The horror of Stephen King: It has a damp kaleidoscope

Alberto 2021-10-13 13:07:59

When Stephen King published "It" (IT) in 1986, he described this novel as the sum of his current life. This novel, which took four years to develop and spread over a thousand pages, is written in Deli, a fictional city in Maine, USA. There is a cannibal monster that can only freely change its appearance. In twenty-seven years, it will bring disaster to Deli City for a full meal. In 1958, children in the city were killed one after another. The seven children of the protagonist and his party noticed the abnormality, decided to fight it to the death, and severely injured it. They promised that if it makes a comeback one day, the "Waste Chai League" will definitely return to its hometown again, hand-cutting monsters. In 1985, it awakened from a deep sleep, and the seven grown-up children also forgot and woke up. They must face their childhood nightmare again.

Although it can change for thousands of years

The film adaptation of the novel "The Clown" was released this year, with the same translation name as the film and television version 27 years ago. This is of course a clear question. But Pennius the clown is just one of the many faces of "it". We also saw in the movie that it reads our hearts and transforms into our greatest fear to capture us. It can be said that You are what you eat is absolutely true. Because its food determines its appearance.

Its different appearance in the movie version is slightly different from the novel. After all, the latest movie version sets the protagonist’s childhood in the 1980s in order to increase the audience’s sense of substitution, and thus has to abandon the outdated monster modeling. In the novel, it has been incarnate as Mu Nai Yin, werewolf, giant bird, Frankenstein, vampire... The list all the way, inevitably has a sense of Halloween. In fact, more serious horror movies tend to focus on a single monster. Two monsters tend to turn to joking and experimentation. More than two (if they are still reasonable) are usually used to achieve greater discourse, such as "Private Hostel" (Cabin in the Wood). Another situation that is prone to monster carnivals is children's movies. "Nightmare Before Christmas" and the classic animation "Mad Monster Party?" directed by Jules Bass in 1967 are examples.

In the novel, its shape can be said to be an alternative catalog of American culture in the 1950s. For example, the werewolf was born from the movie "Wolfman" (I Was A Teenage Werewolf) in 1957. The Giant Bird is a reference to the 1957 movie "The Giant Claw" (and this movie itself is also influenced by the giant toothless pterosaurs that appeared in the Godzilla series). The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954 and Tarantula in 1955 are also among the monster prototypes. One of the most eye-catching new monsters in the 2017 new edition must be the woman playing the flute in the painting. The face of the woman in the painting blends the styles of the Italian painters Amedeo Modigliani and Ito Junji (it can be seen that Japan is still one of the major exporters of horror culture from the 1950s to the present), and also the director Andy Muschietti. His predecessor "Mama" (Mama) introduces Stephen King's universe.

So why is it most often shown as a clown? Because its favorite dishes are children, and the clown's shape makes it easier for children to relax. It is also worth mentioning that one of the most notorious serial murderers in the history of the country appeared in the United States in the 1970s: John. Wayne. Gacy (John Wayne Gacy). In six years, he sexually assaulted and murdered a large number of teenagers, and was eventually charged with 33 counts of murder. Because he participated in the clown club in the local community, he often appeared in local parties and charity events as a clown, and was given the nickname "The Killer Clown" by the public. Gacy was executed in prison in 1994, meaning that Gacy was still alive when "It" was written. Even if Jin has never directly admitted that "It" is based on Gacy, this undoubtedly casts a deeper shadow on this work. Coincidentally, Gacy once revealed that the reason why he likes to dress up as a clown is because it makes him feel "return to childhood". And this is exactly one of the important themes in "It" and even Jin's writing.

Who did you spend your childhood with

Childhood is very important in the world of Stephen King’s novels, such as "Hearts in Atlantis", "Firestarter", "The Shining", "Pet Cemetery" (Pet Sematary) and other works, children occupy an important position. This is why, when he intends to write a book of "integrated masterpieces", he will write this growth story that happened in a certain summer, not only that, but also as a part of adult re-experiencing and thinking about childhood, because childhood Value can best be reflected in memories. Jin was fascinated by the splendid senses of childhood, and (should) be far away from evil.

