In Two Minds: Stephen King, George A. Romero and The Dark Half

The 30th anniversary of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, published in 1989, seems to offer an opportune moment to take a look at the collaboration between King and George A. Romero that brought King’s novel about a writer’s alter ego to the screen.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the late George A. Romero is so often associated with Stephen King. Having become firm friends in the 1970s – King even has a small cameo in Romero’s Knightriders (1981) – the two masters of horror first worked together on Creepshow (1982), a tribute to the colourful horror comics that they both loved in their youth. They collaborated again on its sequel Creepshow 2 (1987) and the cult anthology series Tales from the Darkside (1983–1988), which was designed to capitalise on Creepshow‘s modest commercial success (and was even intended to carry its title before Romero and his frequent producer, Richard P. Rubinstein, chose to rebrand the series for Tribune Broadcasting and avoid a potential rights dispute with Warner Brothers).

Their closest collaboration was their first. Romero directed two adaptations of King short stories for Creepshow: “Weeds” (1976) – which became “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” – and “The Crate” (1979). King’s “Word Processor of the Gods” (1983) was then adapted by Michael McDowell into a 1984 episode of Tales from the Darkside, and the author himself penned a new tale of terror that aired as part of the show’s fourth season in 1987: “Sorry, Right Number,” which was later published in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). Another of King’s stories, “The Raft” (1982), served as the basis for a section of Creepshow 2. However, Romero opted to take the producer’s role for the sequel; he wrote the screenplay from an outline penned by King, but handed the director’s chair to Michael Gornick, director of photography for every Romero movie from Martin (1977) to Day of the Dead (1985).

Check out this post on “The Raft,” a King story adapted into a segment of Creepshow 2.

These are, of course, only the collaborations that eventually came to fruition. Romero tried many times to adapt one of King’s novels for the screen. At various points in the 1970s and 1980s, he was attached to adaptations of ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), The Stand (1978), Pet Sematary (1983) and a number of other King properties. Unfortunately, none of these projects worked out – at least not for Romero. He dropped out of ‘Salem’s Lot (1979) when the decision was made to expand it into a television mini-series, making way for Tobe Hooper. The Stand, which was to be adapted by King himself, languished in development hell for several years before Romero parted ways with Rubinstein and left Laurel Entertainment, the production company they had co-founded. It, too, was eventually realised as a mini-series with Rubinstein and King acting as executive producers – though not until 1994, and with Mick Garris directing. Pet Sematary (1989) was eventually brought to the screen by Mary Lambert; Romero instead worked on Monkey Shines (1988), and another of his chances to adapt King went unrealised.

What is surprising about the personal and professional relationship between Romero and King, then, is that it wasn’t until the 1990s that Romero finally made his first and only adaptation of a full-length King novel: The Dark Half (1993), based on the 1989 book of the same name. After many false starts and cruel twists of fate, The Dark Half came together relatively quickly. Having made Monkey Shines for Orion, Romero was the company’s first choice for its adaptation of King’s wildly successful chiller (which would have been 1989’s best-seller if not for Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger). As he told Fangoria, Romero was delighted that a project had finally worked out: “It makes me feel that I’m finally getting to do a novel of Steve’s.”

You can buy King’s The Dark Half from Amazon:

As King scholar Simon Brown notes in his monograph Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (2018), Orion’s instinct was that The Dark Half had the same potential as another cerebral horror film it was developing from literary source material: The Silence of the Lambs (1991). With high hopes and hefty profits in mind, the studio invited Romero to adapt the novel and gave him a budget of $10-15 million, the highest he had ever worked with. But things were rarely that easy for Romero, especially at this point in his career – and given his track record with King properties, perhaps The Dark Half was always doomed to fail.

