A poison pen name haunts THE DARK HALF (1993)
The Stephen King/George Romero thriller is an interesting mess.
Stephen King’s 1989 novel The Dark Half is largely remembered not so much for its plot or characters, but for the real-life incident that inspired it.
King, as most people know, is incredibly prolific, and it’s not rare for him to publish two novels in the space of less than a year (in the span between 2021 and 2023, he’s published five). But early in his career, publishers sought to limit him to one book per year to avoid saturating the market. In order to maintain an outlet – and experiment with whether his books could be a success without the Stephen King brand – he created the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
Between 1977 and 1984, King published five novels under the Bachman name – Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man and Thinner. In 1985, a bookseller connected some similarities between the Bachman books and King’s writing, and King ‘fessed up and “killed” Bachman (two other books were “found” in 1996 and 2007, but by that point Bachman was more of a marketing gimmick than anything).
It’s been a long time since I’ve read any of the Bachman books, maybe since high school. It wasn’t too hard to hear King’s voice coming through when you read them, but Bachman’s writing was a little pulpier, meaner and more cynical. The books were less horror-centric, and often dystopian or science fiction. King, aside from a few isolated books, tends to be a humanist and optimist; aside from a few exceptions good usually triumphs over evil. Bachman’s books didn’t have happy endings; famously, the final pages of The Running Man end with the hero dying of a gut shot and flying a plane into a skyscraper, something I’m sure Edgar Wright won’t be able to keep in his upcoming adaptation.
Anyhow, the whole King/Bachman affair is old news now, a piece of trivia that even casual readers probably know. But in the early 1990s, it was still pretty newsworthy that America’s best-selling author had also published a series of other novels that went unnoticed for years. And in 1989, King published The Dark Half, which pondered the question: What if Bachman couldn’t die?
Four years after that novel was released, the film adaptation, co-written by King and directed by his buddy and Creepshow collaborator George Romero, hit theaters. It’s been decades since I’ve read the novel, but from what I recall, the film’s broad strokes are pretty faithful. Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) is an English professor who once published some books that received literary acclaim but didn’t burn up the best-seller lists. He’s supplemented his income by writing lurid, ultra-violent and best-selling crime novels under the pen name George Stark. When a nosy journalist pokes around, Thad decides to beat him to the punch and “kills” George; he even agrees to a photoshoot at a graveyard, complete with a tombstone. But shortly after, people connected with Thad’s writing career begin to die in gruesome ways. Local sheriff Alan Pangborn (Michael Rooker) suspects the good writer, but Thad believes something else: Somehow, George Stark has come to life.
The idea of a pen name that wouldn’t die is interesting, and I recall The Dark Half being a solid read, even if it didn’t stick around in my mind like some of King’s classics. King dealing with the psychological implications of having a secret identity to write through, one in which you’re able to indulge your basest and most violent fantasies, has potential, as are the suggestions that Thad enjoyed that outlet, even if his wife (Amy Madigan) did not. The Dark Half is also the first novel that King wrote completely sober, and Thad’s struggle with alcoholism is a bigger thread in the book than in the movie.
There’s some interesting subtext in some of King’s writing from this period. Thad wants to put George Stark away so that he can focus on writing more serious and respected work; he doesn’t want to be seen as the pulp guy anymore. Just two years earlier, King had published Misery (originally intended to be a Bachman title), also about a writer who has been put into one box and wants to try something else. By this point, King was already branded “the master of horror,” but this was also the period in which he was writing pulp and science fiction under the Bachman name, and The Talisman, Eyes of the Dragon and was already two books into The Dark Tower. Was he wrestling with being pegged solely as the horror guy?
The Dark Half movie, unfortunately, isn’t too interested in pulling the threads too far, even with a script by the author. The first hour is its best, as Thad has to deal with the Stark news coming to out. His conversations with the journalist, in which he talks about George Stark as a real person and his relationship with him as quite complex, is an interesting idea.
The idea that creating Stark allowed Thad to indulge his darker side is one I wish the film explored more. It’s brought up in the film’s first hour, but the film quickly abandons any pretense of making this a psychological thriller and instead becomes more of a slasher film, in which we see Stark – also played by Hutton with greaser hair, an omnipresent bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a fairly rough Southern accent – stalk and brutally murder people connected to Thad.
I wish the film didn’t so quickly put to rest any question about Thad being responsible for the killings. A better film might have him growing darker the stronger his psychic connection to his creation grows and questioning whether he was really the one committing awful crimes. It deflates the deeper questions the film seems to be asking, and settles for being just another monster movie. And while Amy Madigan is fine in the role as Thad’s wife, she stands by her man a little too strongly; there never seems to be a moment in which she questions whether her husband might be a serial killer, even as evidence piles up and one victim dies in a particularly gruesome manner, in the way Thad angrily vented he’d like to see him perish.
I also think Hutton is miscast. Thad is a drip, with no real sense of hidden darkness or anger. We never doubt that he’s just a mild-mannered husband and father. As Stark, he has a little more fun – he seems to relish playing pure evil. But because he’s so over-the-top nasty as Stark and so dry as Thad, neither character feels either truly menacing or sympathetic. Romero never asks Hutton to modulate, and once Stark is unleashed into the world, the movie isn’t interested in nuance, either.
It’s also distracting to cast Michael Rooker as a side character in a movie where he likely would have been a better lead. Rooker can play dark – either soulless, as in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or playfully wicked, as in Guardians of the Galaxy and The Walking Dead – but he can also be charismatic and warm. He’s fine as Pangborn; his sympathy for Thad keeps him from being just a stock antagonist. But I kept thinking this would be a better movie with Rooker as the star, perhaps making Thad a bit more off-kilter and complicated (this is not the first film of 1993 that I thought might be improved with Rooker jumping from supporting to lead).
That’s not to say that The Dark Half isn’t interesting. Romero was a friend of King’s, and he understood his voice better than many. Creepshow is a perfect pairing of their sensibilities. And Romero understands how to translate King’s writing from page to screen. One scene that stuck in my mind from the novel was its reveal early on that Thad had originally had a twin in the womb who was absorbed and started growing again — in Thad’s brain — during childhood. The book and movie open with a surgery that has one of the ickiest and most memorable scares in King’s bibliography (if you’ve seen the movie, you know it involves an eyeball). And when the film is still in slow-burn mode, Romero understands how to draw out dread. King’s screenplay also showcases the author’s skill with dialogue; I still laugh at the news photographer – who takes pictures of teddy bears in coffins as a hobby – shouting “folderol!”
While it’s disappointing that the film drops its more potent psychological subtext, Romero stages several effective and shocking sequences of violence and suspense (there’s a great fake-out involving a window cleaner, and a scene where Stark stalks a man in an apartment hallway is quirky and unhinged in a way that feels pulled directly from King’s pages). The supernatural threat is a bit confusing – I don’t quite understand how Stark is manifested as a living, breathing person, and the film’s attempts to explain it just make things even more complicated. I don’t really understand why George can’t write books on his own – the climax hinges on Thad writing for him – or why, once he’s alive, he would be unable to hurt Thad. It’s a goofy premise, but the finale with a flock of sparrows eating a man alive is something I can safely say I haven’t seen before.
The Dark Half is a mid-tier King novel, and probably about the same as a movie. We’ve seen a lot worse, but it doesn’t quite hit the heights of something like Carrie, The Dead Zone or The Mist. It’s entertaining; I just wish it were more interesting.
More entries in 2023’s Stephen King Halloween marathon