Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, One Man's Musings on the Works of Stephen King.

Each week I'll review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King in the chronological order of publication,

and this week I'm continuing my look at King's examination on identity, writing, alter egos, and our true selves,

the existential thrill ride of the dark half, specifically the cinematic adaptation.

Now let's think about this for a second.

I want to think about this particular movie.

At the end of the day, when you sit down to compile a list of the greatest influential storytellers in the world of horror,

there are a few names who will float to the top of that list.

Certainly King, clearly.

Lovecraft might be up there.

Poe might be up there for the literary purists, but outside of the literary genre, there's a lot to choose from.

And so think about the swell of the horror genre and pop culture

movies and television knock down the conventional barriers and let it be okay to be

scared west Craven threw down the gauntland and created the figurehead of the 1980s

horror movement John Carpenter gave us minimalist horror in a small town in the 1970s, but before either one of these icons, there was one man who used horror as a metaphor to speak about the world we live in in a way that many weren't talking about at the time, even though we should have been speaking about it.

It's a man who looked at the world and saw racial tensions and needed to comment upon it, so he

crafted a movie around it.

King, being known to speak on that topic as well, clearly would have approved.

This director would later use the genre to comment upon classism and consumerism to varying

success, but the one that started at all not only was a strong

example of how to tell a story, but ushered in a particular subgenre to the horror genre that

lives on to this day, stronger than ever, I would say, and Robert Kirkman, creator of AMC smash

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