The Silence of the Lambs went on to become an enormous success—a hit with audiences, critics and awards bodies alike. The Dark Half, on the other hand, was delayed by two years after Orion filed for bankruptcy in December 1991. Upon its eventual release in April 1993, it was met with a decidedly lukewarm critical reception, failed to recover its budget and, sadly, is now often unfairly remembered as an unfortunate misstep in the director’s impressive body of work. But Orion’s optimism was likely misplaced from the beginning. After all, The Dark Half is an enormously personal novel for King, and not one that was likely to easily translate into a digestible, commercial horror film.

The Dark Half tells the story of Thad Beaumont (portrayed in Romero’s adaptation by Timothy Hutton). The film’s prologue reveals that Beaumont suffered from terrible headaches as a child, caused by a parasitic twin he absorbed in utero. In adulthood, Beaumont becomes a writer of “worthy” literary fiction, but the less savoury side of his personality is given an outlet through pulpy crime novels he publishes under the pseudonym George Stark. When it is revealed to the world that Beaumont and Stark are one and the same, the author holds a mock funeral for his alter ego. But Stark doesn’t want to stay buried, and shortly emerges from the grave as a murderous doppelgänger (also played by Hutton) who begins to stalk Beaumont’s family and threatens to destroy his life.

For King, writing The Dark Half was very much an attempt to exorcise a number of personal demons. First of all, he was saying goodbye to his own literary double. Between 1977 and 1984, he had secretly published a series of novels – Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984) – as Richard Bachman, a name derived from Richard Stark (who also provided George’s surname), a pseudonym used by Donald E. Westlake, and the Canadian rock band Bachman–Turner Overdrive. In many ways these novels are very different from King’s usual fiction and only two of them, The Running Man and Thinner, have thus far been adapted for the screen. Largely written in the mid-1970s, they are angry, bleak and uncompromisingly cynical explorations of the very worst of humanity (and they rarely end well). In fact, Rage – the story of a high-school senior who takes a gun to his algebra class – proved so controversial that King eventually chose to take it out of circulation following its implication in a number of real-life school shooting incidents.

King’s connection to Bachman was discovered by a fan in 1985, providing the dramatic set-up for The Dark Half and forcing the author to retire his long-running penname (Bachman reportedly died of “cancer of the pseudonym”). But King was not just reimagining his alias as a repressed double – he was also dramatising his struggles with drugs and alcohol, having spent much of the 1980s in a downward spiral of addiction and self-destruction. He had begun drinking regularly in the 1970s, and things escalated quickly in the next decade: famously, he has no memory of writing Cujo (1981), and while he was directing his sole feature film, Maximum Overdrive (1986), he was constantly under the influence of cocaine.

Several of King’s novels are, at least in part, explorations of his battle with alcohol and drug abuse – The Shining (1977) and The Tommyknockers (1987) are two obvious examples – but none quite so literally as The Dark Half. This was essentially King’s take on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which George Stark embodies the writer’s dreadful fear of his own potential for cruel and violent behaviour, especially towards his family. King had gotten clean in the late 1980s following an intervention by his wife Tabitha, and this novel was a way of working out his feelings on the man, husband and father he had been for the previous decade. Mean-spirited and out of control, Beaumont’s dark half is a literal manifestation of the author under the influence.

Finally, King was also exploring his discomfort at having been pigeonholed as a writer of lurid, throwaway horror fiction; Beaumont is, after all, quite embarrassed when he is forced to admit that he is also George Stark. And this was undoubtedly a theme that Romero strongly identified with: the conflict between artistic expression and commercial viability. For the majority of his career, Romero had been able to produce all of his projects independently, and had gained a reputation as a fiercely political filmmaker. His debut feature Night of the Living Dead (1968) had screened at the Museum of Modern Art as early as 1970, and many of his other early works, chiefly The Crazies, Martin and Dawn of the Dead, were very quickly recognised as scathingly countercultural works of political protest. After the release of Day of the Dead (1985), though, Romero felt the call of Hollywood and moved into more commercial filmmaking in the late 1980s.