And the closest thing to "It" must be his first work "Carrie". "Witch Carrie" tells the story of an introverted girl who grew up in an authoritarian and pious family. She discovered that she possessed magical powers during adolescence. She was bullied and eventually used this ability to avenge the world around her.

One of the things "Witch Carrie" and "It" have in common is that the protagonists are all "losers" on the margins of society. They are by no means dazzling elites and heartthrobs, and are even marked by obvious shortcomings. The seven children in "It" can squeeze into the "waste wood alliance", each has its own strengths: William stutters, Richard has four eyes, Eddie is sick, Bann is obese, Michael is black, Stanley is a Jew, and Beverly is a woman. . (Yes, in "It", women are also an original sin: "Daughters need more discipline than sons. He has no sons, and Beverly vaguely thinks it is her fault.") And they are all attacked by the same group of bad guys in the city And bullying.

In addition, children or adolescents have also become a major factor in inducing supernatural events. Why does it love children? Generally, stories with the theme of Cannibalism are nothing more than the promotion of the freshness and tenderness of children's meat, or the effect of rejuvenating youth. But it has another experience: "Adults have the fear of adults, and the endocrine can also be activated and extracted, allowing the chemical components of fear to permeate the body and flavoring the meat. But the fears of adults are often too complicated, and the fears of children are relatively simple. It’s also more powerful.” It’s all about imagination and belief: “Children are not only good at killing themselves, but also accepting people and things that are difficult to explain. They subconsciously believe in the existence of the invisible world.” “Food may be the source of life, but The source of strength is faith. When it comes to faith, who can compare to a child?” So King explained the death of the protagonist’s brother George: “If he is ten years older, he will not believe what he sees. But. He is only six years old, not sixteen."

Another similarity is that they all highlight the opposition between children and adults. Their parents are either lack of awareness, neglect of care, or over-indulgence and diligent manipulation. In the world of Jin's novels, adults are often corrupt and indifferent. They can't help the pain experienced by children at all, and sometimes more actively aggravate it. The best example is that when it scares children with illusions, parents completely ignore the magical scenes that children see. Jin did not clearly explain whether they would not or cannot see, but in short, it is not a problem for adults. Even when children face life and death challenges, they rarely consider appealing to adults.

For example, when the bathroom in Beverly's house was stained red by blood from the drain pipe of the washbasin, her father's indifference caused Beverly to turn to the children of the same age, confirming that they could all see the blood stains, and were willing to interact with Beverly. Clean up together. There is a scene in the novel that is not available in the movie version. When they cleaned the bathroom, the blood was stained on their clothes, so they went to the laundromat together to wash the blood off their bodies. Since the operation of machinery involves certain skills and dangers, laundry is usually not a housework that children will share. The child is always asked to "disarm" and let the mother borrow the clues on the clothes to monitor your daily activities. Washing clothes with parents on their backs is inevitably linked to shame, because under what circumstances do children usually do this? The most common is to hide traces of nocturnal emission and menstrual blood. In the movie version, the director deliberately inserted the scene of Beverly buying sanitary napkins in the pharmacy. The whole wall of sanitary napkins was very pressing, and Beverly looked blank. The director interpreted the blood in Beverly's bathroom as adolescent girls' fear of menstrual blood. This can be described as a fairly accurate judgment. The story of "Witch Carrie" begins with the heroine's menstrual cramps. She doesn't know what menstruation is. She sees the blood between her legs in the school shower, thinks she is life-threatening, crashes and screams.

Youth is a cruel book

Sex and gender are a big theme of the horror type, and Stephen King's focus on this element is very obvious. The adolescent body always has a sense of horror, because the familiar body suddenly becomes unfamiliar, the voice changes, somewhere is swollen, and the hair grows-so children are so frightened by the deformed clown, they also realize that they cannot stop themselves from becoming Someone else. And you know, this fear is not just physical. The end of growth is to become your parents, become a boring adult, and become an accomplice in this world. Like Michael in the movie, maturity means calmly holding the gun and executing the livestock in front of him without hesitation.

