The “abysmal” horror movie Stephen King called the worst ever made: “A miserable waste of celluloid”
It goes without saying that horror is one of cinema’s most subjective genres. After all, certain movies will leave some viewers in need of fresh underwear, while others are left yawning from boredom. However, as one of the medium’s most prominent figures, it’s accurate to suggest that Stephen King knows his stuff.
After all, he’s built his entire brand on terrifying readers for over half a century, with his bibliography selling hundreds of millions of copies and spawning dozens of adaptations across film, television, and streaming. Albeit not always to the best reception, daring stabs are always made at bringing his works to life. For many, he’s modern horror’s most prominent icon, and he knows what he likes.
During his lengthy career, King has plunged his spindly fingers into many pies. Although he’s always been an author first and foremost, he’s adapted many of his works for the screen, penned a few original screenplays, devised a couple of stories specifically for live-action, and made his one and only directorial effort in the ill-fated Maximum Overdrive, so he also has a fair bit of knowledge as to how Hollywood works as well.
With that in mind, he came from a place of knowledge and experience when he doubled down on one feature as the single worst horror flick in cinema history. King’s choice hardly emerged from left field or outside of the box, though, but if enough people decry a certain film as being the worst of the worst, then it’s not exactly an opinion without merit.
Despite its cult favourite status, which is admittedly based entirely on how shitty it is, nobody would begrudge King for awarding Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space “the booby-prize as the worst horror film ever made”, as he did in his 1981 non-fiction book, Danse Macabre. He knows people love it because it’s crap and as a guilty pleasure, which still wasn’t enough to prevent him from twisting the knife.
“Yet there is nothing funny about this one, no matter how many times it has been laughed at in those mostly witless compendiums that celebrate the worst of everything,” he wrote. He felt sorry for the legendary Bela Lugosi, who struggled through his final onscreen appearance to end a seminal association with horror on the most embarrassing note.
“Lugosi died shortly after this abysmal, exploitative, misbegotten piece of trash was released,” King continued. “And I’ve always wondered in my heart if maybe poor old Bela didn’t die as much of shame as of the many illnesses that were overwhelming him.” Harsh, but it just goes to show how much he hated the movie.
Plan 9 from Outer Space has its fans, but King isn’t one of them. Describing it as a “sad and squalid coda to a great career” and a stain against Lugosi’s towering contributions to cinematic scares, his withering takedown of Wood’s magnum opus culminated with him decrying it as a “miserable waste of celluloid”. Well, we couldn’t have put our opinion out there as eloquently, really.
