I don't like scary movies. At all. I never have. I never will. I am intransigent on this score. I remember as a kid--I couldn't have been more than five--being at my Grandpa Leon's house, a man with a bit of a laissez-faire attitude toward what was appropriate for children to watch, and refusing to watch Pet Cemetery with him and my three year-old brother. Tyler, so far as I can remember, was undisturbed. (For those of you who know him this might explain some of his viewing habits and preferences.) I sat in the kitchen coloring pictures with my grandma. I have only seen a handful of honest-to-God scary movies since then. And I have hated them all.
(It should be noted here briefly that for some reason the zombie genre is exempt from this intense dislike. There is something so implausible about a zombie outbreak that is not shared by, say, Hostel that refuses to allow it too far into my head. Zombie movies to me aren't even scary, so much as gross action movies.)
As such, I have also studiously avoided horror fiction as a genre. I have read Frankenstein and Dracula, but that is about as scary as reading has ever got for me. But for some reason I was looking for something new to read on the Kindle and I searched for Stephen King novels. The Shining was the first hit and it was something like $4, which for 400 pages and many hours of entertainment seemed like a bargain. For some reason, in my mind King has always been a hack writer. Perhaps it has something to do with this clip from an old Family Guy (yes, dear God, I used to watch Family Guy). Or maybe it is because I spent a chunk of one unfortunate afternoon watching The Langoliers. But this was really well-written stuff. And for much of the time, absolutely terrifying.
Was there an episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and he gets so scared that he puts it in the freezer? (Oh, and, yes, dear God, I used to watch Friends.) That is how I felt for a good chunk of this book. "Get this thing away from me. Oh wait, what happens next?" Weird things happened while I was reading the book as well. For example, the family is snowed into the hotel on the 7th of November. The day I read that was the seventh of November. Jack makes his last phone call before the winter sets in to the manager of the hotel who winters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I had just read the scene at my lunch break at work and we got a phone call from a Florida area code. There was no one on the other end of the line. I Googled the area code. 305. Serving residents of the Florida coast from Miami up to Fort Lauderdale. I couldn't read it by myself at night. I held Clara tight, and kissed my babies with vigor. In many ways it was even scarier than the film version.
For me it has everything to do with pacing. Now again, I am no connoisseur of horror movies, but I understand that where the scariest films get a lot of their mileage is the pacing. You have to build to that big moment of fright, whether a gruesome death, or a scared jump/scream-inducing thing, or a big reveal. That is why sound is such a crucial element to scary movies. All film has to do that. And all film fails to do that as well as a book simply because pacing doesn't translate as well to the medium of the film as it does in the book. When you have a 100 minute long film, you can only spend so many minutes building up the tension around a scene. When you have a 400 page book that takes the better part of 15 hours to read, you can go slow as hell.
And that is just what King does, time and time again in this book. For me the scariest scene was when little Danny was in room 217 and the naked ghost woman comes out of the tub and puts her hands around his throat (cut scene). That sentence I just wrote takes about ten seconds to read and isn't that scary. The scene in the book took several minutes. Several terrifying minutes. When the visualization is all in your head sometimes it becomes more acute; your brain is not passive and has to do more work and is therefore more attuned to what is going on. As her hands curled around his neck I could feel pressure on my own. My heart was racing, my eyes flying down the page to try to catch the resolution or the next thing or anything to break the tension of that lingering moment.
I hated it, and I loved it. It was very weird. Maybe that is how everyone feels about scary movies and I am just sort of getting a glimpse. Not that I want to dwell in that world any longer. My Netflix queue remains bereft of horror movies. My Kindle is unadorned with further scary books. I want the scary stuff to always scare me on those rare moments I indulge whatever reptilian part of our brain digs that stuff. I don't want to become comfortable with it or desensitized to its effects. I regard the capacity to be a 30 year-old man reduced to that five year-old at the kitchen table with grandma as a net positive in my life.
Speaking of which, that sounds like a good start to a horror movie. A grown man becomes child-like when confronted by fear, taking solace in the memories of coloring pictures idly at his grandmother's table to escape his Philistine relatives, only it is revealed that the pictures he drew were far more lurid and grotesque than anything in the movies he avoided and the sweet innocent boy was nothing of the sort. Reveal: the man is actual in an insane asylum, having murdered his family with an ice pick and a blowtorch after seeing a dead dog in a cemetery (I still have no idea what that movie is about, clearly), and though his doctors think he is rehabilitated he is getting the urge to kill again. And maybe he can read minds. I don't know yet. And maybe that dead dog talks to him somehow. Or all dead dogs can. I don't know. See Spot Kill, Halloween 2016. You're welcome, America.
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