It understands this anxiety about losing innocence so much that it uses "You will float too." (You will float too.) as a solicitation. Stephen King mentioned many fairy tales in his novels, emphasizing the rite of passage aspect in the story. Among them, "Peter Pan" is mentioned the most times. A boy who knows how to fly will not grow up. Landing is to compromise, to accept the laws of this world. (Calvino's "The Baron in the Tree" will also nod and say yes.) So its suggestion is this, you can float, and you don't have to grow up. Of course, this charm was quickly dismantled, because the child immediately understood that there was only one way to stop the growth process, and that was death.

The monsters harassing in the sewers of Germany can also be understood as an undercurrent of secretion during adolescence. The twenty-seven-year cycle is somewhat flexible in the book, maybe twenty-five or twenty-eight, which inevitably reminds people of the menstrual cycle. Although the unit has changed from month to year. Another interpretation is that this is the return of Saturn in astrology-the routine karmic episodes set off a major test. The original novel links its origin to the science fiction level of the universe, but the film adaptations have not dealt with this aspect, so I won’t repeat it here.

The city is our home, and the hidden sewers also have the meaning of a cellar. Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space describes the cellar as follows: "He is actually the dark part of the house. In the house, it shares the power hidden underground. When we are in the cellar, When dreaming, we echo and coordinate with the irrationality of the abyss." The sewer is the home of the cheap rebuke (urine, feces, insects, bacteria, and rotten) of the entire city. Take a look at the linguistic work "The Parables We Live By" ( In Metaphors We Live By, the up-down spatialization metaphors studied by William Nagy can be explained more clearly. We would say "get up", the hypnotic state "underneath", "get up", "fallen", "noble", "low" inferior... Because the ground is always horizontal, the ground is subconscious, mundane, and the dead field.

The desire that suddenly emerges from the flesh is so irrational that it makes the child feel uneasy, and sometimes it also takes an aggressive posture to attack. For example, in the novel, Eddie meets the mad homeless man who constantly throws out invitations to him for sex transactions, while Beverly listens to the voice of her parents in her bedroom: "Want to hear if her mother would scream". There is no plot of Beverly being sexually assaulted by her father in the book, perhaps not as cruel as the movie. But on the whole, the movie version's description of youthfulness is still relatively mild, even inferior to the old version in 1990. The old version of the sex symbol was quite blatant. For example, when Eddie encountered it in the shower room of the school, we saw that the shower bar beside him became longer and stretched, chasing Eddie’s thin body and spraying it mercilessly. The narrow mouth squeezed out, jokingly saying "so narrow", "make adjustments", and teased Eddie for being "sissy."

In the new version of the movie, a group of boys are gleeful at the woman's body, which seems to be a lot of laughter. Like "In those years, some of our girls chasing after". With such pure love, will the interpretation of sexuality mean that readers are not right? Stephen King’s version is the oldest but also the most inconvenient for you to shirk. After a duel with monsters in the 1950s, the protagonist and his group were lost in the underground waterway. They secretly knew that to remove this snare for children, they had to lose a certain innocence, and they had to grow up in their own way. Beverly made a request to have fun with them one by one. In the filthy sewer, they committed themselves wholeheartedly and independently, regaining their stigmatized and stigmatized sex. Of course, they are underage. This paragraph of children's group sex is written in detail and explicit, which has caused countless controversies over the years. Due to scale considerations, the film only replaced the blood palm covenant, allowing them to exchange another body fluid. Then we finally understood why the plaster on Eddie's hand changed LOSER to LOVER. It is not their shortcomings that binds them together, but their lust.

Had to become flesh

Yes, Stephen King is so extreme. Love is not only promised by heart, but also by doing it personally. Jin explained his views on haunting in the novel: "Ghost: There are often ghosts or ghosts. / Unforgettable: It keeps coming up in the heart, it is hard to forget. / Haunting: Often appearing or reappearing, especially ghosts . Also refers to places frequently visited. / There is another definition: places where animals hunt.” This remark sums up how Stephen King understands horror.

