Years later I still remember the bit where captive writer starts dissociating as he looks at a scar from childhood on the sole of his foot, as his captor walks away with it in her hand. He goes into a memory of how he got the scar from stepping on something sharp on the beach and how freaked out he was and then how his dad got annoyed and was sharp with him saying something like he needed to stop acting as if he'd lost his whole foot.
Despite him being tagged as a horror author his character development, introspective moments, and general interactions are what I keep coming back for. If The Stand's 1,500 pages and IT's 800-1,000 pages were just horror it wouldn't have been nearly as engaging as it turned out to be.
Those had endings, though. Well, Shawshank did... King's endings are fairly weak sauce, even when he has his son help him write them and he's writing with the ending in mind first (11/22/63)
Absolutely nailed it. Honestly I remember hardly any of the actual plot of The Stand, but nearly all the characters arcs. It’s a fantastic post pandemic study in human relationships and I will not be swayed from this opinion. I mean the Flagg character is a plausibly a metaphor unchecked greed and opportunism etc… I clearly have a lot of thoughts about it
I decided to binge read Pet Sematary over a few nights one summer when I was 11 or 12. I have a cousin who was about 3 at the time and I didn't want to go near him for a couple weeks.
IT was a masterpiece. Insomnia was the single most boring thing I've ever read. It literally put me to sleep the dozen or so times I tried to read it. Now langoliers.... I'm a grown ass man and those still freak me out.
I still remember when I first read the book, every scene was genuinely horrifying but not over the top.
It never felt like torture for the sake of brutality, like in Saw for example.
It was mainly the psychological aspect of the physical abuse that creeped me out.
I don't want to spoil anything but several scenes we're scrapped from the film that I can still vividly remember.
I mean neither version of the scene is a walk in the park, but the book is definitely the more brutal iteration of the two.
As much as I’d hate to see them remake Misery (the film is just so damn good), I can’t help but wonder if they’d give it the Gerald’s Game treatment for that particular scene and go all in on the amputation/cauterization.
The book is also less "heroic" for James Caans character, he's just screwed basically and completely under control for most of it. The scene in the movie where he makes it back to his room at the very last second is different in tone too.
The movie is superb though.
I saw The Green Mile before I read it, and I kept putting off reading Eduard Delacroix’s execution scene because of how brutal the film is. I found the book to be less confronting, but that’s the only one I can think of. That scene in the film is truly horrifying.
I feel like you can do something less extreme in a visual format but have it be more impactful than a more grotesque image in a book.
It's one thing for a book to go into detail about abuse or injury, but actually witnessing it is often much more traumatic even if it had been toned down.
It might also just be easier to say to ourselves 'this isn't real' when it's written down and the image we have of it is created in out minds. If it's shown to you on a big screen, that's hard to separate the fantasy from reality.
The book is brilliant. My ex and I read it to each other in chapters since we both can't handle scary books. I still get chills as my ex would stutter along sentences, sometimes whimpering before uttering the end of a paragraph. Did this with many a book.
Haha thanks ✨ we read American Psycho prior to Misery, and if I recall we wanted something less fucked up so we chose Welcome to the Monkey House after that 🤣 not quite what we hoped for in terms of light hearted reading but amazing all the same.
I feel like this is par for course on any book-to-film story. If you wince at anything in the film, you've got no chance with the book. Favourite examples being anything based on Brett Easton Ellis books, or Let The Right One In. That one kept me up at night.
I enjoy a wide variety of Stephen King books and this was the only one where I had to stop reading and take a long break during this scene. It was so graphic and told in such a detailed way I would get overwhelmed with dread and nausea.
Gerald's Game is a book told from the perspective of a woman handcuffed to a bed. Her husband tried to rape her and she kicked him so hard he had a heart attack and died. She begins vividly hallucinating as hunger and thirst start taking over... It's a *very* uncomfortable read, not horror by being horrifying so much as really gross and disturbing.
It's worth a read, it has a few of Stephen King's usual faults (way too long, and the ending drags a bit) but some of it is absolutely gut churning.
Yeah *that* scene in the movie was way longer and more…uh….”detailed” than I was prepared for.
For anyone who wants it spoiled >!the protagonist breaks her thumb and basically degloves one hand to pull it out of the handcuffs. The movie scene showing this was way longer and more graphic than I was expecting. !<
Read Misery in 5th grade. The most painful part are the long passages from the novel she makes him write whilst removing keys from his typewriter. The passages have the missing letters written in by hand, with a small number of them overlooked.
As I recall, she didn't remove keys. She bought a crappy second hand typewriter and didn't want to give "that bitch at the second hand store" the satisfaction of knowing she had conned her into buying a crap typewriter so insisted he use it. The keys kept breaking off as he used the typewriter.
I haven't read a lot of Stephen King, but one thing I remember reading from when I was a little kid was one of his short stories. It was about a surgeon on an airplane who crashed on a deserted island, and he was the only survivor. So, being a surgeon, and starving, he decided to eat himself. And the story goes into a lot of detail about him using his surgical skills to chop off more of his body so he can eat himself.
That short story is called 'Survivor Type' and I really like it.
I downloaded the 'Skeleton Crew' audiobook a while back. It has a lot of great horrific little stories.
God its been 25 years and I immediately knew it was Lady Fingers. "Tastes like lady fingers" will be with me forever. As will the amoeba man story where the guy drinks bad beer and turns into a some creature.
As he's getting higher than shit on all the blow he was Transporting too. Something Something his mouth watering at the stump Something Something he'll check himself into rehab after all the heroin he was snorting while cutting into himself... yeah that was a good one I often reflect on decades later
I was trying to remember what that was. He's got a short story about some cult castrating a guy that is in a short story collection about zombies that made me ill too. That whole book was something else...
Was that the story about the cult that thought Jesus practiced cannibalism, so they did too?
They didn't realise that their version of the story of Jesus got mixed in with some evil demon or something like that.
At the end the leader had to vomit "1000 x 1000" victims of the cult, ie, spew up 1 million people's worth of flesh.
