Stephen King on the Small Screen

Mark Browning

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781841504124
• eBook ISBN: 9781841504551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Sign Language
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this follow up to Stephen King on the Big Screen, Mark Browning turns his critical eye to the much-neglected subject of the best-selling author's work in television, examining what it is about King's fiction that makes it particularly suitable for the small screen.

By focusing on this body of work, from the highly successful The Stand and The Night Flier to the lesser-known TV films Storm of the Century, Rose Red, Kingdom Hospital, and the 2004 remake of Salem's Lot, Browning is able to articulate how these adaptations work and, in turn, suggest new ways of viewing them. This book is the first written by a film specialist to consider King's television work in its own right, and it rejects previous attempts to make the films and books fit rigid thematic categories. Browning examines what makes a written or visual text successful at evoking fear on a case-by-case basis, in a highly readable and engaging way. He also considers the relationship between the big and small screen. Why, for instance, are some TV versions more effective than movie adaptations and vice versa? In the process, Stephen King on the Small Screen is able to shed new light on what it is that makes King's novels so successful and reveal the elements of style and approach that have helped make King one of the world's best-selling authors.

Chapter 1

Vampires

As Stephen King on the Big Screen discovered, King’s fiction, and the adaptations deriving from them, tends to be repeatedly drawn to certain representations of monstrosity, often appearing to favour forms which are increasingly anachronistic to contemporary audiences. Key amongst these is the vampire. Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) brought much of the vampiric folklore surrounding these mythic entities to a wider audience – the use of crucifixes and wolfsbane to act as a deterrent, the lack of reflection in mirrors, and destroying them via staking or bringing into sunlight. This chapter considers how King draws on such conventions as it suits his dramatic purposes, where he extends generic boundaries and where he operates completely within them.

It (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990)

A clown can get away with murder.

(John Wayne Gacy)¹

The film has two prime points of interest: the dramatic structure (co-written by Lawrence Cohen and director, Tommy Lee Wallace) and the realization of Pennywise, who appropriates a number of features of the quintessential cinematic vampire. In the view of Wallace, Part One of It is ‘a unique piece of work for television’ and ‘the best example of the seven act picture ever performed on television’. Certainly the seven-act structure meshes very well with the introduction of seven characters and the linkage between their past and present lives. A phone call from Mike Hanlon (Tim Reid), the only one of the group to stay in Derry, sometimes heard in part, sometimes just referred to, triggers a flashback for each character in turn.

As a group of outsiders who come together to support one another, ‘The Losers’ Club’ has similarities with the group of boys in Stand by Me. Like Gordie (Wil Wheaton) in the earlier film, Bill (Richard Thomas) also tells the group stories and suffers the death of a brother, whose room is turned into a shrine; like Vern (Jerry O’Connell), we have a bullied, chubby figure in Ben (John Ritter) and in almost every case, parents, especially fathers, are absent or abusive. The attempted sentiment is similar, like the group hug at the end of Part One, and the quality of the child actors is high but the characters just do not have the depth of Stand By Me, where they carry the whole of the film and not only a (albeit more interesting) half.

Tim Curry’s dramatization of the nightmarish figure of Pennywise is a piece of inspired casting. The mixture of camp, threatening, sadistic pleasure draws on the same ability that he showed as Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) and creates one of the most enduring and genuinely disturbing features of the film. Curry has had an extensive career as a voice artist, which is important, given the make-up that partially obscures his features and also the potential contrast between his smiling face and a snarling, aggressive voice. Pennywise is mostly not threatening until he speaks. His repetition to Audra at the petrol station about a balloon – ‘Don’t you want it? – only gains a nasty sexual undertone in its delivery, bizarrely echoing real-life killer John Wayne Gacy in his self-styled persona of as the ‘Killer Clown’, including switching between multiple personalities, deepening his voice to shift from playful to murderous.² Tim Curry’s performance, especially in the attack on Georgie from the storm drain, contains a similar chilling shift, focusing on the term ‘float’ with its ambiguity between relaxed leisure and abject lifelessness.

