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.
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