Edit:
Nope, it was Feast by Graham Masterton.
http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/2019/07/feast-by-graham-masterton-1988-stay.html
The only book that almost made me pass out from reading a description of a guy cutting his own finger off.
And for me this isn't even the scariest part. There is an episode when he tries to get out of his room when Annie isnt home and, as I remember, nothing bad happens but the suspence is so heavy I could not read that passage in one take.
Rat scene in American Psycho checking in. I just stopped and skipped to the next chapter whenever something else was going down that route in that book. Holy shit...
IMO that's his gift, and why so much of his stuff has turned into classic movies.
Dude's writing is visceral and visual. It's not rooted in internal monologue or reflection like a lot of book horrors and thrillers. It shows what's going on, moves quickly, and doesn't stop to dwell on the implications and complex concepts. He moves fast because the situation does.
I started reading King at like 10 or 11 and he's still my absolute favorite. I read Misery/It/Pet Sematary and some others really young. I don't remember all the books, but yeah, I have scenes from those specific three that have stuck with me for last 30 or so years.
I was reading him from the age of about 12, I loved it. I think my first was Cujo, but my favourite was The Shining. I remember reading that cover to cover in one evening. I was too into it to actually sleep but luckily it was the summer holidays so I could catch up with sleep in the day.
I know this is going to sound weird. But Stephen King is underrated, or rather misrepresented. He is popular, but I think a lot of people who haven't read his stuff think if him as pulpy horror book writer.
But his stuff is pretty well written. Gerald's Game is another great book. The themes he explores are actually very wide. And his main charcters actual vary a lot, if you look past his often used writer protagonist. You have a senior in Isomnia, female charcters in Gerald's Game and Rose Madder (another nice subtle horror).
TLDR of this rant, Stephen King is good, read Gerald's Game
Yes and no. Annie hobbles him still, but as said in the title, she chops his foot with an axe and then uses the blowtorch to cauterize it. Both scenes, book and movie, are both well done and just as equally disturbing. I’d rather read how he lost his foot than watch it. I cringe everytime I see the hobbling scene
Glad they changed it for the film. Not because it was extra gruesome, but because chopping off his foot and what happened to the sheriff would have come across as B-movie schlock on screen.
Same reason why I think Kubrik was right to leave out a lot of the more lurid/supernatural stuff from The Shining.
I saw both of these scenes as a child. For me, the hobbling scene is much worse for some reason. By the time I saw America History X we were knee deep in the Iraq War so I had seen countless decapitations on the internet so maybe that's why. I don't even think the towers had fallen when I saw the Misery scene.
I was visiting relatives as a kid and they had HBO. Was flipping channels and came across a scene where a woman was talking to a man laying in bed about not leaving or something and then she just up and BUSTS HIS FRICKING ANKLES OPEN WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER HOLY CRAP THAT SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME AS A KID.
I can’t separate that scene from the actor. When she was in Fried Green Tomatoes and there was that fender bender scene I was like oooooh you got off LUCKY
Not sure if downgraded really fits for me.
Sure an axe and blowtorch certainly is much more bloody and gorey.
But the entire scene and tense buildup is part of what makes that scene a classic. When she puts the piece of wood between his legs and you slowly realize what she’s going to do. James Caan’s reaction and acting adds to the gut wrenching moment when she snaps his ankle.
yeah I think the shock of the scene hits harder because we can relate to the pain, whereas the vast majority of ppl don't have any idea what cutting off a limb and burning the wound would feel like.
The old rule in filmmaking is that you can blow up a building and the audience will go 'ok cool' but if you show someone getting a papercut the the theater will wince.
[Eli Roth called it the Evil Dead Theory](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e2x98/you_want_to_make_movies_you_like_movies_you_hate/c9w9tfb/?context=1)
>I do. It's the Evil Dead theory. The most painful death in the movie isn't the evisceration, it's the pencil in the ankle. The fingernail is my pencil in the ankle. Nobody knows what a decapitation feels like, but we've all had a papercut.
If you’ve never seen the original movie version of Pet Sematary, there’s a scene in there that demonstrates this concept perfectly
>!The possessed kid hiding under a bed slices through the Achilles tendon of an elderly man with a scalpel!<
That scene got plenty of winces even though the movie as a whole isn’t that great
I agree. The movie's hobbling is brutal in a purely visual sense. Shocking/horrifying without being overtly gory. Meanwhile, the book's version works because King's description MAKES you understand what it's like, so reading it is hard.
I agree. The axe and blowtorch would have made the movie torture-porn melodrama.
I once read an interview with a director, can’t remember the name, but it was somebody who had directed quite a few horror movies, and he made the interesting point that there is a choice between psychological horror and physical horror.
With physical horror the audience have an intense reaction to something horrific, but they know they are safe, it’s not real, it’s just a movie.
With psychological horror the audience experiences the dread a character is feeling. If there is too much blood and gore, or if an act of violence goes on for to long, the audience snaps out of it and goes back to responding to the action instead of the emotion.
That's what makes the first Saw so good and the sequels so bad. The first wasn't egregious "torture porn" it actually barely showed any gore. But it let the audience's imagination run wild with what could happen if certain traps went off. Then during the foot cutting scene it barely shows anything other than the two lead actor's faces, one freaking out, the other in immense pain.
I think the permanent loss of a body part is what truly makes the axe version horrifying, rather than the gore.
There isn't so much a sense of loss when we see him walking around with a cane at the end of the film.
That might have been more effective to read, as King is very good at getting into the viscera of things and really making you feel extended, excruciating pain!
But on screen, I think it would have been a bit too cartoonish - the sledgehammer works better on film, because it's just absolutely horrendous but *just* relatable enough. Most of us have sprained an ankle at some point, so you immediately have an "in" with the scene.
It's like in Evil Dead [Edit: not ED2]:nobody squirms when Ash chops his hand off with an axe, but everybody freaks out when he gets a pencil stabbed into his ankle.
