by George Beahm
Stephen King: 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, justifying why The National Enquirer was doing the country a real service in running 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 would argue that there was a constructive purpose behind my scrapbook: It was proof, at least to myself, that the bogeyman is dead. But there is something else at work here as well. There is always the urge to see somebody 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.
Magistrale: 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 successful at capturing and allegorizing “national phobic pressure points”?
Stephen King: 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 everybody 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.
Magistrale: Margaret White’s (Piper Laurie) vision of the world thoroughly warps Carrie’s once the bucket of blood comes crashing down. Mother’s intrusive voice becomes a dominating presence in the cataclysmic scene when Carrie burns down the gym. However, Mrs. White is wrong; not everyone is laughing at Carrie. [Director Brian] De Palma makes that very clear. The gym teacher feels great compassion toward Carrie’s humiliation—you can read this in her face—and so do the majority of Carrie’s other classmates, except, of course, that wretched Norma. I’ve always thought that one of the most unnerving moments in the film is that everyone gets punished, the empathetic as well as the evil pranksters.
Stephen King: 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 addition 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,2 a film that has not yet been released but I have seen it, has a scene in it where there is a group of bewildered Americans who are locked behind barbed wire in a detainment camp. I sometimes think I wrote this entire novel just to be able to have this one woman in the group identified by her Blockbuster video card. There is a terrifying fear of the government that runs throughout Dreamcatcher, and that’s something that runs through many of the films—Firestarter, The Stand—the idea that they would rather kill all of us than tell us the truth. This is something we should all remain afraid of.
Magistrale: 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?
Stephen King: 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 production 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 dollar 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.
Magistrale: 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?
Stephen King: That’s right. But I think I have developed a reputation in Hollywood as a “bankable writer.” Castle Rock has had better luck than anyone in decoding what it is that I do. That is, with the exception of Needful Things.3 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 indecipherable because it doesn’t have time to tell all the stories and do all the setups. It’s a complicated book.
Magistrale: The same thing happened to ’Salem’s Lot. As a miniseries in 1979, it held together pretty nicely. But when it was cut apart and re-released as ’Salem’s Lot: The Movie, it was pale reflection of its former self (no vampire pun intended).
Stephen King: And none taken. When Tobe Hopper finished ’Salem’s Lot, there was a lot of serious talk about buying it back from CBS and releasing it as a feature-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 Kingdom 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 Kingdom 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 moviemakers 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 titles, 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 t
o 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, Secret Garden” from Four Past Midnight. Nothing was happening to it. Now Anthony Minghella, who directed The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, is going to make it into a movie.4 My novella is the right length—it’s small, and it’s in one place. Columbia now has the chance to make a great feature. Castle Rock made a great feature out of Misery because it’s short and all in one place. The same thing is true of Gerald’s Game, which is a property that I have decided to hold on to. We’ve had a lot of offers on Gerald’s Game, but I have refused. I’m thinking eventually, if I get a chance in my retirement, I want to write the screenplay for Gerald’s Game.5
Now that I have the rights to Kingdom Hospital, ABC wants it to be a television series. I think that might work. I want to divide it up into a fifteen-hour series, and that would give ABC two or three seasons of airtime. You see, what everybody wants when they do a TV series is something similar to CSI or Seinfeld. The magic moment occurs at the end of the fifth season, when a program gets somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty episodes. Then the show gets syndicated and everybody gets really, really wealthy all at once. My idea is to take Kingdom Hospital and expand it. If you have a short story you can always expand it, whereas if you are working with a novel, you are always thinking of taking stuff out. This is not to say, however, that filming a novel can’t be done.6
Getting back to your original question, because I knew as soon as you asked it that this is where we would be spending most of our time. I love the movies. I have always loved the movies. And one of the reasons that my work gets bought in the first place is that I write cinemagraphically. Producers pick up my stories because they are cinematic. They are able to take my stories around to directors, and sooner or later a director says, This really pushes my buttons. I really want to do that. This is what happened with the novel Dreamcatcher. The first-draft screenplay that Bill Goldman did of it was good, but probably not good enough to justify an eight-million-dollar budget. Lawrence Kasden [the film’s director] broke it open because he understood what Castle Rock has for years, that this is not a novel about spaceships, or interstellar war, or the end of the world. It’s a story about four guys who go up to a cabin every year and make “guy food.” The definition of “guy food” is that you can’t use the oven; everything you eat has to be done on the stove burner. You have a hunk of butter, and you have shit in cans. Maybe you use a little ground beef, but you are talking really basic cooking.
In the first half of the screenplay for Dreamcatcher, nothing much happens. But you need to remember that the best fears, the ones that really work in horror stories and movies, are the ones that have not been articulated, that are still looking for some manner of expression. One of the things that I discovered after my accident was that I was having a lot of problems with narcotic 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 radically. And I got to thinking about these things. In 1956, in Peyton Place, we finally 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 operates 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 toilet 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 bedroom stays empty, as I don’t care what goes on in the bedroom, only the bathroom—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.7 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 they are out of my word processor and downloaded from my head and onto the page. Once you move from a single artisan working in his hut to the Hollywood film, the writer is no longer the one in control, and you discover a situation where complications arise exponentially. In the making of a film, you are suddenly dealing with four hundred artists in the studio. Then it becomes a lottery. All you can do is try to pick the best people possible; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Magistrale: 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?
Stephen King: 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 expression that she conveys directly to the audience. And then the picture ends. Brilliant. I’ve been trying to do something like that ever since.
Magistrale: 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 elements appear to work so harmoniously with each other in these films?
Stephen King: 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 reaction is appropriate, how to respond. When the human intellect reaches a blank wall, sometimes the only thing left is laughter. It is a release mechanism, 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 th
e leeches off, but then things get plenty serious 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 hobbles 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 Hargensen 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 manipulated by his girlfriend’s blowjobs suggests that he’s not very bright. But a lot of guys can appreciate Billy Nolan’s predicament: He’s got a hot girlfriend 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 character 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.
Magistrale: 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 completely successful adaptation” of one of your books. Have there been other films that have satisfied you to the same degree?
