The Year Movies Got Stephen King Right

This has been a great year for Stephen King movies - three in a row based on his stories have been killer: It blew through like a storm in theaters and became the highest-grossing horror film ever made, then on Netflix we got Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game, dripping with dark and enticing imagery, and finally 1922 - a sad, horrific period piece.

I loved all these as King’s written macabre tales, and I like them as movies almost as much.

And it really is kind of a breath of fresh air for me, as I never thought movies based on King’s stuff were always very good - I went on record as hating the original It movie back in 2016, and others like Pet Sematary, The Stand and more were underwhelming at best. I suppose there were some good ones too, but the disappointments as compared to the books were too great for me to get past.

And I think the tone was just never quite right - King has always been such a big name for the unique imagination and style he had, which wasn’t really ever translated right before this year. It’s not something that can be described in a word or two, but just the feel his stories have - the dialogue style, the focus on emotional heartstring-tugging character development, the strange and surreal supernatural world-building that doesn’t draw from any one established school of myth… it all just comes together into a uniquely King-like piece that he has forged over the years into a signature style.

Finally, with these films, I think they got it right. In the new It movie, the way the kid main characters interact and talk and jive with one another is just magical. It’s great to watch because they’re actually funny and have memorable interactions - not like the old one where I honestly can’t remember one conversation between them. These kids are seriously charming and the writing combined with their acting skills produces a wonderfully enjoyable energy. And when things get dark and the visions they see draw them together to fight the evil, you really give a shit. That’s how you make a good story. King understood that, and now a movie based on his work captures his unique writing style well.

In Gerald’s Game, a husband ties his wife to the bed for some sex games, but then the husband dies of a heart attack, leaving main character Jessie to fend for herself. One thing King did with the book was create such a rich story even despite the fact that the character is tied to a bed the entire time. He did it through flashbacks and inner dialogue and a whole story about what led to Jessie’s current predicament. Flanagan masterfully weaves this stuff together by putting in ‘ghost’ versions of Jessie and her dead husband that converse with the real ones, as well as flashbacks with wonderfully macabre, ominous imagery. The level of introspection and character layering is in-line with King’s specialty.

1922 is a newer story, a tale of murder and greed set in a farmhouse in the early 20th century as a farmer plots to kill his wife for the land she’s inherited. It was one of my favorite stories King has done recently, and an especially brutal and punishing read. The movie pretty much sticks to exactly how the story went, not missing a beat. Thomas Jane is excellent as main character Wilfred James, and the creeping, slow-burning horror and guilt of this story rolls over into a crushing wave by its end. Like a lot of good King stories, the horror comes from the human evil and the perils of greed upon his own actions. The pacing and atmosphere are just perfect - chilling stuff.

As I’ve been writing this, I noticed all the reasons I’ve given for appreciating these movies - good characters, layered writing, chilling atmosphere and the human evil - aren’t necessarily groundbreaking or original things that make King’s work good. They’re things that make any fiction good and lots of good fiction does these things well. But as I said, King just has his own unique touch and I am glad these movies are doing him justice finally. King has been a cultural icon and institution for decades and I’ve enjoyed his work for well over 10 years now myself. Do yourself a favor. Check out these movies this Halloween season.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

All Hallows Eve (2013)

All Hallows Eve is a 2013 horror movie that I had never heard of until I bought it at the Spooky Empire convention last year. I then watched it when I got home and it was one of the scariest fucking things I’ve ever seen. Here’s a review of it.

Director: Damian Leone

Starring: Katie McGuire, Mike Giannelli

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This is a sick fucking movie, and I mean that in a literal sense… the thing is that it really doesn’t do anything terribly different from the generic horror movies you’ve seen a hundred times, but just does things in a more depraved manner. It’s an anthology story with a wrap-around about a babysitter watching two kids on Halloween night – you could easily get the impression it’s just a straight rip-off.

But then they find a weird unmarked video tape – not a DVD, a video tape, because I guess the sick perverts of this town are not up to date with things. Or maybe just every time you need a haunted media in a horror movie, it’s something old. A haunted iPod or DVD doesn’t have the same resonance. And a haunted mp3 file? Fucking forget it.

The tape has a bunch of shorter movies on it, which the babysitter, after some hemming and hawing that ultimately goes nowhere, agrees to let them watch. You’ll start to see how amazing that really is when you see the fucked up shit on these stories – though the kids keep claiming they’ve seen “much worse stuff” on the internet. I guess they’re busy scouring the Dark Web for snuff videos or something.

The first story is about a girl who is sitting alone in a train station when a clown approaches her, initially seeming annoying but harmless, like any weird asshole you see on a train. But then things get weird when he pulls out a syringe and sticks her with it, kidnapping her – right there, it’s already fucked up.

Is he medically licensed to do this?