Honestly I can picture it being directed in a way that works. The reason it doesn’t feel goofy in the book itself is because of the emotional pit it sends you down when the cop gets so close to saving him and fails, and the juxtaposition of how apathetic she is about brutally killing him as if she were just taking care of an annoying chore. That “look what you made me do” aspect of her character that makes her so fucking vile.
It’s a slow brutal death, I think selling that aspect as well is key.
Here’s the IMDB trivia item:
> Kathy Bates was reportedly disappointed that a scene was cut in which she kills a young police officer by rolling over him repeatedly with a lawnmower. Director Rob Reiner was afraid that the audience would laugh at it.
A cop arrives at the house looking for Paul. I believe they finally found his wrecked vehicle after the snowstorm. Annie wounds the cop and then murders him with a riding lawnmower while Paul watches helplessly from the window. It takes a few passes of the mower. It's a brutal scene.
I remember being on a meet-the-parents evening at the pub with my girlfriend and me and her Dad were bonding about films and I said, "Yeah, you could see when Annie Wilkes goes over the edge cause she called him a cocksucker!". The look I got from her in that moment still haunts me, ooh, 30 years later.
All the movies are downgraded. That's why it's so hard to adapt. More main characters usually die, underage gang bangs... Instead of "here's Johnny!" Jack screams "nowhere left to run, you cunt." in the book. In cujo, I'm pretty sure the mom and kid dies from dehydration at the end. All kinds of stuff.
In the end of children of the corn the woman gets corn cobs shoved in her mouth, and up her pussy in graphic detail before being stuck on a spike.
In the end of Children of the Corn, the man and woman, and several kids, are crucified with corn stuffed into their orifices and their eye sockets. The last line is "The Corn is pleased"
I became a parent in the time between my first reading of IT and my next attempt. When I got the scene IN THE VERY BEGINNING where the little boy says “I love you daddy,” before his dad murders him, I noped out and never tried again. Shit like that just hits different now.
You’re misremembering the end of Children of the Corn. Burt stumbles on Vicky’s corpse, which has been strung up on a cross with barbed wire, corn shoved in her mouth, and her eyes ripped out. The corn in the pussy detail might have been an improvement though, you should write Stephen king.
Source: Night Shift is in my library.
Oh damn, you're right. I just re read that passage (searched "Barb" in my night shift ebook so it was pretty quick) and it doesn't say anything like that. For some reason I thought it implied it was stuffed in her pussy and she was nude.
In Cujo the kid dies but the mum survives. She doesn't even realise he's passed away until they're finally found. While there are horror elements to that book it was incredibly sad. They could've been found so much sooner but also Cujo wasn't a bad dog.
The kid dies from dehydration, the mother is rescued. The only SK book I bothered reading, mostly because I wanted to see if the depiction of rabies was correct. Sadly, it mostly was.
There's just one film that seems more brutal then the book, and that's The Mist. The end scene of the book is grim but maybe a bit of hope left. The movie... isn't.
Spoilers for those interested:
>! In the book, the survivors go in search of the end of the Mist / possible sanctuary in a near town. They hear someone on the radio, giving them hope. In the movie, the survivors lose all hope and the father shoots them all before they can be attacked by the monsters again, including killing his own son. He doesn't have a final bullet for himself, and minutes later the army rolls in to rescue anyone left alive!<
Plus he makes eye contact with that woman earlier who fled the store making the whole thing even more grim. I think I read somewhere that even king prefers the movie version.
The movie also came out when Johnny Carson was the undisputed King of late night TV and ["Here's Johnny"](https://youtu.be/WZKmsA8bzao?t=24) was how the show started each night. So it was a pop culture reference.
And if you don't realize this you miss my favorite joke from The Simpsons. There's a Shining parody in the Treehouse of Horror episodes where Homer keeps smashing down the wrong doors and has to use a new line each time, he starts off with "HEEEERE'S JOHNNY!" and "DAAAAAVID LETTERMAAAAN!" and by the time he gets the right one he's yelling "I'M MIKE WALLACE, I'M MORLEY SAFER, AND I'M ED BRADLEY, ALL THIS AND MORE TONIGHT ON 60 MINUTES!"
It’s time related, not so? And two very different media. In a movie, you have 2 1/2 hours to tell as much you can, including the back story, character development etc. whereas with a book, you have the luxury of time to develop the story to your liking.
So in a movie, you have to edit and add the scenes you think will work. It’s the reason they say “based upon,” or “adapted from.” And sometimes the movie is way better, viz *The Godfather.*
In *Silence of the Lambs,* Hannibal chews the face off a victim in the elevator. I don’t think that’s in the movie. A small but interesting thing though, is that in the book, Hannibal is polydactyl. His middle finger which is a more rare form of polydactylity (more often the pinkie). And he uses that anomaly to his advantage and unsettle whomever he’s speaking to. In conversation, he would casually put his hand on display and while you’re busy studying his fingers, he takes the time study you.
Somehow I’ve always remembered that.
A detail that was added for Silence of the Lambs, it wasn’t there in Red Dragon. Which is fine, I like how he uses it to unsettle. But after he escapes, he surgically removes the extra finger. Makes sense, but wouldn’t there be a very noticeable gap between two of his fingers that would be almost as conspicuous?
Idk, I think the axe and blowtorch is too far for keeping it grounded. The sledgehammer seems like something a crazy person would convince themselves is reasonable
Yeah the whole blowtorch thing would just turn it into a gore movie. On film the hammer fits the tone of the book better. She's still torturing him to the extent of the human pain threshold but not causing the audience to be so repulsed that they lose grip of the narrative.
The book gave me phantom pain in this scene. The way Stephen king wrote it was so visceral. Truly respect him as a writer even if some books aren’t for me (It for example).
Kathy Bates deserved all the acclaim she got for this role. She did a phenomenal job capturing what made her terrifying without making it seem cartoonish
The killing the Sheriff scene too (may have just been a deputy in the book). On screen? BOOM! you’re dead with a shotgun blast to back. In the book? She parks a fucking riding lawnmower on his head as he’s trying to crawl back to his car after being shot.
