everyone else that it wasn’t a fluke. There are times I wish it was different.” He had a four-year gig on Star Trek: The Next Generation and in recent years has done cameos on The Big Bang Theory. Now, following in the footsteps of his Stand by Me character, Wheaton has turned to writing, running a blog, then a website, and in 2017 he came out with the novella Dead Trees Give No Shelter.
Other King child stars have had more visible careers, including Seth Green, who rocked dorky black glasses as the goofy nerd in the 1990 TV miniseries of It, and Drew Barrymore, who was just 8 when she made the campy 1984 Firestarter.
EW the Ultimate Guide to Stephen King Page 4