So for Kim, it is important to materialize fear: "It does not disappear slowly like a ghost in a movie, but disappears in the blink of an eye, but Eddie heard a pop, very like the opening of champagne. The sound of the bottle proves that it does exist. The sound is the loud noise made by the air filling the space it left." And it is not only materialized, but also has primitive animality: "The feeling in the glove is not a hand, but an animal. Sharp claws." Even the monster in Jin's other long-length masterpiece "Magic Island", the ultimate assassin is also...bite. Is it really that scary to be bitten? There are so many things in the world that are a thousand times more terrifying than being bitten. You can only accept, this is a very Stephen King's way of expression.

In the new version of the movie, it has significantly more teeth than the old version, and the biting scenes are also dealt with vividly. In addition to the advancement of special effects makeup technology, this is also the natural evolution of Western strange physics. Western monsters are always additive. The scientists in "Jurassic World" made it very clear: "Customers want them to be bigger, roar louder, and have more fangs." It is very different from the economy and simplicity of Asian monsters. Just look at the neat-looking Sadako-san you will understand. The horror of gold is obviously a product of European and American thought.

Another physical experience that makes Jin fascinated by writing is the sense of taste. In the book, almost every time it appears, Jin takes the trouble to reiterate its stink, and does not spare his pen and ink to elaborate on its richness and complexity: "He smells the smell of floods, rotten leaves, and deep gutters, and he feels wet and smelly. . That’s the smell of the cellar.” “The smell of cinnamon, spices, linoleum treated with weird drugs, sand, and blood that has dried and shattered...” Saramago said in “Blind”, the most in hell Painful punishment is the terrifying stench in it. Because you cannot refuse the sense of smell, it is pervasive and lingering. Taste is also the most abstract among the five senses, and perhaps text is the most accessible medium. This is also the limitation of film adaptation (and let us forget those 4D movies that claim to let you experience it in person).

A corner of the world, history is like a river

In addition to the two story lines separated by 27 years, Jin also wrote a large number of "episodes," which were told by the only member of the "Waste Chai League" who remained in Deli after 1958. During the twenty-seven years, he was immersed in the study of Deli's history and wrote the book "Deli: A Wild History of the City". Those episodes are excerpts from the fictional work.

King narrated Deli's history of violence and talked about the horror history of Deli, but it must have accompanied the denial. Because what can best reflect the history of a city? Ghost must be one of the important indicators. Where there is no history, there are no ghosts. It is always crying for a new trial, but at the same time the original verdict is upheld and firmly nailed there. Those unanswered righteousness, unanswered prayers, insulted and oppressed, refused to pass away, and slowly evolved into disturbing and even fatal diseases. King compares Deli with London and Rome: Indeed, Deli is not as old as they are. The United States is such a young country, but we also have our ghosts.

Ghosts are also often linked to criticism of development, because ghosts have a very close relationship with their habitat. At this point, gold and ghost are in a line. One of the historical episodes wrote about Deli City in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Deli was drastically cultivated. Jin wrote about the situation of workers logging in extremely violent language: "Axes and hooks were used to rape the green new wood" and "Break open." The hymen of a large forest", "These lace-clad villains raped the forest and planted stubble and debris in the forest"...Jin deliberately pointed out that when the abuser he controlled came out of the library. In the process of bullying, he trampled on the book on the ground. The name of the book is "Bulldozer".

Therefore, at the beginning of many chapters of "It", King quoted the poem "Paterson" by the poet William Carlos William (William Carlos William). Williams wrote "Patterson" under the principle of "no ideas but in things" (no ideas but in things), citing many local historical materials, and juxtaposed poetry and writing about the past and present of this small town in New Jersey. Kim was in his memoir "Steven. "On Writing: A Memoir of a Craft" mentions his love for Williams and his influence on his language style. In "It", Williams' influence even came to the level of form, and even the content-the city is the person.

