Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Did anyone else love those books as much as I did? Do you remember in grade school when your teacher would give you the little catalogs of books that you could order? Was I the only kid who used to get SOOOOOO excited when those things would come around? I know the answer to that is no, because I was just talking to Greg the other day about how cool that used to be. But for about 3 years I had this insatiable appetite for ghost stories. I gobbled up all the Scary Stories books. I would read them in the family room with the lights dimmed low, all by myself. I even got a book that was called something like How To Catch A Ghost. I think my favorite book of ghost stories actually was a compilation that Roald Dahl collected. If you don't know his more unconventional writings then you don't know Roald Dahl. He is deliciously twisted. Also, Orson Scott Card has a great take on dread versus horror. He says,

"Which brings us to the most potent tool of storytellers. Fear. And not just fear, but dread. Dread is the first and the strongest of the three kinds of fear. It is that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not yet identified what it is. The fear that comes when you first realize that your spouse should have been home an hour ago; when you hear a strange sound in the baby's bedroom; when you realize that a window you are sure you closed is now open, the curtains billowing, and you're alone in the house.

"Terror only comes when you see the thing you're afraid of. The intruder is coming at you with a knife. The headlights coming toward you are clearly in your lane. The klansmen have emerged from the bushes and one of them is holding a rope. That is when all the muscles of your body, except perhaps sphincters, tauten and you stand rigid; or you scream; or you run. There is a frenzy to this moment, a climactic power—but it is the power of release, not the power of tension. And bad as it is, it is better than dread in this respect: Now, at least, you know the face of the thing you fear. You know its borders and dimensions. You know what to expect...

"Obsessed with the desire to film the unfilmable, the makers of horror flicks now routinely show the unspeakable, in the process dehumanizing their audience by turning human suffering into pornographically escalating "entertainment." This is bad enough, but to my regret, too many writers of the fiction of fear are doing the same thing. They failed to learn the real lesson of Stephen King's success. It isn't the icky stuff that makes King's stories work. it's how much he makes you care about his characters before the icky stuff ever happens. And his best books are the ones like The Dead Zone and The Stand in which not that much horror ever happens at all. Rather the stories are suffused with dread leading up to cathartic moments of terror and pain. Most important, the suffering that characters goes through means something.

"That is the artistry of fear. To make the audience so empathize with a character that we fear what he fears, for his reasons. We don't stand outside, looking at a gory slime cover him or staring at gaping wounds. We stand inside him, anticipating the terrible things that might or will happen. Anybody can hack a fictional corpse. Only a storyteller can make you hope the character will live."

Which brings me to the purpose of this post - 1408. I really love John Cusack. I love him in his old stuff. I love him in the dark comedies. I love pretty much anything he does. He just seems like an every-man. With a Brad Pitt, you're never going to know a guy who is that beautiful in real life. But with John, there is a certain type of appeal that comes from just being a kind of regular guy.

I don't remember when I saw the trailer for the movie, but I was intrigued. For the last couple years, I just haven't been interested in most of the horror movies that have come out because they seem for the most part to be just showing and not telling anything. Hard to do in a movie, but it can be done, methinks. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but if you can think of one, please comment on this post and let me know.

When I heard a radio interview with John Cusack I learned that the movie is based on a short story by Stephen King. My interest was piqued. I had been drawn in. So I went and bought the book, but I just found out while looking for excerpts online that the whole thing is actually posted here. If you aren't interested in reading the whole thing, then perhaps read just the introduction that King wrote:

As well as the ever-popular premature burial, every writer of shock/suspense tales should write at least one story about the Ghostly Room At The Inn. This is my version of that story. The only unusual thing about it is that I never intended to finish it. I wrote the first three or four pages as part of an appendix for my On Writing book, wanting to show readers how a story evolves from first draft to second. Most of all, I wanted to provide concrete examples of the principles I'd been blathering about in the text. But something nice happened: the story seduced me, and I ended up writing all of it. I think that what scares us varies widely from one individual to the next (I've never been able to understand why Peruvian boomslangs give some people the creeps, for example), but this story scared me while I was working on it. It originally appeared as part of an audio compilation called Blood and Smoke, and the audio scared me even more. Scared the hell out of me. But hotel rooms are just naturally creepy places, don't you think? I mean, how many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about reading a few final verses from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand beside them and then hanging themselves in the closet beside the TV? Brrrr. In any case, let's check in, shall we? Here's your key... and you might take time to notice what those four innocent numbers add up to. It's just down the hall.

So this weekend I plan on seeing this movie. I'll post the trailer too. And it already seems to depart a lot from the story, but the beauty of the short story adaptation is that it is okay to use artistic license because the story isn't entirely fleshed out already.