Ice Twisters (2009) and the Influence of Stephen King

Stephen King has had a vast influence over storytelling in the past fifty years.  His best-selling bibliography has entertained and inspired generations of readers.  Many of the movies and television series based on his work have gone down as classics in their respective genres.  It only makes sense that there would be copycats and homages that play into his style.

Knowing a good amount of his work, there are some tropes that I picked up on.  One of the most specific is that in Stephen King’s writing, he really likes to focus on penises.  That’s not what this post is about, though.  There are other common threads.  The use of the fictional towns of Derry, Castle Rock, and Jerusalem’s Lot are part of his shared universe.  A few of his tales are about a group of friends when they’re kids and when they’re adults and how those times are connected.  There are a bunch of stories about possessed things.  The biggest trope, however, is the profession of Stephen King’s main characters.  Many of his main characters happen to be writers.

Salem’s Lot had a main character who went back to a town that has a traumatic history because he is writing a novel about something similar.  The Shining featured a winter caretaker who was writing while cooped up in the Overlook hotel with his family.  One of the kids from It grew up to be a writer.  1408 had a writer visiting a haunted hotel room to write about it.  Misery might be the one that people think of the most since the entire story revolved around a woman holding a writer hostage until he wrote the story she wanted.  People say that you should write what you know, and he certainly does.

Other storytellers have picked up on this frequent Stephen King story element.  It has found its way into the novels, short stories, scripts, and plays of people who were clearly inspired by the horror legend.  People who grew up on Stephen King have paid homage to his work by telling stories that harken back to some of the stuff he’s done.

One such movie was 2009’s Ice Twisters.  Charlie Price (Mark Moses) was a science fiction writer visiting a small town for a book signing.  His background as a scientist made his writing more realistic and factual than most science fiction authors.  When a series of freak, isolated ice storms started, Charlie teamed up with Joanne (Camille Sullivan), a former science student of his now working for the Federal Science Foundation.  They figured out what was causing the freezing frights and found a government coverup in the process.

The main thing that was pulled from the Stephen King inspiration was the fact that Charlie Price was a writer who became the protagonist of the story.  He was the person who ended up saving the day.  It was his actions that prevented the government from covering up what was causing the storms.  The writer was the central figure of the story and the person that the audience empathized with.

Though not always the heroic figure that Charlie Price was, the main characters in Stephen King’s work are writers in many cases.  One of Stephen King’s heroic writers was Ben Mears from ‘Salem’s Lot.  He teamed up with a few other townspeople to stop a vampire infestation.  In the end, he saved a child and put in a valiant effort to defeat the vampires once and for all.  It tied into his writing, which was about one of the local houses that people believed might be haunted.  As a reader, you related to Ben and his fears.  You wanted him to end up defeating the threat.  The ending is ambiguous about whether he stopped it for good, but he was the heroic figure for the novel.  He was a writer saving a town from monsters. 

But there was a depth to Charlie Price that made everything feel more seeped in the Stephen King writer mythos.  The writing was the reason that he was in the area to begin with.  He had been scheduled to visit a local small-town bookstore for a signing.  When the signing was done, he went outside.  That was when one of the first major ice storms hit.  It got the story going, and got Charlie going.  Had he not been there for the book signing, he would have missed the storm, and he wouldn’t have been able to save the day.

Stephen King has tied the writer’s job into the story of his novel more than once.  Misery might be the most famous example of an author lead character having their profession tied into his story.  Paul Sheldon was an author who wrote a series of popular novels.  He was tired of writing the series and killed off his main character.  He finished a new manuscript for a new book and got in a car accident rushing it to a publisher.  Annie Wilkes, a fan of the Misery books found him and nursed him back to health while reading the final Misery book.  When she found out that Misery died, she kept Paul hostage until he wrote a book where she came back to life.  The story hinged on the fact that Paul was a writer.  Had he not been a famous writer, none of the events would have happened.

The last aspect that should be touched upon is the writer’s field of expertise being used to solve whatever the issue is.  Or to hinder it.  That all depends on the situation.  Ice Twisters had Charlie Price using his background of science to help end the ice storms.  He was a scientist who had become a science fiction writer, and the storms that were happening were something that felt right out of one of his books.  He used that to his advantage, taking a page out of his own book to find a way to save people from the weather anomalies.

In the novel It, one of the main characters grew up to become a horror writer.  Bill, the leader of the group, always had a way with words and would use that ability to get everyone ready to go into battle against Pennywise, or whatever form Pennywise took at the time.  The horror novels would give Bill an added strength through his life as he would deal with horror for nearly 30 years.  He faced evil in Derry at the beginning of the three decades and at the end, while facing his own horrifying thoughts in his writing during the time between.  His experience with horror through his first encounter with evil and his writing would prepare him for the second encounter in Derry.