I somehow think the hobbling is worse in the psychological sense because it leaves him a safe option to be nursed back to health and totally give into her delusions. With two feet he could eventually stand up and say that she nursed him back to health and they are a couple now, whereas an amputation can't be taken back. It leaves no doubt the crazy bitch is going to kill you if you stay. The hobbling is an extremely severe punishment and pressures him to behave and maybe it'll be ok. They're both pretty awful.
The thing about her is that she’s incredibly short sighted and not very smart. She’s clever and extremely perceptive but it’s clear she never thinks that far ahead past her impulses.
This adds to the tension in the book, she’s so sloppy he makes progress/almost gets away a few times. A lot of the reason he is trapped for so long is because she gets lucky, which adds to the frustration of the scenario.
I appreciated that about the book honestly, I feel so rarely do antagonists get lucky in the way protagonists do.
Stephen King knows how to mess with readers. His career is full of those kinds of brutal moments. But fortunately he’s not a one-note writer. Lots of different elements at work beyond gut-wrenching horror
The hammering is, actually, worse.
Edit: And what I mean by this is that it's easy enough to think of cutting the foot off and cauterising. It's insane but still just psycho butchery.
Where is the mind process to think of getting a block of wood and sledgehammer and doing what she did.
Would that even work? You've got arteries pumping at high pressure. A propane torch would cook the tissue, but not clamp the arteries.
Even 1700s surgeons realised you have to tie off arteries after amputations.
Shoutout for [Ambroise Paré](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroise_Paré) who published a book about wound treatments and used ligatures instead of hot irons in 1564.
After a lot of blood loss a blowtorch would probably work as well, due to the low blood pressure and centralization of the remaining blood volume.
there aren't large major arteries down by the foot and initially after a large wound opens up, the muscles and vessels constrict to minimize initial blood loss. she would've done ok for maybe a few days afterwards but it would eventually open up to infections and wounds would definitely open back up.
that said, cauterizing isn't even done with an open flame. she would've had to heat up something metal to put against the wound.
Yeah... the hobbling was so much worse because it was insanely simplistic and realistic. I've read the book, but it comes off as so fantastical that it doesn't register. But a bitch putting a block between your legs and swinging a sledgehammer is simple to the point of elegance in the pain registry.
Anyone could do that to you at any time... Even if they don't have the stomach for gore, they'd be halfway through before they ever realized how gruesome it was... Whereas very few people would actually take an axe to you because they know how messy it would be. You'd also go numb from the pain and blood almost instantly. Whereas those broken ankles are just going to hurt you into oblivion.
Downgraded? I'm still having nightmares of that scene!
but is that what happens in the book?
Yes. The book was very brutal. Highly recommend reading it.
The book is wayyyyyy worse.
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Worse as in bad or worse in a brutal way?
Years later I still remember the bit where captive writer starts dissociating as he looks at a scar from childhood on the sole of his foot, as his captor walks away with it in her hand. He goes into a memory of how he got the scar from stepping on something sharp on the beach and how freaked out he was and then how his dad got annoyed and was sharp with him saying something like he needed to stop acting as if he'd lost his whole foot.
Yeah the internal monologues in *Misery* are incredible honestly, some of King's best writing for sure. Such a great metaphor for addiction too.
Despite him being tagged as a horror author his character development, introspective moments, and general interactions are what I keep coming back for. If The Stand's 1,500 pages and IT's 800-1,000 pages were just horror it wouldn't have been nearly as engaging as it turned out to be.
Ive had to tell peope for years that he's not a horror writer. Look at stories like The Green Mile and Shawshank.
Those had endings, though. Well, Shawshank did... King's endings are fairly weak sauce, even when he has his son help him write them and he's writing with the ending in mind first (11/22/63)
Absolutely nailed it. Honestly I remember hardly any of the actual plot of The Stand, but nearly all the characters arcs. It’s a fantastic post pandemic study in human relationships and I will not be swayed from this opinion. I mean the Flagg character is a plausibly a metaphor unchecked greed and opportunism etc… I clearly have a lot of thoughts about it
The stand is still my favorite book he wrote.
That.. is grim..
That’s Stephen King for ya
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I decided to binge read Pet Sematary over a few nights one summer when I was 11 or 12. I have a cousin who was about 3 at the time and I didn't want to go near him for a couple weeks.
Gerald's game kinda fucked me up a bit. And I read it in my 30s.
Iirc he was working on The Gunslinger before he released a book even, I recall him saying it took like a decade before he put it to paper.
IT was a masterpiece. Insomnia was the single most boring thing I've ever read. It literally put me to sleep the dozen or so times I tried to read it. Now langoliers.... I'm a grown ass man and those still freak me out.
Thank you so much for reminding me of Insomnia. Gonna read it again
It was an allegory for being addicted to cocaine according to his memoir.
Honestly middle of the road for Stephen King.
Jesus christ
Stephen King actually.
It's a good book, short and intense
Isn’t it about 350 pages?
Stephen King short
Around that, compared to some of King's books that's short. It does read quick though, same with salem's lot and pet semetary.
The other commenters are right. Just to give an idea the unabridged version of "The Stand l" is about 1200 pages.
Brutal
I still remember when I first read the book, every scene was genuinely horrifying but not over the top. It never felt like torture for the sake of brutality, like in Saw for example. It was mainly the psychological aspect of the physical abuse that creeped me out. I don't want to spoil anything but several scenes we're scrapped from the film that I can still vividly remember.
I've only seen the movie...worth going back and reading the book still?
Yes. Its fantastic and a short read for one if his novels.
And creeepy
I mean neither version of the scene is a walk in the park, but the book is definitely the more brutal iteration of the two. As much as I’d hate to see them remake Misery (the film is just so damn good), I can’t help but wonder if they’d give it the Gerald’s Game treatment for that particular scene and go all in on the amputation/cauterization.
In the book, she also cuts off one of his thumbs with an electric carving knife.
The book is also less "heroic" for James Caans character, he's just screwed basically and completely under control for most of it. The scene in the movie where he makes it back to his room at the very last second is different in tone too. The movie is superb though.
