King’s Halloween

I am not a fan of horror.  I generally go for comedies, action movies, and when possible, action comedies.  I generally avoid horror movies because I don’t see the joy in getting scared and being bombarded by jump scares.  Also they tend to have bleak endings that don’t necessarily end with good triumphing over evil.  Usually the last survivor starts to ride into the sunset, only for the sunset to eat them.

As a result, I generally avoided the “Master of Horror” Stephen King.  He already had scared the crap out me and most other children of the 90’s with Tim Curry’s IT, so I wasn’t willing to subject myself to much more.

By the time I turned 30, I had only read a few Stephen King Books, and seen a few Stephen King movies.  I had read Carrie, the Green Mile, and The Regulators, and seen Stand By Me and Green Mile.  At the time, I didn’t even realize either of the movies were Stephen King.

For the most part, I considered Stephen King the “default” answer that people gave when asked who is their favorite author.  Kind of like the Beatles are with music.  Just the mainstream common denominator.

However, 2 years ago we started getting trailers and information for the movie, “The Dark Tower.”  I had previously heard of the Dark Tower series before, but knowing it was “Stephen King” I knew it would be scary and depressing and I wouldn’t like it.  In fact, I was fairly convinced that the “Gunslinger” mentioned in the title of the first book would die in the first book and we would be following around the kid he encounters in the first book.

But the more I looked into The Dark Tower, the more I became enthralled with everything.  I love interconnected universes.  The idea that EVERYTHING in Stephen King’s novels is connected really intrigued me.  In that first year I read more Stephen King Novels and watched more Stephen King movies than I had in the 30 years prior.

Last year I was in a bind to figure out what to do for a October marathon.  On October 1st, I was brainstorming and I came up with 2 ideas.  1. Watch as many Bad Horror/Halloween movies as I could find, 2. Watch as many Stephen King movies as I can.  Due to the release of The Legend of HallowHawaiian, I went with the bad movies.  And for that I was damned.

But I figured this would give me time to read a bunch of the books so I could compare them to the movies and write better reviews.

I have not managed to read all that many books, and in fact the books I HAVE read, I’ve already seen the movies, so no help there.

So like the years before, I have some rules.  These are all going to be movies I have NOT seen before.  So unfortunately none of these movies make the list:
The Dark Tower
The Dead Zone
The Green Mile
ANY of the IT movies
The Running Man
The Shining (1980)
Stand By Me
The Stand

What pisses me off most is that IT: Chapter 2 came out last month and Doctor Sleep comes out next month.  They would have been AWESOME to put on the list.

So tomorrow night we begin KING’S HALLOWEEN with Pet Semetary(2019)