Are you lonesome

Tonight

Are you lonesome tonight

Do you miss me tonight

Are you sorry? We drifted apart.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King'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 in pop culture.

Movies and television, knock down the conventional barriers and let it be okay to be scared.

West Craven threw down the gauntlet 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.

...