Stephen King names the film that terrified a generation: “The best argument for the rating system that I have ever seen”
Considering his longstanding position as the king of horror fiction, it’s fair to say that Stephen King knows a thing or two about scaring the living daylights out of his readership. With a back catalogue of genuinely spine-chilling tales, King wielded his pen of fear on countless terrifying occasions.
Among some of the legendary author’s greatest works are the likes of Carrie, The Shining, Pet Sematary and It, each of which has sent waves of fear through the bodies of their readers and maybe of those very works have also been adapted into acclaimed movie versions, with the cinematic medium profiting from King’s imagination.
It’s only likely, though, that King could possess such an understanding of how to weave his tales with terror by also knowing about the most brilliant works of horror to begin with. Indeed, King has often spoken at length about his favourite horror books and movies, and he once discussed his impressions of a horror classic in an interview with Phil Konstantin.
According to King, George A. Romero’s 1968 independent horror movie Night of the Living Dead was an important work of the genre because of the way it was released. The author explained, “Night Of The Living Dead is an interesting case because it was an unrated movie when it came out. At that time, there were only two ratings: GP, which is the same as PG now, and the unrated movies.”
Indeed, as King notes, when Night of the Living Dead came out, the MPAA rating system hadn’t been created, so it was released unrated. The film tells of seven people trapped in a rural farmhouse in Pennsylvania who must survive a barrage of attacks from flesh-eating reanimated corpses, which themselves popularise the zombie horror movie.
When King first saw Romero’s film, he was still in college and hit up the theatre in the afternoon, joined by an audience of “kids, mostly from five to eleven”. The author went on, “I have never in my life, from the time I was a kid until now, been in an audience where children were so quiet. They were sitting gape-mouthed; they were simply stunned. Total silence.”
Unsurprisingly, the violent and fearful nature of Night of the Living Dead would have been too much to bear for such little eyes and minds, and King proceeded to call the film “the best argument for the rating system that I have ever seen”. Now, King himself is, of course, responsible for some of the most notorious horror moments in both literature and cinema, but even he feels that the genre I don’t have anything against either of the Dead movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, none of those movies “is not something that you hand to kids”.
“You just don’t do it,” he added. “You have to be old enough to take it. Kids are just not prepared for it.” King then explained that when he was a kid, he had seen a number of films that “frightened us profoundly”, namely the Disney film Bambi, which was also known to have terrified Quentin Tarantino.
“That was something I had nightmares about,” King admitted. But still, even the terrors of Bambi could not compare to the kind of trauma that was inflicted on those poor children sitting with King that afternoon in the cinema. The horror author signed off, “I can’t imagine being a little kid of eight and seeing Night Of The Living Dead with living corpses eating the flesh of living people.”
