by Rocky Wood
This 308-word story has an interesting link, as it was apparently re-written as The Killer (see the separate chapter).
The Thing at the Bottom of the Well
In this story a mean little boy meets a meaner opponent. Oglethorpe Crater enjoyed hurting people and animals. From tying a rope across the stairs so the cook fell, to poking pins into his pet dog, nothing was beyond his wretched ways.
One day he heard a voice down a well inviting him into it. He went down and was found a month later, tortured, and dead.
This story is perhaps the least derivative of those in People, Places and Things and shows flashes of King’s future themes. Oglethorpe Crater, ‘…an ugly, mean little wretch’ was visited by the very same tortures he had inflicted on other creatures – ‘…his arms were pulled out … pins had been stuck in his eyes, and there were other tortures too horrible to mention.’
Oglethorpe had been dealt this ugly but deserving death (King quickly creates an intense dislike for the child in the reader) by something at the bottom of the well. ‘But a soft voice called up, “Hello, Oglethorpe.” Oglethorpe looked down, but could see nothing. “Who are you,” Oglethorpe asked. “Come on down,” said the voice. “And we’ll have jolly fun.” So Oglethorpe went down.’ Any reader of It would recognize a prototype of Pennywise in this short passage. The last words of the story, as the searchers leave with the boy’s body are ‘…it actually seemed that they heard laughter coming from the bottom of the well.’
This 355-word story falls into the America Under Siege Reality. The main character, little Oglethorpe, is the sort of nasty child who might have grown into a Joe St. George, Sr. ‘He dearly loved plaguing the dog and cat, pulling the wings from flies, and watching worms squirm as he slowly pulled them apart. (This lost its fun when he heard worms feel no pain).’ We know nothing of the ‘Thing’ except it could clearly communicate and kill, somehow taking its tortures from its victim’s own actions. No timeline is given in the story.
The Stranger
Kelso Black, a character in The Hotel at the End of the Road, has a reprise in this 235-word story. In each case he comes to a sticky end. In this tale, Black apparently meets the Devil, as does Gary in King’s most critically awarded story, The Man in the Black Suit.
In the story Black killed a guard during a robbery. While toasting the $50,000 takings he heard footsteps coming up the stairs to the attic where he was hiding. A Stranger entered and Kelso Black began screaming after looking into the stranger’s face. The two disappeared, leaving nothing but the smell of brimstone in the room.
In this America Under Siege tale, the main characters are Kelso Black, who had just committed the robbery, “…now he had fifty grand in his pockets. The guard was dead – but it was his fault! He got in the way”; and a “stranger” the reader (and presumably, Black) assumes is the Devil. “‘It’s time for you to come, Kelso,’ the stranger said softly. ‘After all we have a long way to go.’” Then “…Black looked into that Face.” While Kelso screamed the “stranger” simply laughed “…and in a moment, the room was silent. And empty. But it smelled strongly of brimstone.” Readers will know that King uses a similar artifice in The Stand, where looking into Randall Flagg’s face at certain times could drive the viewer insane. No timeline is given in the story.
The Cursed Expedition
In this story James Keller and Hugh Bullford travel to Venus, where they find breathable air, perfect temperature and delicious fruit. Keller calls it the Garden of Eden but Bullford has his doubts. These doubts are confirmed the next morning when he finds Keller dead. He tries in vain to contact Earth even though there is nothing wrong with the radio.
After seeing the ground open up before his eyes he takes a soil sample, analyzes it and finds the planet is alive. Venus then swallows the spaceship, with Bullford inside.
This 324-word science fiction story falls into King’s New Worlds Reality. King returned to the story line of a living planet swallowing up visiting astronauts in Beachworld, published in Weird Tales for Fall of 1984 and a slightly revised version in Skeleton Crew the following year. Venus is also a key location in a King’s Night Shift story, I Am the Doorway.
The main characters in the story are astronauts James Keller, who did not see the danger of Venus and ended up dead, with “…a look of horror on his face Bullford never hoped to see again,” and Bullford, the skeptic who sensed the danger in the idyllic landing spot – “‘I don’t like this place Jimmy. It feels all wrong. There’s something … evil about it.’” Before the planet reared up and ate the space ship, “The landscape was the same, pleasant and happy. But Bullford could see the evil in it. ‘You killed him!’ he cried.”
In a neat little phrase, after the planet’s soil closes over the ship it “…almost seemed to lick its lips.” No timeline is given in this story.
The Other Side of the Fog
Pete Jacobs finds himself lost in time when he is surrounded by a fog outside his house. Stepping out of the fog, Jacobs found himself in a city in the future. Frightened, he re-entered the fog only to come out in at the time of the dinosaurs and again he ran into the fog. It seemed he was destined to be lost forever in the fog and time.
In such a short story King does a great job of bringing Jacobs’ fear to us through the closing sentences, “The next time the Fog closes in on you, and you hear hurried footsteps running through the whiteness... call out. That would be Pete Jacobs, trying to find his side of the Fog … Help the poor guy.”
