Stephen King’s aversion to the “weirdly tasteless meat and cheese” of modern horror
In the case of so many of Stephen King’s greatest horrors, you’re left flummoxed. The films send you home with questions unanswered and a slight confusion about it all. To him, that’s dessert after a great meal.
It’s really no wonder that King’s books were quickly adopted by Hollywood. He not only writes in a way that is already cinematic, making it easy to conjure up his characters and imagine them living, breathing and moving around. But he also nails that perfect balance between delivering a gripping plot, while also not holding it too tightly.
For the ultimate example, look at The Shining. The plot is relatively simply that of a man and his family moving into a remote and empty hotel in the depths of winter, and then the man going mad. But there’s so much more to it than that.
The Shining could just be taken on the surface as a story of its protagonist, Jack Torrance, being unable to handle the isolation. It could be a story about psychosis and mania as he buckles under the silence of the building and the pressure in his mind to write, and completely loses it. But there are also other theories, especially held in the movie’s mysterious closing scene, where Torrance’s face features in a group photo from years and years before, opening up a whole new can of worms about ghosts and haunting in the final seconds.
Carrie is a similar tale, as on the surface, it’s a paranormal flick about a prom queen with a supernatural rage. But amongst that, it also involved witchcraft and religion. There is always more going on than what meets the eye in a King story, and to him, that’s how horror should be. To him, it’s also why he believes horror has lost its way.
“Horror is an intimate experience, something that occurs mostly within oneself, and when it works, the screams of a sold-out house are almost intrusive,” he said to Entertainment Weekly. When dealing with the audience’s psyche and their innermost fears, the author sees horror as a deeply personal thing, which makes it sit at odds with the blockbuster.
Yet the blockbuster of the moment often is a horror, especially as Hollywood has adopted the genre more and more. Specifically, though, King thinks Hollywood has adopted the cheapest kind of horror, adding, “A movie such as Blair Witch is more like poetry than like the ‘event films’ that pack the plexes in summer”.
The Blair Witch Project is a horror that exists much more in his mode of thinking due to its enduring mystery. In contrast, he said of these ‘event films’ where plot leads beyond atmosphere or wonderment, “Those flicks tend to be like sandwiches overstuffed with weirdly tasteless meat and cheese, meals that glut the belly but do nothing for the soul,” he put eloquently.
To him, it all comes down to the very core of fear, and rarely is fear loud or abrasive. It’s rarely even major jumpscares or classically frightful monsters. Instead, fear is more commonly a quiet, eerie feeling that can really be explained. It’s a shiver up your spine, and King doesn’t believe Hollywood blockbuster horrors get that, as he said, “Those movies blast our emotions and imaginations, instead of caressing them with a knife-edge”. Doing too much all at once, King concludes modern big-screen horrors are unsatisfying, unfulfilling and simply not that scary.
