December
13, 2016
Stephen King has been
one of the greatest horror novelists for decades, and we’re always
interested in hearing what he has to say about writing and the genesis of his
stories. And now, one of King’s classic interviews from nearly three
decades ago has resurfaced and been reanimated for a more visual story.
Via
Laughing Squid, Blank on Blank has released a classic King interview that was
conducted in October 1989 by Thomas Smith for The Public Radio Book Show. The animation for
this video was created by Patrick Smith and it offered some humorous visuals
for King’s words as well as a few visual callbacks to some of his most famous
tales including Carrie,
and It.
The video
opens with King’s reflection on childhood, as he witnessed a little girl lost
in her own world of imaginary people while realizing that it was not only
very close to what he does as a writer, but something that would get him
locked away if he did it in public. King also shared a few thoughts on why
the minds of adults are so different from those of children, while once again
clarifying that his predilections toward horror were not born out of some
childhood trauma that he suffered.
“I think that a lot of what we think of as
horror fiction or fiction of the macabre comes out of this sense of futurity
that we have,” said King. “As we grow older we become aware of the fact that we
are going to die and most of us are going to die in ways that are that are
unpleasant. For most of us, it’s there, it’s waiting for us. We understand that
on an intellectual level. But I don’t think on an emotional level or a
spiritual level we ever quite come to terms with it. Mentally we grasp it,
emotionally we can’t quite grasp it.”
King went on to explain how his supernatural
horror stories tap into that innate fear of death by serving as symbolic
representations of mortality while dealing with those ideas in a way that
readers can more easily accept. King compared it to the way that dreams can
bring up our darkest fears in a context that let the dreamer experience them
while still remaining somewhat acceptable to our sleeping brains.
You
can read more of King’s interview at Blank on Blank.
http://nerdist.com/stephen-king-reflects-on-the-origins-of-fear-in-animated-interview-from-1989/