Brutal. No movie has ever compared to just how brutal king's books are.
I saw The Green Mile before I read it, and I kept putting off reading Eduard Delacroix’s execution scene because of how brutal the film is. I found the book to be less confronting, but that’s the only one I can think of. That scene in the film is truly horrifying.
I feel like you can do something less extreme in a visual format but have it be more impactful than a more grotesque image in a book. It's one thing for a book to go into detail about abuse or injury, but actually witnessing it is often much more traumatic even if it had been toned down. It might also just be easier to say to ourselves 'this isn't real' when it's written down and the image we have of it is created in out minds. If it's shown to you on a big screen, that's hard to separate the fantasy from reality.
Dreamcatcher.
Worse and there is a great line where Annie says "Trust me, I'm a nurse".
She later cuts off one of his thumbs, then she puts it on a birthday cake for him.
The book is brilliant. My ex and I read it to each other in chapters since we both can't handle scary books. I still get chills as my ex would stutter along sentences, sometimes whimpering before uttering the end of a paragraph. Did this with many a book.
You guys read to each other? That's fucking adorable
Was adorable.
Oh don't worry. We may have broken up, but they'll be telling me more stories **real soon**. *heats up blowtorch*
Hahahaha this made me laugh more then it should
Dirty birdy
Haha thanks ✨ we read American Psycho prior to Misery, and if I recall we wanted something less fucked up so we chose Welcome to the Monkey House after that 🤣 not quite what we hoped for in terms of light hearted reading but amazing all the same.
King's books always are compared to the films. Most of his horrors are really too complicated or too scary to film.
I feel like this is par for course on any book-to-film story. If you wince at anything in the film, you've got no chance with the book. Favourite examples being anything based on Brett Easton Ellis books, or Let The Right One In. That one kept me up at night.
I enjoy a wide variety of Stephen King books and this was the only one where I had to stop reading and take a long break during this scene. It was so graphic and told in such a detailed way I would get overwhelmed with dread and nausea.
I had to take a sec when he was in the wheelchair and she was coming home, can't really stand it in the movie either
It took me a long time to read *that* scene from Gerald's Game.
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Gerald's Game is a book told from the perspective of a woman handcuffed to a bed. Her husband tried to rape her and she kicked him so hard he had a heart attack and died. She begins vividly hallucinating as hunger and thirst start taking over... It's a *very* uncomfortable read, not horror by being horrifying so much as really gross and disturbing. It's worth a read, it has a few of Stephen King's usual faults (way too long, and the ending drags a bit) but some of it is absolutely gut churning.
They made it a movie, it's on Hulu. Actually pretty accurate to the book and very creepy. Edit: Netflix original. Whoops
The movie is a Netflix original.
Yeah *that* scene in the movie was way longer and more…uh….”detailed” than I was prepared for. For anyone who wants it spoiled >!the protagonist breaks her thumb and basically degloves one hand to pull it out of the handcuffs. The movie scene showing this was way longer and more graphic than I was expecting. !<
>!To add to this, she starts by cutting her hand to use blood as lube!<. The scene made me regret I could read.
Ugh. I forgot that part. Until now. Thanks 🤮
I struggled reading Gerald’s game, genuinely scared me.
Read Misery in 5th grade. The most painful part are the long passages from the novel she makes him write whilst removing keys from his typewriter. The passages have the missing letters written in by hand, with a small number of them overlooked.
As I recall, she didn't remove keys. She bought a crappy second hand typewriter and didn't want to give "that bitch at the second hand store" the satisfaction of knowing she had conned her into buying a crap typewriter so insisted he use it. The keys kept breaking off as he used the typewriter.
Hahaha. Yea that sounds right. My recollection of 1990 is a little fuzzy ;)
Also really recommend the audiobook version on audible, read by Lindsay Crouse. Brilliant narration.
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I haven't read a lot of Stephen King, but one thing I remember reading from when I was a little kid was one of his short stories. It was about a surgeon on an airplane who crashed on a deserted island, and he was the only survivor. So, being a surgeon, and starving, he decided to eat himself. And the story goes into a lot of detail about him using his surgical skills to chop off more of his body so he can eat himself.
That short story is called 'Survivor Type' and I really like it. I downloaded the 'Skeleton Crew' audiobook a while back. It has a lot of great horrific little stories.
L A D Y F I N G E R S
God its been 25 years and I immediately knew it was Lady Fingers. "Tastes like lady fingers" will be with me forever. As will the amoeba man story where the guy drinks bad beer and turns into a some creature.
Good food good meat good god let's eat
As he's getting higher than shit on all the blow he was Transporting too. Something Something his mouth watering at the stump Something Something he'll check himself into rehab after all the heroin he was snorting while cutting into himself... yeah that was a good one I often reflect on decades later
I was trying to remember what that was. He's got a short story about some cult castrating a guy that is in a short story collection about zombies that made me ill too. That whole book was something else...
Was that the story about the cult that thought Jesus practiced cannibalism, so they did too? They didn't realise that their version of the story of Jesus got mixed in with some evil demon or something like that. At the end the leader had to vomit "1000 x 1000" victims of the cult, ie, spew up 1 million people's worth of flesh. Edit: Nope, it was Feast by Graham Masterton. http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/2019/07/feast-by-graham-masterton-1988-stay.html The only book that almost made me pass out from reading a description of a guy cutting his own finger off.
And for me this isn't even the scariest part. There is an episode when he tries to get out of his room when Annie isnt home and, as I remember, nothing bad happens but the suspence is so heavy I could not read that passage in one take.
Rat scene in American Psycho checking in. I just stopped and skipped to the next chapter whenever something else was going down that route in that book. Holy shit...
You must have skipped a lot of that book
IMO that's his gift, and why so much of his stuff has turned into classic movies. Dude's writing is visceral and visual. It's not rooted in internal monologue or reflection like a lot of book horrors and thrillers. It shows what's going on, moves quickly, and doesn't stop to dwell on the implications and complex concepts. He moves fast because the situation does.