There were a few other Stephen King influences in Ice Twisters such as the small-town vibe of everything and the basic horror storytelling elements, but the biggest influences were in the writer main character.  The television film had taken that aspect of King’s writing and ran with it.  The main character was a writer whose background helped solve the dilemma that everyone encountered.  The fact that he was a writer explained why he was there.  If he were not a writer, the entire story would have played differently.  The job was an essential detail in the plot.

Stephen King’s work has been some of the most influential of the 45 years that he’s been a big name writer.  Other writers were inspired to make horror novels.  Many, many movies have been made based on his work.  Movies that weren’t directly based on his work have used elements of his writing to build their own worlds.  If he never wrote a book or never became a household name, the entire entertainment world would be a different landscape.  His influence is everywhere.

Now let’s get a few notes in here:

• Camille Sullivan showed up in the Sunday “Bad” Movies for the third time in Ice Twisters, after already being in The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30) and Ice Soldiers (week 71).
• Nicholas Carella returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies in Ice Twisters.  He had previously shown up in Ghost Storm (week 97).
• Have you seen Ice Twisters?  Do you think it was as influenced by Stephen King as I’m making it out to be?  What did you think of it?  Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• Twitter and the comments are also good places to tell me about movies I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If there’s something I haven’t seen that you think I should, hit me up, let me know, and maybe I’ll cover it.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies now, and it’s got some decent stuff going on.
• This was the second post to come out this week, but it was supposed to come out two months ago.  The post after it was Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.

Promoting Fear Through Films and Reefer Madness (1936)

With every generation, there are new fears that people latch onto.  New things come into the culture that scare parents, politicians, police, and anyone else in a position of authority.  We can see that right now with the vape culture.  Signs have gone up at establishments that say both not to smoke and not to vape.  Commercials have been played before movies at the cinema to warn people about the potential side effects of vaping.  It’s the new scare that has found its way through western culture.

When a major scare hits the culture, it will inevitably creep its way into media and entertainment industry.  Movies become one of the major outlets to spread the fear.  Propaganda movies sway the thoughts of a population by manipulating their outlook on life.  Other movies that aren’t blatant propaganda sneak thematic messages in or use the villain as a vessel for the scare.  Studios and filmmakers know how influential their work can.  They end up using it as an influence to propagate the scare.

The biggest of the scares to hit movies would be communism and Russia which caused a lot of issues both in front of and behind the camera.  Joseph McCarthy was a senator who had put together a commission to try and weed out the communists in Hollywood.  People lost careers over it.  The Hollywood blacklist was created, with the names of “known” communists.  People were no longer sought out to work on the big pictures.  On screen, there were many Russian villains and cold war thrillers that came out of the era.  It lasted well into the 1980s until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Cold war thrillers were a big source of the communism scare in movies.  They were mainly spy flicks where it was the CIA or FBI against the KGB.  They weren’t the only source for putting this sort of fear into American audiences, however.  Though the McCarthy trials happened in the 1950s, the action movies of the 1980s were just as fearful.  They were filled with Russian villains.  Take, for example, the film Red Dawn.  It was about teenagers forming a resistance against the Russian army that invaded America.  It brought the threat of Russia and communism to American soil.  The Americans still came out on top, but it was a movie warning people about how bad the Russians and their communist ways could be.  When the remake was released in 2012, the Russians had been replaced with North Koreans.  The North Koreans were a quickly edited cover-up for the originally intended Chinese villain.  Either way, the villains were communist or dictatorships, so it was an extension of the Russian villains that populated the films of the 1950s through the 1980s.

Communism wasn’t the first scare that American film audiences would experience, and it wasn’t the last.  Christian movies are all about putting fear into people in order to make them believe.  There are many instances where Christian films have used fear tactics to attempt to convert people, or play into the steadfast opinions of the already converted.  Take the first two films in the God’s Not Dead series as an example.  The first movie was about a student’s beliefs being taken away from him by a teacher who no longer believed.  The teacher died in the end because he didn’t believe.  There was a reporter who lost her faith, and she ended up with cancer.  By the second movie, her cancer was cured because she believed in God again.  Bad things happened to the people who didn’t believe.  Good things happened to those who did.

Another scare that managed to find its way into film was the AIDS epidemic.  This was a huge thing in the 1980s and 1990s where people were afraid of the because it was new and unknown.  There were connotations that came with it.  It was mostly happening to gay people, and the idea of AIDS made people automatically conclude that someone suffering it would be gay.  That’s not always the case.  It can be shared through needles, sex, or blood.  It didn’t have to be gay sex.  We all know that by now.