Let us tear the curtain of silence

Since this story is the sum of Stephen King's current life, it is inevitable to be autobiographical. This is not uncommon in Jin's works. For example, most of Jin Jue's works took place in his hometown of Maine. Also, such as "Misery", "Secret Window", "The Dark Half" (The Dark Half), "1408", etc., more than ten works by Kim Yoo all feature writers as the protagonists. Occupation. The male protagonist William in "It" makes a living writing frightening novels, so many people think that William is a clone of King. In addition, Jin was born in 1947, and he was eleven years old in 1958, the same as the protagonist in the book. Therefore, the 1950s that Jin has meticulously recorded are his personal experiences.

It is worth mentioning that in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine in 2014, Jin revealed that the original horror experience he can remember is Disney's animation "Bambi". When the forest fire trapped Bambi and it ran away desperately, an indescribable sense of horror emerged in the heart of young Stephen King. It is still strong today. This scene also appears in "It". When the protagonist explored its origin, he learned that it landed on the earth with the perish stone. With the explosion, "a strong wind blows the smell of the forest fire in front of them, and the smoke is getting thicker and thicker... The animals are also running for their lives, avoiding thick.㮒Smoke, fire, and death."

There is a passage in the book that in the 1960s, William, who dreamed of becoming a writer, took a writing course in college. At that time, the civil rights movement in the United States was in full swing, and politics was naturally involved in the classroom. Every student's work contains a lot of social criticism, and the "radiation" is very high. William is unclear, so he made this comment: "Why do novels have to be related to society? Politics... Culture... History, don't these elements naturally appear as long as you tell the story well?" Does Kim agree with this statement? Like "It", Kim Jae's "Witch Carrie" and "Salem's Lot" and other works also cited a large number of fictional documents, reports, and interviews to make supernatural terrorist incidents more conclusive and more conclusive. Social. Jin's criticism of the world is clearly visible. So the answer to this question is neither. It should be said that instead of starting from the general atmosphere of society, Jin often develops stories from individual life, and believes that political criticism will naturally coexist. Horror-type works often give people the impression of contempt for life, and the character's management is always lackluster, and only serves as a sacrifice or prey to satisfy the author's purpose and feed the pleasure of readers and viewers. However, Jin often spends a lot of space writing characters, and every protagonist, abuser, and victim is never negligent. Of course, this kind of writing makes the reader usher in another kind of horror: the mastery of the details of the character's life has become a torment. He makes sure you experience life to better savor the suffering.

King believes in the power of writing. Jin believes that Deli’s evil stems from the residents’ forgetfulness, and the town itself lacks quality media to help residents understand and remember the multiplicity of evils. A world without history and words will more easily become evil in the bag. So the library in Deli became a beacon for the children, and they slowly crawled out of the books to figure out a way to deal with it. In addition to the old-fashioned "Unity is power", Jin wants to propose "Knowledge is power." And knowledge has to become flesh, and become a word for inheritance. I seem to hear Stephen King whisper: write it, write it, or we will be lost.

(Original issue 01 Weekly 06/11/2017)

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Extended Reading
  • Joey 2022-03-24 09:01:08

    Ugly. Who said it was scarier than Annabel! 5.5 points or less. Laughter is far inferior to the hut in the woods. The child part is inexplicably far inferior to Weird Story. The horror of the clown's appearance is not as good as the ab in the coffin of the dragon hunting tactics. The movie premiere looked extremely embarrassing. Not recommended to watch

  • Martina 2021-10-20 18:59:46

    Too "Weird Story"! Too "Weird Story"! Too "Weird Story"! It feels like watching an American TV show with a co-star. Is this forcing me to play 2333333333?

It quotes

  • Beverly Marsh: I want to run towards something, not away.

  • Stanley Uris: [Bill holds up a sneaker he found in the sewer] Shit... don't tell me that's...

    Bill Denbrough: No... Georgie wore galoshes.

    Eddie Kaspbrak: Whose sneaker is it?

    Richie Tozier: It's Betty Ripsom's.

    Eddie Kaspbrak: Oh shit. Oh god. Oh fuck! I don't like this.

    Richie Tozier: How do you think Betty feels? Running around these tunnels with only one frickin shoe?