I hope you all had a great summer. I’ve been hard at work on the next volume in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series. It’s called Write Like Stephen King: A study guide focusing on the novel IT. And the good news is, it should be out within the month. I’ve completed the text and the cover art has been commissioned.
To be notified as soon as the book’s available, you can register at http://popularfictionmasterclass.com (sign up to download the free book ‘Ten Unusual Tips for Writers’).
But to give you a taste of what’s to come, I thought I might post part of the first chapter …
Anxiety
Stephen King’s IT has affected the imaginations of readers and filmgoers to a truly extraordinary degree. Although the book isn’t the origin of that familiar popular-cultural motif ‘the scary clown’, the notion that clowns are dark and threatening characters did take a much stronger hold on the popular consciousness after King’s terrifying creation Pennywise reared his orange-tufted head in 1986. You would have to turn to the novel Dracula or the movie Jaws to find another horror creation that had been so successful in giving people’s fears a new shape. And even then, there’s clearly a reason to be scared of vampires or sharks. But a clown? What gives?
The clown isn’t the only form taken by ‘It’, but it’s certainly the guise that people remember. That’s why publishers of the book and filmmakers responsible for the various adaptations have routinely used clown imagery in their publicity. It’s clearly the most successful ingredient in Stephen King’s recipe for fear, and the reason isn’t difficult to see. People find clowns in general a mildly alarming mix of the anarchic and the pleasant. The unpredictable nature of these colourful, custard-pie-throwing creatures is without doubt unsettling. They’re soppy but destructive, bold but vulnerable, physical but decorative. As a result, they leave children and adults alike with ambivalent feelings. When we’re watching them, we feel the experience could go either way, tipping over into laughter or unpleasantness. It’s that state of instability that makes them great raw material for horror. Naturally, no one runs in terror from a circus tent when they appear in the ring – we all understand that they’re basically a safe and entertaining phenomenon. The point is that underneath the sweetness there’s a potential for unpleasantness. The characterisation of Pennywise simply takes the alarming side and puts it on steroids, making it infinitely crazier and more terrifying than the reality.
This focus on semi-trusted aspects of life – drawing out and enhancing the features that are already slightly threatening – is a standard technique in the horror genre. Think of Hitchcock’s film The Birds, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, with its terrifying sparrows, crows, seagulls and even chickens. Our feathered friends may not be an obvious source of danger in real life, but in large flocks they display a mysterious group intelligence. Their scaly feet, beady eyes and quick movements are also somewhat unpleasant. The film takes those characteristics and turns up the volume on them until they become truly scary.
Consider, also, the 1976 supernatural thriller movie The Omen, which gradually reveals that Damian, a little boy with a mischievous glint in his eye, is in fact a satanic incarnation. It’s something that one might say jokingly about a naughty child, that he’s the devil incarnate. But in the movie, that slightly negative feeling towards a child is made concrete and larger than life.
Stephen King has deployed the same technique to great effect in a number of his novels. In Cujo, and Pet Sematary, for example, family pets are the source of fear. It’s easy to see how some people develop negative feelings about dogs, for example, if they’ve been bothered by animals that bark and leap up, or if they’ve read a news story about a mauling. But this anxiety is usually something that exists under the surface of more positive feelings. The novels exploit that subterranean fear by dragging it out into the open and exaggerating it. In The Shining, it’s a husband and father who turns into a monster. He displays an exaggerated version of the unpredictability and anger that can shake a child’s trust in an otherwise loving parent.
Anxiety – the idea that our nagging fears will turn out to be completely justified – is a normal and natural reflex, just waiting to be triggered by a skilful writer of horror stories. Originally a survival instinct, anxiety has stayed with us to the present day, manifesting itself in perfectly ordinary circumstances. In fact, most members of the human race experience the same kind anxieties at the same stage of personal development. As toddlers, we’re worried about abandonment by our parents. Child psychologists believe it stems from early experiences of separation from our parents, which instils a fear that protection and care might be withdrawn at any moment. Significantly, toddlers are not usually anxious about the many obvious sources of danger in their lives – things such as crossing the road or the consequences of pushing random items up their noses. If anything, those kinds of experiences have a frisson of excitement. Instead, their nightmares focus on the suspected precariousness of their situation. Older children or teenagers tend to be afraid of things like social rejection at school – the suspicion that their friends will suddenly turn nasty on them if they do something uncool. Once again, it’s not the obvious dangers like climbing trees or experimenting with cigarettes that cause them anxiety. Those things are considered rather exciting. Then, as we enter adult life and start a family, fears for our children predominate – specifically, fears about the people and things we trust to entertain and protect them. The anxiety that something bad will happen as soon as they’re out of sight or left in the charge of carers is universal. And you can add to that the many fears artificially created and fuelled by the media – thoughts that we may be inadvertently harming our children by making the wrong nutritional or educational choices on their behalf.
One factor behind the terrifying effectiveness of Pennywise is that the idea of a child-murdering clown taps into this reservoir of anxiety about child rearing. Stephen King supplies a scattering of details that encourage us to see the character in those terms. When Georgie encounters Pennywise in the drain, he’s reminded of two children’s television characters from the 1950s: Bozo and Clarabell. It’s also noted that Pennywise is wearing ‘white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.’ So, in the run up to the boy’s grisly murder, we are being reminded of televisual experiences that formed the background to most children’s lives in the Western World for more than half a century. This is not accidental. In an even clearer statement of purpose, Stephen King writes that ‘If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald.’ In its details, the characterisation of Pennywise draws on those aspects of childhood that parents typically feel most ambivalent about: TV, cinema, fast food – trashy popular culture in general.
The horror genre is full of films and novels exploiting the same fears. For example, in the 1982 movie Poltergeist, the television becomes a channel for communication between a little girl and malevolent spirits. The memorable image of the child staring into a hissing TV screen crystallises that anxiety, just like the cartoonish characterisation of Pennywise. The anxiety is then amped up for horrific effect when the child disappears into the dark world behind the screen. It’s an equivalent of Georgie’s murder, which turns up the volume on the same set of parental fears. Interestingly, when the movie was remade in 2015, the publicity images didn’t revolve around the image of a TV, but rather a ‘scary clown’ toy that plays a minor role in the paranormal events of the story. It’s a testament to the power of that particular image to tap into a common set of fears.