Phil Hobbins-White Rob Reiner’s big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s novel (1987) was released in 1990, blending conventions from the psychological thriller and horror genre, as well as utilising other elements which became common in horror films later in the decade. What follows here will be an exploration of the landscape of cinema in the years […]
Marc Olivier *This essay has been excerpted from Marc Olivier, Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects, Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. 224-33. You can find Household Horror at Amazon #ad or on Indiana University Press’s website. Another hack writer snowbound in Colorado with a woman he’d like to kill, another […]
Dawn Keetley The high-profile, mainstream horror films of the 1990s were almost aggressively white: Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1992), Scream (Wes Craven 1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), The Sixth Sense (M. Night […]
Harriet Stilley When protagonist Paul Sheldon proclaims that he is “in trouble,” that “this woman” – namely, psychotic super-fan Annie Wilkes – “is not right,” he invokes insidious, if not invidious, questions regarding the role gender plays in the articulation of horror. Indeed, Stephen King’s fictional universe abounds with vehemently unhappy, violently unhinged, and villainously […]
Dawn Keetley Stephen King published Misery on June 8, 1987, and he has claimed that the novel is, first and foremost, about the compulsions of cocaine use. King was a self-confessed “heavy user” of cocaine from about 1978 to 1986, and he famously confessed in an interview with Rolling Stone that “Misery is a book […]
Eric J. Lawrence The first full page of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery introduces the initial, muddled thoughts of his severely injured protagonist, author Paul Sheldon: The pain was somewhere below the sounds. The pain was east of the sun and south of his ears. That was all he did know. For some length of […]
Taylor Hughes It is the middle of the night. Annie Wilkes has waited and waited for the latest installment of her favorite series. She goes to the bookstore to be sure she gets the first copy. She devours it as quickly as possible, curling up in the armchair we later glimpse in her bedroom, reading […]
Sezín Koehler The once innocuous phrase “I’m your number one fan” took a sharp turn toward the menacing after Kathy Bates uttered it in Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. Said by Annie Wilkes after rescuing her favorite romance novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan), who almost died in a snowstorm car accident, the […]
Avalon A. Manly There is a moment in the rising action of 1990’s Misery when protagonist Paul Sheldon (James Caan), trapped and tortured by “number-one fan” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), breaks out of his room and finds, to his great relief, a phone on the living room table. It’s an old-fashioned rotary phone, with solid […]