It was then that Romero first encountered some of the more unfortunate consequences of working with the major studios. For example, he was attached to an adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and had the firm backing of David Puttnam, then head of Columbia Pictures – but everything fell apart when Puttnam left the company. Romero then made his first film for Orion, and experienced the infamous meddling of studio executives. Having finished a film he was happy with, Orion requested that Romero return for reshoots and insisted on a new ending, which prevented him from continuing work on his adaptation of Pet Sematary. He acquiesced to the studio’s demands, but the film ultimately met with commercial and critical failure regardless.

Pet Sematary was, in the end, directed by Mary Lambert and released in 1989. You can check our post and our podcast on the film.

Romero was largely unwilling to publicly disparage Orion for their part in the fate of Monkey Shines, but it’s clear that his first experience of working with Hollywood was not a particularly positive one. As he told Fangoria in 1993 while promoting The Dark Half, the fact that his first studio picture did not live up to its potential weighed heavily on his mind: “I was really depressed, profoundly depressed. The movie was a long involvement – two years of my life from top to bottom on that thing.” And there is a clear sense that this unease followed him into the making of his next film for the company. In an article on the filming of The Dark Half in Romero’s home state of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh Press reporter Michael Winks noted that the director “spoke fondly of Orion” but revealed his inner thoughts through a carefully chosen quote: “I have to respect the fact that it’s their money.”

Romero later admitted to Fangoria that he did not have the level of control over The Dark Half that he might have wanted, and certainly did not have a say in the final shape of the picture: “Well, I’d like to have final cut, but in order to get that I’d have to scramble and do all the things you’d have to do if you were that hot a director. And that’s not what I’m looking for.” In a single sentence that reveals his true feelings about working within the confines of the Hollywood system, he continued: “I’d only want final cut if I could have it without all the games that go with it.” Romero, then, was never really prepared for working with movie stars, inflated budgets and studio executives. He was a maverick: a born independent who felt truly comfortable only when working on his own terms.

And that is exactly what makes The Dark Half so interesting. King’s book may have been an exercise in exploring both the death of his pseudonym and his rehabilitation from substance abuse, but it was also a novel thematically concerned with the binary opposition between creating great art and making a living. And it was this element of the story that intrigued Romero. As he told Fangoria: “I’m attracted to material that deals with one’s dark half…particularly when it focuses on an artist or writer. I’ve looked at my own dark half in the mirror a few times.” This was a project that allowed the director to put his own frustrations on the screen, literalising the two sides of his career in King’s characters: Beaumont the tortured artist, Stark the commercial success – their battle of egos an embodiment of his own warring priorities. The fact that Romero did this in collaboration with a Hollywood studio makes the film even more fascinating.

Romero’s one and only adaptation of a King novel is, then, far from a misstep in his body of work – but rather a film about his body of work. And it was, ultimately, his distaste for playing by the industry’s rules that meant it was his last film as director for nearly a decade, given that it took The Dark Half two years to be given a theatrical release after filming wrapped in early 1991. He returned with the fiercely independent Bruiser (2000), and it was 2005 before he finally worked with a studio again on Land of the Dead. So, while it is certainly a shame that we will never get to see Romero’s take on any of the writer’s other works, The Dark Half was perhaps the perfect King novel for him to adapt: a window into the mind – or minds – of a deeply conflicted filmmaker.

You can stream The Dark Half on Amazon:

Craig Ian Mann is a film scholar and writer with a particular interest in popular genre cinema, including horror, science fiction, action and the Western. His first monograph, Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He teaches film and television studies at Sheffield Hallam University, edits programme notes for London’s Science Fiction Theatre and co-organises the Fear 2000 conference series on contemporary horror cinema. He tweets @craigimann.

Check out our other posts on Stephen King adaptations — on Gerald’s Game, on the original Pet Sematary and the remake, on the short story, “The Raft,” and on “Rainy Season,”  and our podcast on the Creepshow franchise.