Tag: Stephen King

Movie review: “Carrie” (1976)

Posted on by Eric

“Well, who should we vote for? They’re more your crowd than mine. (she thinks) I don’t even have a crowd.”

“Why don’t we vote for ourselves?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Please, don’t vote for ourselves!”

“Carrie. (smiles at her reassuringly) C’mon. To the devil with false modesty.”

(she thinks, finally smiles in return) “To the devil.”

I read Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie over the course of a single, white-knuckle weekend back in high school and haven’t revisited it since. Neither of those statements is particularly surprising in retrospect. King was my first, second, and third favorite author growing up. Whereas typical kids can be counted on to occasionally skip schoolwork to indulge in unconstructive extracurriculars, I too often found myself immersed in choice cuts from Night Shift or Skeleton Crew instead of my own assigned reading. The breadth of King’s literary domain has rendered his lesser tomes somewhat disposable, and Carrie certainly isn’t one of his best. Structured largely as a series of small town newspaper articles covering the aftermath and, retroactively, the background and lead-up to a sensational local tragedy, it reads like the growing pains of an ambitious first-time author manifesting in real time. Continue reading “Movie review: “Carrie” (1976)” →

Movie review: “Pet Sematary” (2019)

Posted on by Eric

Pet Sematary

“But it’s all okay. You’re back now.”

“Back from where?”

The specter of unimaginable loss hangs, as it should, like a pall over Pet Sematary – not merely the loss of a beloved pet, say, which would be awful enough on its own; nor the loss of a sibling, maybe one you loved, or maybe one of whom you were scared enough as a little kid to secretly, shamefully, wish dead; nor the loss of a spouse, nor a parent, nor, worst of all, the sudden and heartbreaking loss of a child – but of everything, the loss of seemingly everything you ever loved and fought for all at once, crumbling away to nothing before your frantic, helpless, unbelieving eyes. What would you do in that moment, honestly, without the benefit of foresight or rational thought, to get it all back? Wouldn’t you do anything? Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s stoic horror parable touches the heart with a clammy, room temperature hand and presses down firmly, until our breathing is rendered involuntarily shallow. Continue reading “Movie review: “Pet Sematary” (2019)” →

Movie review: “Creepshow” (1982)

Posted on by Eric

creepshow

“Har-ry! The lady fair is waiting for her knight in shining corduroy!”

Whether or not we might remember or care to acknowledge it, the world owes a debt to the creators of EC Comics, the trailblazing, still romanticized horror imprint that thrived throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s. At the dawn of the Cold War, a period that would seize the globe in a vice grip of apprehension for decades to come, EC titles such as The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt subtly defused the steadily mounting popular paranoia in their young readers by getting them to focus instead on stirring yarns concerning implacable, supernatural terrors, in effect teaching them, at a time when the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed increasingly real, if not yet omnipresent, to maybe stop worrying so much about the bomb, a solid decade before Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove took their own crack at it. Sure, EC seemed to say, the world is a dangerous place, but that’s conventional thinking, not to mention boring. Continue reading “Movie review: “Creepshow” (1982)” →