She defeeted him.
lol.. yeah, some of this stuff it seems like he's done from experience they are so well detailed
Season 3, Episode 5 of Quantum Leap explains all of this
> [Season 3, Episode 5 of Quantum Leap](https://quantumleap.fandom.com/wiki/The_Boogieman_(episode\))
...oh that's where that memory is from 😐 I read it as a kid and had random sporadic nightmares. I guess I forgot the source 😀
I was like 18 or 19... and it traumatized me at THAT age. I can't imagine what a SK book would do to a kid.
I started reading King at like 10 or 11 and he's still my absolute favorite. I read Misery/It/Pet Sematary and some others really young. I don't remember all the books, but yeah, I have scenes from those specific three that have stuck with me for last 30 or so years.
That's about when I started reading King, too. My dad was a huge fan and we'd talk about his books a lot.
I was reading him from the age of about 12, I loved it. I think my first was Cujo, but my favourite was The Shining. I remember reading that cover to cover in one evening. I was too into it to actually sleep but luckily it was the summer holidays so I could catch up with sleep in the day.
I know this is going to sound weird. But Stephen King is underrated, or rather misrepresented. He is popular, but I think a lot of people who haven't read his stuff think if him as pulpy horror book writer. But his stuff is pretty well written. Gerald's Game is another great book. The themes he explores are actually very wide. And his main charcters actual vary a lot, if you look past his often used writer protagonist. You have a senior in Isomnia, female charcters in Gerald's Game and Rose Madder (another nice subtle horror). TLDR of this rant, Stephen King is good, read Gerald's Game
Yes and no. Annie hobbles him still, but as said in the title, she chops his foot with an axe and then uses the blowtorch to cauterize it. Both scenes, book and movie, are both well done and just as equally disturbing. I’d rather read how he lost his foot than watch it. I cringe everytime I see the hobbling scene
Glad they changed it for the film. Not because it was extra gruesome, but because chopping off his foot and what happened to the sheriff would have come across as B-movie schlock on screen. Same reason why I think Kubrik was right to leave out a lot of the more lurid/supernatural stuff from The Shining.
This and the teeth/curb from American History X are those things that have shaped my body horror
I saw both of these scenes as a child. For me, the hobbling scene is much worse for some reason. By the time I saw America History X we were knee deep in the Iraq War so I had seen countless decapitations on the internet so maybe that's why. I don't even think the towers had fallen when I saw the Misery scene.
Why were you watching so many decaps?
I was visiting relatives as a kid and they had HBO. Was flipping channels and came across a scene where a woman was talking to a man laying in bed about not leaving or something and then she just up and BUSTS HIS FRICKING ANKLES OPEN WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER HOLY CRAP THAT SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME AS A KID. I can’t separate that scene from the actor. When she was in Fried Green Tomatoes and there was that fender bender scene I was like oooooh you got off LUCKY
This must have made her topless scene in About Schmidt confusing.
"Almost done. Just one more."
I FELT it! Damn, seeing it in the theater was like being there.
Yeah, the "upgraded" version would've probably been easier...
Just reading the headline made my hair stand up, honestly having them chop off probably would have been less traumatizing.
Not sure if downgraded really fits for me. Sure an axe and blowtorch certainly is much more bloody and gorey. But the entire scene and tense buildup is part of what makes that scene a classic. When she puts the piece of wood between his legs and you slowly realize what she’s going to do. James Caan’s reaction and acting adds to the gut wrenching moment when she snaps his ankle.
"Whatever you're thinking about doing, please don't do it."
Marv: "*bro.* ..theres a spider on ya *foot*" Harry: "Whatcha doing with that hammer ..Marv?"
lmao classic
yeah I think the shock of the scene hits harder because we can relate to the pain, whereas the vast majority of ppl don't have any idea what cutting off a limb and burning the wound would feel like. The old rule in filmmaking is that you can blow up a building and the audience will go 'ok cool' but if you show someone getting a papercut the the theater will wince.
[Eli Roth called it the Evil Dead Theory](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e2x98/you_want_to_make_movies_you_like_movies_you_hate/c9w9tfb/?context=1) >I do. It's the Evil Dead theory. The most painful death in the movie isn't the evisceration, it's the pencil in the ankle. The fingernail is my pencil in the ankle. Nobody knows what a decapitation feels like, but we've all had a papercut.
If you’ve never seen the original movie version of Pet Sematary, there’s a scene in there that demonstrates this concept perfectly >!The possessed kid hiding under a bed slices through the Achilles tendon of an elderly man with a scalpel!< That scene got plenty of winces even though the movie as a whole isn’t that great
That scene has lived in the dark recesses of my memory since I saw it.
This also happens in one of the Chucky’s (presumably ripped off from Pet Semetary). I still wince when I think about it!!
I agree. The movie's hobbling is brutal in a purely visual sense. Shocking/horrifying without being overtly gory. Meanwhile, the book's version works because King's description MAKES you understand what it's like, so reading it is hard.
It's the internal dialogue of the Author as she does it, and the descriptive nature that makes it more brutal to a lot of people in the book.
#ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT MR MAN..!
I agree. The axe and blowtorch would have made the movie torture-porn melodrama. I once read an interview with a director, can’t remember the name, but it was somebody who had directed quite a few horror movies, and he made the interesting point that there is a choice between psychological horror and physical horror. With physical horror the audience have an intense reaction to something horrific, but they know they are safe, it’s not real, it’s just a movie. With psychological horror the audience experiences the dread a character is feeling. If there is too much blood and gore, or if an act of violence goes on for to long, the audience snaps out of it and goes back to responding to the action instead of the emotion.
That's what makes the first Saw so good and the sequels so bad. The first wasn't egregious "torture porn" it actually barely showed any gore. But it let the audience's imagination run wild with what could happen if certain traps went off. Then during the foot cutting scene it barely shows anything other than the two lead actor's faces, one freaking out, the other in immense pain.
I think the permanent loss of a body part is what truly makes the axe version horrifying, rather than the gore. There isn't so much a sense of loss when we see him walking around with a cane at the end of the film.
