Bestselling horror author Stephen King, the writer of scary works of art like The Shining, Pet Sematary, and It, has spoken about the most terrifying movie experiences he’s ever had to endure. And while his horror designs are extremely sophisticated, the things that scare him the most seem to be the most simple ones.
As reported by Variety, Stephen King wrote an essay in their spooky season piece of “Variety’s 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time.” The author’s contribution was short, but it spanned decades of the genre with a few comparisons between pivotal works of horror that defined generations. The question is: how do you scare a man like Stephen King when he’s written books like Carrie, Misery and The Stand? This was his answer:
“I thought deeply about this question, perhaps more deeply than the subject — my scariest horror movie — deserves… but then, I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, so maybe it’s a valid Q.”
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Most of King’s major works have been adapted to the big screen with various results. Yes, he’s had his share of flops, but on the other side of the spectrum, we can find genre-defining films like The Shining, 2017’s version of It, and The Shawshank Redemption. In recent times, the author’s become more prolific than ever, but he seems to find time to praise modern horror films on his X account. However, none of them compare to those he points out in the essay:
“My conclusion is that the ‘scariest’ varies according to the viewer’s age.
As a kid of 16, the scariest movie was
The Haunting
(directed by Robert Wise). As an adult, it was
The Blair Witch Project
, with that building sense of doom and those truly horrible last 35 seconds
.But overall, I’d have to say
Night of the Living Dead
, George A. Romero’s low-budget masterpiece.”
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is the Movie That Scared Stephen King the Most
In Romero’s 1968 landmark approach to zombie horror, a young woman is forced to break into a house in the middle of nowhere when a violent, ghoulish man attacks and kills her brother. Once inside, she finds more survivors trying to stay safe from mysteriously undead people who have gathered outside with one thing in their absent minds: eating the flesh of the living.
King speaks about the horror classic that laid the foundations of the zombie subgenre in horror, and completely revolutionized the movie marketing industry and the way people made low-budget horror movies:
“In the end, no one survives. This movie has lost its elemental power over the years — has become almost a Midnite Madness joke, like
Rocky Horror
[Picture Show] — but
I still remember the helpless terror
I felt when I first saw it.And now that I think of it, there’s a real similarity to
Blair Witch
[Project], both with minimal or no music, both cast with unknown actors who seem barely capable of summer stock in Paducahville, both with low-tech special effects.
They work not in spite of those things, but because of them
.”
- Release Date
- October 4, 1968
- Cast
- Duane Jones , Judith O’Dea , Karl Hardman , Marilyn Eastman , Keith Wayne , Judith Ridley