The “creepy” 2008 horror movie Stephen King avoided like the plague: “I don’t want to see it”
Despite building his name, reputation, and fortune on horror, there are certain lines that Stephen King won’t cross, even one as innocuous as sitting down and watching a movie.
Obviously, as one of the genre’s most iconic figures across any medium, he’s got a strong disposition. You can’t write the stories that he’s written, conjure the horrific scenarios that he’s conjured, and envision the nightmares that he’s envisioned without having a stomach for the gruesome, grisly, and gory.
And yet, when he’s not busy devising his latest tales of terror or watching them being adapted to the screen as part of Hollywood’s endless obsession with his bibliography, King has his limits. Make no mistake, he’s a fan of horror cinema and he always has been, as long as it’s not too tasteless.
When the torture porn craze exploded in the early 2000s, the author was neither here nor there. Under the right circumstances, he felt that it served a purpose, describing the subgenre as “like driving past an accident,” but also warning that “people get desensitised to that in a hurry, and you cease to get involved on a level where there are characters.”
That said, it’s worth noting that none of King’s favourite horror movies tick the torture porn boxes. Night of the Living Dead, The Blair Witch Project, The Descent, the entire Final Destination franchise, and Night of the Demon don’t rely on shocking acts of violence, although the Last House on the Left remake came pretty close, so it’s not as if he was completely against it.
However, when ruminating on the torture porn explosion, citing Eli Roth’s Hostel 2 as “a better picture in every way” than its predecessor, the master of the macabre made it perfectly clear that a spiritual bedfellow, one that was based on horrific real-life events, was something he’d actively avoid at all costs.
“There’s an exploitation film about Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, and I don’t want to see it,” King stated. “It makes me feel creepy just to think about it. It’s almost like exploiting murder for the sake of murder. I understand ‘torture porn’. It’s a good phrase. But I would argue with you, there’s a fine line there, it’s redeeming social merit, but it’s more than that, it’s an artistic thing, too.”
Whereas Hostel 2 has “something going on there that’s interesting on an artistic basis,” the Rader flick did not. While King didn’t name names, based on the timeline, we can only assume he’s talking about BTK, which was released in the United States in 2008, not long after Roth’s sequel, starring slasher film legend Kane Hodder in the title role.
Rader murdered at least ten people between 1974 and 1991, typically by attacking them in their homes before binding, torturing, and killing them, hence the ‘BTK’ moniker. Making exploitative torture porn movies based on actual events is always in bad taste, which is why King had no interest in ever seeing it.