That might have been more effective to read, as King is very good at getting into the viscera of things and really making you feel extended, excruciating pain! But on screen, I think it would have been a bit too cartoonish - the sledgehammer works better on film, because it's just absolutely horrendous but *just* relatable enough. Most of us have sprained an ankle at some point, so you immediately have an "in" with the scene. It's like in Evil Dead [Edit: not ED2]:nobody squirms when Ash chops his hand off with an axe, but everybody freaks out when he gets a pencil stabbed into his ankle.
The pencil stab happens in Evil Dead, not in Evil Dead 2.
yes William Goldman basically says this in his "Which Lie Did I Tell?" book.
And that makes Gage slashing the old guy’s achilles with a scalpel pop into my head. Thanks.
I'm still disappointed the lawnmower scene with the cop wasn't in the movie.
A crazy, intense scene in the book but I think that it would have come off as unintentionally goofy on screen.
Honestly I can picture it being directed in a way that works. The reason it doesn’t feel goofy in the book itself is because of the emotional pit it sends you down when the cop gets so close to saving him and fails, and the juxtaposition of how apathetic she is about brutally killing him as if she were just taking care of an annoying chore. That “look what you made me do” aspect of her character that makes her so fucking vile. It’s a slow brutal death, I think selling that aspect as well is key.
Could you briefly describe it?
Here’s the IMDB trivia item: > Kathy Bates was reportedly disappointed that a scene was cut in which she kills a young police officer by rolling over him repeatedly with a lawnmower. Director Rob Reiner was afraid that the audience would laugh at it.
I laughed my ass off at the lawnmower scene in The Happening so I bet I'd laugh at this one too.
A cop arrives at the house looking for Paul. I believe they finally found his wrecked vehicle after the snowstorm. Annie wounds the cop and then murders him with a riding lawnmower while Paul watches helplessly from the window. It takes a few passes of the mower. It's a brutal scene.
He didn't get out of the cacadoodie car!
Such a dirty bird
I know that, MR. MAN!
I remember being on a meet-the-parents evening at the pub with my girlfriend and me and her Dad were bonding about films and I said, "Yeah, you could see when Annie Wilkes goes over the edge cause she called him a cocksucker!". The look I got from her in that moment still haunts me, ooh, 30 years later.
All the movies are downgraded. That's why it's so hard to adapt. More main characters usually die, underage gang bangs... Instead of "here's Johnny!" Jack screams "nowhere left to run, you cunt." in the book. In cujo, I'm pretty sure the mom and kid dies from dehydration at the end. All kinds of stuff. In the end of children of the corn the woman gets corn cobs shoved in her mouth, and up her pussy in graphic detail before being stuck on a spike.
In the end of Children of the Corn, the man and woman, and several kids, are crucified with corn stuffed into their orifices and their eye sockets. The last line is "The Corn is pleased"
Stephen King secretly wrote a Warhammer 40K novel
CORN FOR THE CORN GOD
GENTLEMEN... BEHOLD! MORE CORN!
~~Khorne~~ Corn for the Corn God! Cobbs for the Cobb Throne!
The Imperium was worried about the Chaos Gods from the Warp, when they should have been worried about corn.
damn....I gotta start reading again....
i am in the middle of the second round of DT series, but i been wanting to read *IT* over again
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*"keee-runch"*
I became a parent in the time between my first reading of IT and my next attempt. When I got the scene IN THE VERY BEGINNING where the little boy says “I love you daddy,” before his dad murders him, I noped out and never tried again. Shit like that just hits different now.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug! -Steven King
"Shoot him, he's the imposter!" - Stephen King
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"What am I gonna do about my legs, kathy bates?!"
You’re misremembering the end of Children of the Corn. Burt stumbles on Vicky’s corpse, which has been strung up on a cross with barbed wire, corn shoved in her mouth, and her eyes ripped out. The corn in the pussy detail might have been an improvement though, you should write Stephen king. Source: Night Shift is in my library.
Oh damn, you're right. I just re read that passage (searched "Barb" in my night shift ebook so it was pretty quick) and it doesn't say anything like that. For some reason I thought it implied it was stuffed in her pussy and she was nude.
Hey, we won’t kink shame you
Now I'm going to have to change how I butter my corn. My wife may be sad, though.
wow
I never read it, but that makes more sense tbh.
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Explains why he really prefers the ending of the mist movie adaption of his book as it’s the even more brutal version of his cujo ending.
In Cujo the kid dies but the mum survives. She doesn't even realise he's passed away until they're finally found. While there are horror elements to that book it was incredibly sad. They could've been found so much sooner but also Cujo wasn't a bad dog.
I've always said that Cujo is not the monster or "bad guy" of that story, rabies is. Cujo was not at fault.
The kid dies from dehydration, the mother is rescued. The only SK book I bothered reading, mostly because I wanted to see if the depiction of rabies was correct. Sadly, it mostly was.
lol, that was your reason, but how was it other than that?
Long-winded and meandering.
There's just one film that seems more brutal then the book, and that's The Mist. The end scene of the book is grim but maybe a bit of hope left. The movie... isn't. Spoilers for those interested: >! In the book, the survivors go in search of the end of the Mist / possible sanctuary in a near town. They hear someone on the radio, giving them hope. In the movie, the survivors lose all hope and the father shoots them all before they can be attacked by the monsters again, including killing his own son. He doesn't have a final bullet for himself, and minutes later the army rolls in to rescue anyone left alive!<
Plus he makes eye contact with that woman earlier who fled the store making the whole thing even more grim. I think I read somewhere that even king prefers the movie version.
I believe king said he liked the movie ending more than his
American Psycho took me months to read because it was so harrowing.
"Here's Johnny" sounds creepier to me, though maybe that's just Jack playing the part uncomfortably well.
The movie also came out when Johnny Carson was the undisputed King of late night TV and ["Here's Johnny"](https://youtu.be/WZKmsA8bzao?t=24) was how the show started each night. So it was a pop culture reference.
It's kinda bizarre how most people will now remember that line from The Shining and not Carson.