Like the hazy motivation and back story of Freddy Kruger in Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984), Pennywise is used as a repository of deep-seated cultural fears – a beguiling entertainer using his privileged position to get close to children only to abuse that trust as a murderous paedophile. Typically for King, the exact nature of Pennywise’s powers are never made clear – he can apparently appear and disappear at will in different guises, and like Kruger, he appears in characters’ dreams but also starts to impact upon their physical world. There is also a strange dissonance between the childishness of his role and behaviour, telling jokes and laughing with his deep voice and apparently-receding hairline. Despite frequent parodies, the Pennywise character still has the power to frighten as he never takes himself too seriously in a way that the troll in Cat’s Eye (Lewis Teague, 1984) does for example. The sinister balloon-seller is a motif used elsewhere, such as in The Living Daylights (John Glen, 1987), where Necros, a KGB assassin leaves a balloon with a message for Bond (‘Death to spies’) after killing an agent but most powerfully in M (Fritz Lang, 1931), where Peter Lorre uses balloons to entice, abduct and then murder children.

In the opening sequence, we hear a little girl singing ‘Incy wincy spider’, foreshadowing the coming storm and the final manifestation of It. The girl bends down to pick up a doll at which point we hear Pennywise’s laughter before we see him. She looks up at sheets billowing in the wind and catches a glimpse of him. A subjective point-of-view shot past sheets, usually has a romantic context, such as the bed scene between the lovers in Romeo and Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996). Here the obscured view in the shot-reverse-shot exchange initially seems harmless but then we have a quick shot of Pennywise’s smile fading mirrored by the girl’s, as playfulness is replaced by dread. We do not see the attack itself, but the parental nightmare is conveyed in the iconic image of an abandoned trike, its wheel still spinning and a screaming mother’s face.

We are first introduced to Bill, one of King’s many writer-surrogates, via a flashback of his little brother Georgie. A naturally-motivated tracking shot follows his paper boat being carried along a road by torrential rain before disappearing down a storm-drain upon which the camera lingers for a second. An unusual axis is set up with the boy peering into down and an extreme low angle of him from within the drain as Pennywise bobs into view with a Psycho-like high-pitched violin note. It is only when Georgie reaches out for a balloon, that Pennywise grabs his hand, delivering his mantra that ‘When you’re down here, you’ll float too’ and we see a close shot of Pennywise’s upper set of shark-like teeth before his face encroaches the camera’s focal distance and the shot cuts to a blur. These are not the teeth of a stereotypical vampire but their sudden appearance does allude to that horror subgenre.

Having escaped some predatory bullies in ‘the Barrens’, Ben hears a familiar voice and turns to see a vision of his father standing in the lake, holding balloons. As we cut in on the axis, the voice modulates to Pennywise’s and fluffy buttons appear on the man’s uniform. Later, Richie’s meeting with Pennywise similarly fuses with a vision of a werewolf, so that we hear a lion-like roar but the creature suddenly has clown’s feet. These relatively simple effects, creating a visual dissonance, are more unsettling than the skeletal hand that makes a grab for Ben or the full shot of the talking skeleton delivering Pennywise’s line about floating. Eddie’s flashback is in a shower, a place which one might assume to be private and safe. Here the victim is alone, rather than mocked by a group as in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) and there is no disguised attacker as in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). The shower nozzles extending from the walls and turning on by themselves seem the stuff of low-budget 1950s horror but this is strangely appropriate given the time-setting and the fact that we see the group sharing a passion for Gene Fowler Jnr’s 1957 I Was a Teenage Werewolf (prompting Richie’s own vision of Pennywise).

Like the novel, the film raises the question of why clowns should be disturbing. The fear of clowns or coulrophobia, is reflected in It’s spawning of a horror subgenre of its own – the Fear of Clowns franchise. The wearing of make-up personifies innocence and subverting norms of behaviour, usually for comic ends, but it also obscures features and could act as a disguise for anyone wishing harm to their prime customers, children. There are clear overtones of paedophilia in Pennywise’s choice of victim, so that balloons, usually symbols of childish innocence, act as lures in a trap – he personifies the warning not to accept treats from strangers. He has a childish, playful element delivering jokes and songs but at the same time has razor-sharp teeth (drawing in part on Michael Landon’s Teenage Werewolf). He can appear at will, especially around drains, can shape-shift and appears to have no real raison d’ être other than to frighten. Pennywise is revealed piecemeal in the first part but in the second we see all of him from the first scene. This allows Wallace to use the part for the whole in telling details such as his bright yellow trousers or red shoes.

