Stephen King: Are you afraid of the dark?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2021
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Millions of readers all over the world are drawn to fiction that explores our fears. Horror sells and no-one does it better or more prolifically than Stephen King. He’s written more than 60 books, sold close to 400 million copies - he is the master manipulator of dark places and the paranormal. If you're not a reader you may have seen the Shining, Carrie, Stand by Me - all films based on his stories. He's been writing for half a century – how has our appetite for fear evolved?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is by any |
| 0:06.2 | measure one of the most successful and prolific storytellers of his generation. Stephen King was born in |
| 0:13.8 | Maine in the northeast of the United States. He started writing stories as a child. By the time he was |
| 0:19.3 | 27, he'd written his breakthrough novel, |
| 0:22.2 | Carrie, about a bullied high school girl who uses supernatural powers to wreak vengeance on her |
| 0:28.6 | tormentors. It was turned into a cult film, the first of many, based on King's stories, |
| 0:35.0 | and it established him as a writer with his own supernatural gift as the |
| 0:39.5 | master craftsman of the macabre. He clearly relished exploring his reader's fears, and they kept |
| 0:47.5 | coming back for more. He is still at it, some 60-plus novels and almost 400 million book sales later. But how has his and our appetite for |
| 0:59.1 | fear evolved over a half century of writing? Well, Stephen King joins me now from Florida. Welcome to |
| 1:07.5 | Hard Talk. Thank you very much. It's nice to be here. I wish we could do it in person. |
| 1:12.3 | Me too, but nonetheless, it is a pleasure to see you on my screen. And let me begin by asking you |
| 1:18.4 | about the threat that we all, all over the world, in Florida and the UK, all over the world |
| 1:25.1 | are living with, and that is COVID-19. |
| 1:36.0 | Has that invisible threat of the virus in any way dimmed your enthusiasm for writing fiction about dark places? |
| 1:38.5 | I would have to say actually not because I've been in quarantine, sheltering in place for part of the time. |
| 1:48.1 | Things have eased up a little bit, and I've managed to get my two vaccinations. |
| 1:53.5 | Yay, me! And I'm not entirely protected yet. And I think that we all have to continue to take precautions. |
| 2:01.9 | But one of the things that all this solitude and sort of being in one place is done is freed my imagination, |
| 2:12.0 | it's a place to go, a place to forget about what's going on in the world and think about anything from vampires to curses, to kids who talk to dead people, to any of that stuff. |
| 2:24.9 | So it's been good for me in a way, and I think you're going to see a great flood of novels from writers who no longer have an excuse not to sit down at their machines. |
| 2:38.7 | But that is very interesting that the pervasive anxiety of the society around you |
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