King later used the mist or fog element to tremendous effect in both The Mist and Crouch End. This 289-word science fiction story falls into King’s New Worlds Reality. Obviously, Jacobs is the main character. We do not know the timeline of Jacob’s world but we do know the city is in the future: “The cornerstone on a skyscraper read April 17, 2007.” To confirm the futuristic feel King wrote: “People walked along on moving conveyor belts.” And: “Strange cars that rode six inches or so off the ground narrowly missed hitting him.”
When the fog takes Jacobs to the past he is chased by “…a huge prehistoric brontosaurus … The desire to kill was in his small, beady eyes.” We will of course allow a small error here to a writer of King’s age at the time in that a “brontosaurus” (from the mid-1970s this species has been called Apatosaurus) was in fact a plant eater, not a carnivore. The creature lived in the Jurassic Period, 157-146 million years ago.
Never Look Behind You
This 196-word story is King’s collaboration with Chris Chesley. In the story a small-time criminal makes a mistake. George Jacobs had been an usurer for fifteen years but had never been “hooked on a charge.” While counting his money one day an old woman entered the room. As he turned to her, after she stated he would never be able to spend the money, she raised a finger and he died. Two men who found Jacobs’ body did not look behind them and were thereby saved from the same fate.
This America Under Siege story appears to be an-old fashioned case of revenge. Jacobs had so assiduously cleaned out his local community that “…people hated him.” His methods had been questionable but not enough to be prosecuted. This appears to have left an old lady to deliver justice, “Her clothes were mostly filthy rags and other crude material.” When she held up her “…boney (sic) hand” there was “…a flash of fire in his throat; and a scream. Then, with a final gurgle, George Jacobs died.”
As in most of the People, Places and Things stories it is the punch line that makes the story, “‘I wonder what – or who – could have killed him?’ said a young man. ‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said another. That one was lucky. He didn’t look behind him.”
No timeline is given for this story and while it is not linked to any other, revenge is a powerful motive and appears in many a King story, including Dolan’s Cadillac and Dolores Claiborne. As Spignesi has pointed out there is a hint of the future Thinner in the appearance of the old lady, although of course it is an old man who places the curse in that dark tale.
79 See A Talk With Stephen King’s True First Collaborator in Stephen J. Spignesi’s The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia. Chesley’s story Genius from People, Places and Things is also reprinted there
80 According to Chesley, in George Beahm’s The Stephen King Story
81 Horror Plum’d, Michael Collings, Overlook Connection Press 2002
82 Market Guide for Young Writers, edited by Kathy Henderson, Writer’s Digest Books 1993 (Fourth Edition), 1996 (Fifth Edition), 2001 (Sixth Edition)
Pet Sematary Screenplay (1986)
Released on 21 April 1989, Pet Sematary was the first movie ever produced from a screenplay in which King adapted one of his own novel-length works. Also for the first time a King adaptation was filmed in Maine, a contractual requirement King insisted on when he sold the rights. It was made on a budget of $11.5 million and took $57.5 million at the US box office alone, making it a hit in the dollar terms of the time. Pet Sematary is a genuinely frightening film and many a moviegoer was caught literally on the edge of their seats at screenings. Its accuracy to the book and the realistic presentation lead viewers to think, ‘Oh my god, they won’t do that, will they?’ and, sure enough, they do!
Actor Denise Crosby is quoted by Jones83 as saying of King, “I think the fact that he wrote the script made a big difference. He can really tell a story. That’s his genius.” And the July 1989 edition of Cinefantastique commented, “Thanks to the excellent script penned by Stephen King himself, this long-awaited film rendition of his scariest novel to date also proves to be the most faithful adaptation yet.”
Members of the world’s leading movie website, www.imdb.com, give Pet Sematary a rating of 6.3 out of a possible 10, somewhat below a fair assessment of the movie and that of a number of leading critics. Mary Lambert directed. The main actors were Dale Midkiff as Louis Creed; Fred Gwynne (the original Herman Munster) stole the show as Jud Crandall; Denise Crosby played Rachel Creed; and Miko Hughes portrayed a suitably evil Gage Creed. Stephen King appeared in one of his cameos, this time as a Minister. The movie was released on DVD in 2000.
Copies of the First Draft of the screenplay freely circulate in the King and movie production communities. However, this chapter was compiled from the later Revised Draft dated February 1986. That draft consists of 120 pages and 303 scenes. A copy is held in Box 2318 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono and is available for public reading.
In the script a man’s grief leads to even greater tragedy. The Creed family moved to Ludlow, Maine when Louis Creed took up his job as a doctor at the University of Maine. On his first day at work a sophomore, Victor Pascow, died in the infirmary after being hit by a car. While dying Pascow warned Louis of the dangers of a Micmac burial ground but the doctor had no idea what he was talking about.
The family cat Church was then killed outside the Creed house on Route 15, which carried a constant flow of fast moving traffic. Concerned over his daughter’s reaction Louis buried the cat in a nearby Micmac burial ground, which had the reputation of bringing back the dead, rather than in the local “Pet Sematary,” as a child’s sign spelled the latter word. Church returned to life but was now a mean and unlovable animal and Louis was forced to kill it with morphine.
