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Posted on January 25, 2020

Stephen King’s Endings and the Case for Sentimental Horror

Guest Post

From online discussion boards to quips in the 2019 film adaptation, It Chapter Two, there’s one truism Stephen King fans and critics alike have long accepted: King can’t stick a landing. But I’ve always found the ending of his massive coming-of-age horror classic, It, fitting and, dare I say, satisfying. Trying to tease out why the ending works for me—why I believe it rings true with the rest of the novel and is not simply the tacked-on excuse of a writer out of ideas—became a minor obsession that finally culminated in this essay.

The ending is as follows: In 1950’s America, seven children defeat It, the primordial shapeshifter that most often appears in the guise of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Grown up, the protagonists realize that It survived, forcing them to face off against the monster once more. After an apocalyptic struggle, they finally destroy It through the power of their friendship. Fairly standard, but the reviews and articles claiming that the ending is pat, predictable, and void of complexity beg to differ. The headline of a review in Vulture more or less sums up these feelings with the claim that “A Sentimental It Chapter Two Needed More Pennywise.”[i] Read more

Posted on October 30, 2019

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

Guest Post

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).

Posted on October 13, 2019

Schlock & Shock: Talking the Creepshow Franchise

Elizabeth Erwin

Greetings thrill shriekers! In this episode of Horror Homeroom Conversations, we’re adding some shlock to our shock by reconsidering the Creepshow franchise. Beloved and reviled in equal measure for its decidedly campy love letter to EC horror comics of the 1950s, Creepshow is arguably still the standard for cinematic anthology horror. But does it deserve its accolades? We’re debating the franchise’s legacy and why the films still make our hearts go flopsy when we contemplate your sweet autopsy. So stay tuned!

Posted on May 29, 2019

Stephen King’s Radical Rewriting of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

Dawn Keetley

Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” is a well-known cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following tradition, about conformity, and about an innate human violence that needs to be appeased. (The Purge franchise clearly picked up on Jackson’s vision of the efficacy of regular cathartic releases of violence.)

In Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and its film adaptations, however much tradition, conformity, or violence may be pressuring individuals to act, it is clear that it is indeed humans who are acting. At the end of the story, after the sacrificial victim has picked her paper with the black dot, we see characters deliberately pick up stones from the pile gathered in the town center. “Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands.” The town’s children had already taken their stones, and “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson,” the victim’s son, “a few pebbles.” The infamous last line of the story, “and then they were upon her,” makes it clear that the characters act –with purpose and intention. Jackson’s story is a humanist story: it doesn’t necessarily elaborate the more attractive parts of human nature, but we see human free will and human choice in action.

Posted on April 13, 2019

Erasing Empathy: Talking Pet Sematary (2019)

Elizabeth Erwin

The Horror Homeroom crew rarely agrees completely on a film but in this case, we’re unanimous in our criticism of the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. From its privileging of male grief via the systematic erasure of adult female characters to its deeply misguided use of the Wendigo, this film had us wondering if perhaps dead is better when it comes to horror remakes.