She wakes up in a dungeon with two other women, all of them chained up by their necks. They wander around a bit, often hysterical – it’s weird how the main girl is suddenly brave and badass. Earlier, she was scared of a cockroach she saw.

Then they find what I can only describe as what conservatives think Planned Parenthood is:

"THIS is what's happening to YOUR WIVES AND DAUGHTERS when they even GO NEAR a Planned Parenthood!!!"

I guess it ends with the devil raping the main girl – surprise, happy ending! I’m glad that babysitter let these kids watch this…

To be fair, she does finally make them stop watching it. The little boy she’s babysitting throws a tantrum over it but eventually relents. Then she goes back and watches it by herself with a glass of wine – choosing this over Night of the Living Dead by the way. Yeah, I’d also choose a creepy random video someone slipped in a child’s Halloween bag that could be a real-life snuff torture movie over a horror classic. I understand her.

The next story is about a woman alone in a house at night, talking on the phone with her friend about her boyfriend, who randomly woke up in the middle of the night and painted a horrific nightmare painting that he doesn’t actually remember. I love how they just talk about this like it’s normal, never really spending much time on it. You know how those artists are! They’re fucking idiots, right? Just painting stuff they don’t remember…

Anyway, that’s not even really what this story is about – it’s actually about an alien that looks like a child’s drawing come to life stalking her in the dark. As silly as this thing looks, I have to admit, I actually find it pretty creepy to look at. It’s just…eerie.

Just something about that big face and those dead, expressionless eyes.

The boyfriend eventually gets on the phone and tells her to call the cops – but she’s a black woman, so justifiably, she’s afraid the cops will shoot her in her own house, and doesn’t call them.

Instead, the alien ends up dragging her away, probably just to throw her a party, I dunno, I'm naive and have never seen a horror movie. I’d say this probably goes on too long for its own good, but even then I still like it – there’s something dark and hopeless about this story that I don’t get from other, similar ones.

Finally we get the last story, and this is the one I was actively kind of avoiding watching again – it's the most gruesome and gross one by far. I haven't really had a reaction like that to a horror movie in, well, maybe ever, just to illustrate that.

It’s basically a pretty straightforward old horror tale of a young woman alone at night running into the killer clown from earlier. She stops at a gas station where she finds out from the one dude working there that a clown has shit and pissed all over the walls of his bathroom – you know, the old clown trick book in play. He gets run off, and the guy is trying to help the woman find her way back to the highway when he gets distracted by some loud noises. And really, aren't you guys tired of non-vegetarian clowns? I am. I sure fucking am.

End the mutilating of gas station attendants! Eat at your local vegan coffee shop!

From here it just gets more and more depraved – there’s a fairly routine chase scene made creepier by the rawness of it. I guess the gritty looking, grainy camera style adds to it. And it’s just super uncomfortable and bleak at every turn, moreso than your garden variety Friday the 13th ripoff or whatever. She gets into a car with a stranger passing by, which, if you don’t know, is always, 100% of the time a bad idea in a horror movie. And like clockwork, the clown drives up to them and pulls out a random gun and kills him:

The clown is a licensed member of the NRA. He believes in the second amendment.

I don’t even know what it is with this scene. It’s so bizarre it’s almost comical that this fucking clown is using a gun – but nah, it doesn’t quite hit comical and stays weirdly menacing instead.

Then the car crashes in a horribly violent manner, but that isn’t even the worst part – the worst is what happens next, which is really so awful that I'd call it up there with the worst things I've seen on film, how this story ends for her. It's fictional, yeah, and they don't dwell on it much, but the visual is disconcerting to say the least - and to say what it really is, it's fucking horrific shit.

Back in the real world – or the wrap-around story – the babysitter tries to turn off the video, but it won't turn off, instead showing a mirror image of the babysitter standing in the living room, but with the clown behind her in the reflection. This, if you remember, was why they had to discontinue VHS tapes. It just wasn't working out with all the demonic clowns appearing in people's rooms.

Then, I shit you not, the clown appears in real life and kills the two kids she was babysitting. Wow! I wonder what she's gonna tell their parents! This clown has really put her in a pickle!

I am limiting the things I censor on this blog to one per post... sorry.

And that's the movie. Dead kids! Happy Halloween!

I don't even know what to say here. It's a sick, demented fucking movie and one of the scariest I've ever seen. It's just the way everything is done in this – it all feels super helpless and deranged, and the tone is as if it was made by a real life psychopath who was filming things he'd really done. It can be silly, sure, but I think the silliness just accentuates how depraved it truly is, as everything has that diabolical, dark air to it even when you're giggling. Every second of this is uncomfortable as fuck and deeply disturbing.

I don't even really know if I like the movie. It's that fucked up. But it did work as a horror film - they're supposed to effect the viewer, which this one did. So I can at least say that much. It is an unavoidable thing once you've seen this film - it will stay with you.

So with that said, I recommend it if you want something to watch this Halloween.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.