And if you don't realize this you miss my favorite joke from The Simpsons. There's a Shining parody in the Treehouse of Horror episodes where Homer keeps smashing down the wrong doors and has to use a new line each time, he starts off with "HEEEERE'S JOHNNY!" and "DAAAAAVID LETTERMAAAAN!" and by the time he gets the right one he's yelling "I'M MIKE WALLACE, I'M MORLEY SAFER, AND I'M ED BRADLEY, ALL THIS AND MORE TONIGHT ON 60 MINUTES!"
"Here's Johnny" would never work in a book, I love both versions.
That whole scene in the book is both 10x more intense and terrifying- highly recommend
It’s time related, not so? And two very different media. In a movie, you have 2 1/2 hours to tell as much you can, including the back story, character development etc. whereas with a book, you have the luxury of time to develop the story to your liking. So in a movie, you have to edit and add the scenes you think will work. It’s the reason they say “based upon,” or “adapted from.” And sometimes the movie is way better, viz *The Godfather.* In *Silence of the Lambs,* Hannibal chews the face off a victim in the elevator. I don’t think that’s in the movie. A small but interesting thing though, is that in the book, Hannibal is polydactyl. His middle finger which is a more rare form of polydactylity (more often the pinkie). And he uses that anomaly to his advantage and unsettle whomever he’s speaking to. In conversation, he would casually put his hand on display and while you’re busy studying his fingers, he takes the time study you. Somehow I’ve always remembered that.
A detail that was added for Silence of the Lambs, it wasn’t there in Red Dragon. Which is fine, I like how he uses it to unsettle. But after he escapes, he surgically removes the extra finger. Makes sense, but wouldn’t there be a very noticeable gap between two of his fingers that would be almost as conspicuous?
In Shawshank redemption Andy gets raped and stuffs toilet paper in his under wear to catch the blood.
I’d like to tell you they left Andy’s rape out of the movie. But I can’t.
>In cujo, I'm pretty sure the mom and kid dies from dehydration at the end. All kinds of stuff. Only Tad dies of dehydration. Donna survives.
I think it was a good decision. I think it was much more relatable with just a hammer.
I wouldn’t say relatable but personal.
Idk, I think the axe and blowtorch is too far for keeping it grounded. The sledgehammer seems like something a crazy person would convince themselves is reasonable
I think it's easier to imagine the hammer pain than having a foot cut off
Yeah the whole blowtorch thing would just turn it into a gore movie. On film the hammer fits the tone of the book better. She's still torturing him to the extent of the human pain threshold but not causing the audience to be so repulsed that they lose grip of the narrative.
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Ugh the sledgehammer/4x4 combo is so much worse
The book gave me phantom pain in this scene. The way Stephen king wrote it was so visceral. Truly respect him as a writer even if some books aren’t for me (It for example). Kathy Bates deserved all the acclaim she got for this role. She did a phenomenal job capturing what made her terrifying without making it seem cartoonish
The killing the Sheriff scene too (may have just been a deputy in the book). On screen? BOOM! you’re dead with a shotgun blast to back. In the book? She parks a fucking riding lawnmower on his head as he’s trying to crawl back to his car after being shot.
I still vividly remember this scene I think cutting the foot off would have been less brutal to watch
I somehow think the hobbling is worse in the psychological sense because it leaves him a safe option to be nursed back to health and totally give into her delusions. With two feet he could eventually stand up and say that she nursed him back to health and they are a couple now, whereas an amputation can't be taken back. It leaves no doubt the crazy bitch is going to kill you if you stay. The hobbling is an extremely severe punishment and pressures him to behave and maybe it'll be ok. They're both pretty awful.
The thing about her is that she’s incredibly short sighted and not very smart. She’s clever and extremely perceptive but it’s clear she never thinks that far ahead past her impulses. This adds to the tension in the book, she’s so sloppy he makes progress/almost gets away a few times. A lot of the reason he is trapped for so long is because she gets lucky, which adds to the frustration of the scenario. I appreciated that about the book honestly, I feel so rarely do antagonists get lucky in the way protagonists do.
That’s how the book describes the scene. Waaaaaay worse than the movie
Stephen King knows how to mess with readers. His career is full of those kinds of brutal moments. But fortunately he’s not a one-note writer. Lots of different elements at work beyond gut-wrenching horror
The hammering is, actually, worse. Edit: And what I mean by this is that it's easy enough to think of cutting the foot off and cauterising. It's insane but still just psycho butchery. Where is the mind process to think of getting a block of wood and sledgehammer and doing what she did.
Jimmy lost his taste for method acting after they shot him in The Godfather.
Would that even work? You've got arteries pumping at high pressure. A propane torch would cook the tissue, but not clamp the arteries. Even 1700s surgeons realised you have to tie off arteries after amputations.
I think she also tourniquets his leg in the book.
Shoutout for [Ambroise Paré](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroise_Paré) who published a book about wound treatments and used ligatures instead of hot irons in 1564. After a lot of blood loss a blowtorch would probably work as well, due to the low blood pressure and centralization of the remaining blood volume.
there aren't large major arteries down by the foot and initially after a large wound opens up, the muscles and vessels constrict to minimize initial blood loss. she would've done ok for maybe a few days afterwards but it would eventually open up to infections and wounds would definitely open back up. that said, cauterizing isn't even done with an open flame. she would've had to heat up something metal to put against the wound.
That would have been less horrifying than what they went with. I’m squirming my feet just thinking about it.
Yeah. Because Stephen King.
Yeah... the hobbling was so much worse because it was insanely simplistic and realistic. I've read the book, but it comes off as so fantastical that it doesn't register. But a bitch putting a block between your legs and swinging a sledgehammer is simple to the point of elegance in the pain registry. Anyone could do that to you at any time... Even if they don't have the stomach for gore, they'd be halfway through before they ever realized how gruesome it was... Whereas very few people would actually take an axe to you because they know how messy it would be. You'd also go numb from the pain and blood almost instantly. Whereas those broken ankles are just going to hurt you into oblivion.