The most disturbing manifestation of Pennywise occurs as Mike is showing the others his father’s scrapbook and they come across an old black and white picture of a street-scene. There is a blend of disturbing action with disturbing televisual form. There is a more historical element of Rabelaisian misrule about his cracking corny jokes, turning cartwheels and the monochrome scrapbook places the action within the comfort of the past. At the same time, Mark Dery’s description of Sam Torrance in Kubrick’s The Shining (discussed in Stephen King on the Big Screen), applies to Pennywise here – ‘There’s a jump-cutting, channel-surfing quality to Torrance’s madness […] mugging for an imaginary camera, framing its brutality in pop culture quotes’.³ More than the first example of a photo appearing to move, when Georgie gives a wink, here the picture comes fully to life. Pennywise is cavorting about, dancing and hopping in the guise of an entertainer.

However, he freezes in mid-distance and breaks the fourth wall to look directly out at the camera. It is this point that is most chilling – not that pictures move but that figures within them can see and react to those outside. Movement in the opposite direction, into a picture, is the stuff of imaginative fantasy, often for younger viewers, such as the jump into a chalk drawing in Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964). Here, Pennywise runs forward, almost disappearing out of the frame before clambering up a lamp-post in the foreground. There is a subtle shift as his hair becomes clearly red and then his whole face leers into the camera in close-up. Movement through and almost beyond the frame, is achieved despite the shot using only a static camera position, creating the effect of a surveillance camera shot, particularly odd given the period setting. A similar sequence is used in Takashi Shimizu’s remake of The Grudge (2004), where Nakagawa watches a ghostly figure approaching a surveillance camera down a corridor, only to magically appear in extreme close-up looking right into the lens. We cut back to a shot of the group looking in horror at this but there is a further shock as a gloved, grabbing hand shoots out of the book. The idea of a moving picture or of a hand reaching out is not new, as in And Now The Screaming Starts (Roy Ward Baker, 1973) but what is unsettling here is the problematization of borders – what is and is not contained within the frame of a picture.⁴ The idea of pictures having a monstrous life of their own, which threatens to erupt into ‘reality’ is also explored in other King’s short stories like ‘The Sun Dog’ (1990) or ‘Stationary Bike’ (2008) but it is the tightness of the framing, which increases the power of the idea here. With a large ensemble cast, Wallace often has to fill the corners of the frame and exceed proxemic norms by pushing actors closer to one another. This is also touched upon in the opening credits, where the camera first zooms in and then out, not on one of the pictures, but on the space between them.

The inhaler, upon which they all draw a breath before entering the underground passageways to confront It, the nameless monster that supposedly exceeds Pennywise in evil, stands as an effective symbol of childhood belief. Negatively, it allows It to exist, feeding on their fear and allows Eddie (Dennis Christopher) to be dominated by his mother, who knows full well that he does not have asthma and that there is only water in his inhaler. However, this shared belief is what also binds the group together in rejecting evil. It is what Eddie sprays in the monster’s face, asserting that it is battery acid. As a varied projection of fear, this works but the ending to the second part is probably the most disappointing in any of the films discussed in this book. It is clearly a problem trying to manifest a concept of evil onto which individual characters project their own subjective fears, which leads to the clichéd spider monster. Even in the first part, the monster’s hand changes into something clearly non-human before disappearing down the hole but exactly what, is not clear. King complained about Wallace’s monster but it appears in his book too.

In the first confrontation with the monster, its approach is signalled by some Hellraiser-style lighting as it passes along a pipe and a forward tracking shot with a negative-style effect, similar to that used in Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984). One bully, Belch Huggins (Drum Garrett), is despatched by being sucked slowly into a pipe, his legs being bent up at an unnatural angle like Deke in ‘The Raft’ in Creepshow II (Michael Gornick, 1987). The fight against It uses plenty of Alien3-style-Steadicam and Close Encounters-style lights passing overhead (more reaction than action shots) as the room mists over and a rollcall with them all holding hands ends with Pennywise appearing amongst them. He is hit by Bev’s catapult shot, firing a silver dollar with its mythic vampire-slaying properties, and somersaults down the drain, almost pulling Bill with him.