The worst happened when Louis and Rachel Creed’s son Gage was hit by a truck on the road and killed. After the funeral Rachel and their daughter, Ellie, went to visit her parents, leaving Louis alone. Their neighbor, Jud Crandall tried to warn Louis against any thoughts he might have of reburying Gage in the Micmac burial ground by telling him the story of a local man who had buried his son there in 1944. Afterward Timmy Baterman came back to “life” and wandered the town as a virtual zombie until the townspeople, including Crandall, beat and burned him to death.
Driven nearly insane by his grief Louis dug Gage’s body up, ignored Jud’s warning and reburied it in the Micmac burial ground. The boy returned as a vicious monster and killed Crandall with Louis’ scalpel. Rachel, concerned for her husband’s well being, had returned home without his knowledge and Gage also killed her. The boy then attacked Louis, who killed him a second time with a lethal dose of morphine. Finding his wife’s body Louis completely lost his mind and took the corpse to the Micmac burial ground, from which, to close the tale, it returned.
While the original novel was set in late 1983 and early 1984 no dates are given for the action in the screenplay. Interestingly, King changed the circumstances of Timmy Baterman’s two deaths. In the novel Timmy was shot and killed fighting as a US soldier on the road to Rome on July 15, 1943. His father killed him a second time in late July or early August by shooting him in the chest. In the screenplay Timmy was run down and killed by a drunken driver in Georgia in 1944 while on his way back from the war and after his resurrection he was burnt to death by townsmen, including his father and a young Jud Crandall.
The novel Pet Sematary was published in 1983 and this script is indeed remarkably faithful to the original. King even resisted changing details of the major characters, which seems to provide him with great entertainment in other screenplays. Part of the novel was published in the Satyricon II Program Book that year, as The Return of Timmy Baterman. There were minor variations between the excerpt and the final book but these have no impact on the characters. The excerpted incident remained in the screenplay, with the variations noted above.
Many critics describe this tale as a variation of the horror theme of unholy resurrection first introduced by the W. W. Jacobs 1902 short story, The Monkey’s Paw. In fact, as always with King, he took the theme contained in Jacobs’ story, which ends with the father wishing his returned son away before being confronted by him and added the stark and real multiple returns Bill Baterman, Jud Crandall and Louis Creed suffer at his own powerful extension of the concept.
A dark tale in the Bachman tradition King finished writing the novel in 1979 but then put it away, refusing to offer it to his agent and publishers. He relented in 1983, partly to complete a Doubleday contract and refused to participate in publicity. Despite this the book became King’s biggest hardback seller to that time with over 750,000 copies sold. He had apparently ‘warmed’ to the story enough by the late 1980s to write this screenplay and become deeply involved in the production when it was filmed in Ellsworth, Maine and surrounding areas.
Of course the subject matter, the death of one’s child, is so horrific that it is rarely approached in fiction or at the movies. King was apparently inspired to write the story while living in a rented home right on the real Route 15 in Orrington (on the Brewer or east side of the Penobscot River) and commuting daily to the University of Maine at Orono, as writer-in-residence. The initial inspiration for the story was prosaic – Naomi King’s cat Smucky was killed on Route 15, with Tabitha and Stephen deciding they must confront her with the truth, rather than pretend the cat had run away. King told Douglas Winter84:
When ideas come they don’t arrive with trumpets. They are quiet – there is no drama involved. I can remember crossing the road, and thinking that the cat had been killed in the road … and (I thought) what if a kid died in that road? And we had had this experience with Owen running toward the road, where I had grabbed him and pulled him back. And the two things came together – on one side of this two-lane highway was the idea of what if the cat came back, and on the other side of the highway was what if the kid came back …
As is often the case with King screenplays he took the opportunity in this draft of the script to link this work with his other fiction. For instance, in the notes the Baterman place ‘looks like the home of Jordy Verrill’. This is a reference to Weeds, its variant The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill and the Creepshow screenplay.
The little boy Gage Creed is a key character in both the novel and screenplay. After his death one of his sneakers was found in Atropos’ lair, in the novel Insomnia. Also The Gage Creed orchestra played at the Masked Ball to re-open the Overlook Hotel in King’s screenplay for the Mi
ni-Series version of The Shining. In that production King played that Gage Creed on screen!
The town of Ludlow, Maine is also a key setting for The Dark Half and is mentioned in Insomnia and The Tommyknockers. Route 15 is also mentioned in The Dark Half and Insomnia.
A sequel movie, using Ludlow and the Sematary as its links and with Lambert again directing, was released as Pet Sematary II in 1992. Apart from an early appearance by E.R.’s Anthony Edwards it has few redeeming features.
As the first movie is available to the public on DVD and the novel will remain in print for many years there appears to be no likelihood that the screenplay itself will ever be published.
83 Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, Stephen Jones, p.59
84 Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Douglas Winter, p.130
The Plant (1982, 1983, 1985, 2000)
The Plant is perhaps the best known of King stories that have not appeared in a collection. This is due to the incredible publicity that surrounded King’s decision to sell downloadable chapters of the revised version on his website during the dot com boom. Worldwide publicity ensued, including such publications as Time magazine, newspapers and TV as well as the then relatively new medium of the Internet.