“Nailed to the chair”: The song Stephen King thinks horror movies should aspire to be like
Of all the reasons people continue to admire the thrilling works of Stephen King, one facet that seems somewhat overlooked among these conversations is his propensity for embedding psychological disturbances into his work. It’s no secret that King converges societal and political paranoia in his deeply dark and wonderful worlds, but exactly how he achieves this remains more ambiguous than it seems.
For instance, it’s easy to take works like The Shining, It, and Pet Sematary and immediately draw comparisons between the text and broader societal commentaries, but it’s more challenging to acknowledge the nuances that lurk beneath the surface, particularly with pacing and how he threads trauma and frustration into his characters’ personalities and dialogue.
Throughout Misery, for instance, perhaps it’s the way he sets the scene around a familiar source of fear that immediately draws us in, but the calculated use of tension and gore is what keeps us captivated, thrilled by the uncertainty and unpredictability of whatever might be thrown our way next. It’s between these lines that King is able to exercise a delectable push-and-pull of expectation versus narrative, almost like toying with how others receive horror before he even knows it himself.
As he once told The Guardian: “What’s inside your head grows. And you don’t have any sense of proportion until you see how other people react to it.” Today, King’s position in the horror space is unique. He remains relatively accessible on social media and interviews, though not in a way that cheapens his legacy per se, but rather strengthens his voice as an industry leader and expert on all things horror.
And for a genre that’s difficult to define and even harder to master, King knows exactly what works well and what doesn’t. For instance, in his opinion, some of the best horror movies are the ones that immediately get to it and satisfy the audience while maintaining a sophisticated understanding of nuanced contemporary storytelling techniques. The ones that falter are those which hesitantly tackle the story at hand without really delivering anything hard-hitting or impactful.
To demonstrate his point, King likened good horrors to the song ‘Everytime I Eat Vegetables It Makes Me Think of You’ by the Ramones, because, in his words, it “gets in, does its business, and it gets back out again.” Comparing his appreciation for the song to his attitude towards horrors, he continued, “I feel that way about horror movies as well. You get in there and you want to see something that immediately pulls you in, drags you in, and you get nailed to the chair.”
While he recognises the impact of the more recent The Brutalist, he also admitted it’s one that does the opposite, making you feel slightly detached from it because its pace almost makes you lose interest halfway through. According to King, to succeed with a genuinely impactful and thrilling story, things have to get going from the start so that you’re more inclined to revisit them again and again.