Ironically, the limited budget forces some creative thinking and produces more powerful effects than the climactic battle, such as a balloon wandering down an apparently-empty street (pulled by a man with a fishing pole way in the distance). The experience of Bev (Annette O’Toole) with a dripping tap, magically filling a basin with blood, is also effective. It provokes no reaction from her father, who puts his hands right in it and clearly sees nothing. His subsequent gesture of affection, putting his hand to her face, thereby smearing her face with blood he cannot see, is thus all the more effective. This also makes the following scene (although not seen until later) in which the others not only come and help her tidy up but thereby validate her view of the world, more touching.

The second part opens with Bill as an adult visiting Georgie’s grave. There is a slight allusion to the opening of Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) in the background topography, complementing the appearance of Pennywise’s wig, bobbing up from an open grave. This second part is about the power and importance of memory and each character is thrown (sometimes reluctantly) into a flashback. The toast that Mike and Bill drink to, ‘Here’s to remembering’, reflects the importance of not burying the past but recognizing its place in the present. It also facilitates some truly awful sentimental episodes, such as the bike scene, where Bill attempts a moment of childish levity a la Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), and at the end where Bill’s ride through downtown traffic supposedly wakes Audra (Olivia Hussey) from a coma-like state

Pennywise’s appearance to Richie in the library is a quiet, apparently undramatic scene, until the clown speaks, commenting from an upper floor on Richie’s lustful glance at a young librarian. The clown is sitting amongst other readers, none of whom can apparently hear or see him, making Richie’s shock and fear all the more difficult to control. The picture composition puts the librarian and Richie facing each other and Pennywise in the middle of the T-frame as he laughs, recites bad jokes and waves a football rattle. With a single Psycho-style violin note, he makes bunches of balloons fall around Richie, bursting with a bang and spraying blood on people, who with the surreal quality of a nightmare, do not react. A repetitive element and an increasing sense of diminishing returns is seen in Pennywise’s appearance to Ben, motivating a blend of past and present as he helps a younger version of himself, also being bullied, before seeing his father again but only the less unsettling skeletal figure. Ben sees Pennywise from the taxi and when he turns back a single balloon appears in the frame with ‘Turn back now’ on it.

Eddie’s visit to a chemist seems normal enough until he hears a familiar voice and behind a curtain meets old Mr Keane, who had tried to explain the truth about his asthma many years ago. On the key word ‘water’, the man’s voice starts to distort and a sentimental moment in which the two embrace is broken when we see a scaly arm (the same glimpsed at the end of Part One) grab Eddie and a warning to get out of Derry is delivered in Pennywise’s voice before the man reverts to his normal appearance again. What makes the scene effective is that no one else sees this and so like the library scene, this eruption of the supernatural into the everyday makes characters (and possibly us) question our senses.

When Bev visits her old house, the name on the bell changes from Marsh to Kersh, suggesting all is not what it seems in this house. With a fairy-tale motif, the sweet, old lady offers her tea but later starts to slurp her tea through blackened teeth. Bev looks down and sees her cup is full of blood, causing her to drop it. As the woman mops up, her voice changes, although we only have a high-angle shot of the top of her head. The action does not cohere, for when Bev rushes out, the woman, now grotesquely aged, grabs her but also warns her to stay away. Despite apparently boundless powers of shape-shifting, he lets Bev just brush him off.

The characters meet up in a Chinese restaurant and as they start to share their recent visions, Bev faints, claiming that the power of memory was ‘like a tidal wave’, water imagery again linked to Pennywise (Richie, the character most strongly in denial, says ‘Maybe it’s in the water’). He initiates an attempt at a party atmosphere and we have a rotating shot round the table as used in the opening credits of sitcom Roseanne (Roseanne Barr and Matt Williams ABC, 1988–97). The restaurant scene is intercut with Henry Bowers (Michael Cole) in prison and his visions of Pennywise (superimposed over shots of the moon, suggestive of werewolf mythology more than a vampire motif), instructing him to kill all the surviving members of the Losers’ Club. We cut back ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Vampires
• Chapter 2: Stalk and Slash?
• Chapter 3: Monsters vs Aliens
• Chapter 4: Sometimes They Come Back
• Chapter 5: Apocalypse Now
• Chapter 6: Tales of the Unexpected
• Conclusion
• References