A few movies took on the AIDS epidemic.  Philadelphia was probably the most critically acclaimed of the early 1990s, putting the audience in the shoes of Tom Hanks’s character as he died from the disease.  The movie depicted the ways that society worked against him.  It showed how people were treated differently when they had the disease.  Then there was the movie Kids.  It was about teenagers in New York dealing with sex, drugs, and alcohol.  AIDS was a major part of the movie, leading to a particularly shocking finale.  People feared the disease.  Some movies propagated that fear while others normalized the ailment so that the people suffering from it would be treated like people.

Then there was the biggest scare of them all.  It was bigger than the Russian communism scare.  It was bigger than the World War II scare.  It was bigger than AIDS, though it tied into that.  And it was definitely a bigger scare than what Christian movies put out there.  This scare was drugs.

There is a reason to fear drugs.  Opioids are killing numerous people on a daily basis.  They go to the doctor to get cured, end up hooked on pills, and then drown in a empty pill bottles.  Countless celebrities have died from drug overdoses.  River Phoenix, John Belushi, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heath Ledger, Chris Farley, Peaches Geldof, Margot Kidder, Marilyn Monroe, Brittany Murphy, Dana Plato, and Amanda Peterson are only some of the actors that died from drugs related causes.  It’s no wonder the drug scare has been going on for nearly a century.

The war on drugs was a big part of the 1980s, leading into every decade that has come since.  The United States of America, and many other places, cracked down on drug use.  Or they said they were going to.  Most of the efforts in the United States came down to a few of the big-name illegal drugs.  They went after cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and meth.  They didn’t really crack down on the pills that people could get at the local pharmacy.  People were warned about what smoking or injecting could do, but they weren’t warned about ingesting pills.

One of the biggest movies to come out against drugs was released decades before Nancy Reagan’s big push in the war on drugs.  It was a 1936 film called Tell Your Children that played more like an afterschool special or driver’s ed warning video than an actual movie.  If you don’t recognize the name, the movie now goes by the title Reefer Madness.

Reefer Madness was about all the bad things that could happen when people were involved in marijuana.  If they were dealers or buyers, marijuana ended up being one of the worst possible substances.  Everyone on both sides of the transaction were affected.  They all smoked marijuana and it led to bad things.  Some of them hallucinated.  Others attempted rape.  Some sessions even ended in murder.  It was a bad drug that led to bad things.  Or so the movie depicted.

This was clearly propaganda.  More than 80 years after the movie’s release, people know that marijuana was never that bad.  It didn’t drive people to murder or rape.  If they were going to do that, they were going to do it regardless of marijuana.  The drug just gave them an excuse to commit the atrocities without taking personal ownership.  Reefer Madness tied marijuana to those activities in order to give it a bad name because the filmmakers didn’t want people smoking the grass.  Alcohol was fine.  Weed wasn’t.

Looking back on it now, Reefer Madness was laughable.  They went so over-the-top on the side effects that it turned everything into a joke.  The way the people laughed, the violent lengths they would go to after smoking the slightest amount, and their rapidly decreasing minds were heightened to the point where it felt like a parody, even though it wasn’t.  The propaganda they tried to shill didn’t land.  There are better, subtler ways to do it.

Films meant to scare audiences about certain societal topics have been around for ages.  From the drug warnings of films like Reefer Madness to the Cold War communism scare of movies like The Manchurian Candidate and Red Dawn all the way to recent Christian non-believer scares like God’s Not Dead and God’s Not Dead 2, filmmakers use their platform to get across ideas that they feel people should be turned off of.  Want them to fear AIDS?  Use Kids as an example.  The platform was made for telling stories.  Sometimes the stories come with warnings.

There’s a new thing to fear in our culture with every generation.  Movies have been one of the major outlets for getting fear messages out, but there are other ways as well.  There is the basic word of mouth that has been a thing for centuries.  One person tells another person something and it spreads.  The news is a major factor in building fear.  Toys, television, radio, books, advertisements… Almost anything can spread fear.  It’s up to every person to figure out for themselves whether they want to believe the fear or learn something and make their own decisions.

Now let’s get some notes in here and go on with our days:

• This post mentioned God’s Not Dead (week 230) and God’s Not Dead 2 (week 230).
• Have you seen Reefer Madness?  What other movies do you think tie into the whole building fear about something?  Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• The comments and Twitter are also good places to let me know about what I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Drop me a line and tell me about the bad movies you want to see featured here.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies where some fun things are happening.  Check it out.
• This was week 339 of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, which means that next week will be a franchise week.  What will I be watching?  In the past few years, there has been a trend to make direct-to-video sequels to family-oriented action movies of the 1990s.  One of those franchises is ready to go up to bat.  Cop and ½ and Cop and a Half: New Recruit are ready to be covered, and they are what I’ll be checking out.  I’ll see you next Sunday for that post, whatever I have to say about the movies.