Editorials
10 of the Most Gruesome Moments from Stephen King Adaptations
We’re rapidly approaching the release of It Chapter Two, and new nightmares for the Losers Club along with it. Based on prolific author Stephen King’s expansive novel, the adaptation demonstrates what King’s works do so well; it achieves the perfect balance of heart and scares. We care about the characters, which enhances the horrors they encounter.
Emphasis on the horror. King is deeply unafraid to take his characters to some dark, twisted places. And some truly grisly places as well. While we wait for the conclusion to Andy Muschietti’s adaptation this September, we look back at some of the most gruesome moments King’s characters have endured so far.
Maximum Overdrive – Soda and Steam Rolled
Adapted and directed by King himself from his short story “Trucks”, the plot sees all inanimate machines coming to life and hellbent on destroying humans after Earth passes through a comet’s tail. While Maximum Overdrive isn’t a gory film, it does go pretty bold with one particularly nasty kill early on. A Little League coach gets pummeled to death by a vending machine that fires sodas at him at close range, leaving his young team fleeing in terror. The vending machine then takes aim at the kids, and one tries to flee only to trip and immediately get squished by a steamroller. Killing kids is a cinematic taboo, and King shatters it nearly straightaway.
Pet Sematary – Poor Jud
No matter which adaptation of Pet Sematary you choose, Jud Crandall suffers greatly for telling Louis Creed about the ancient burial ground. But since it’s Mary Lambert’s 1989 adaptation from which the reboot takes its cues, we’re going with that one. After failing to prevent Louis from burying the recently deceased toddler Gage in the sour ground, Jud becomes target number one when Gage comes back. With Louis’ scalpel in hand, Jud’s Achilles heel and mouth are cut wide open before Gage tears into his jugular with his mouth. No fair.
Creepshow 2 “The Raft” – Laverne’s death
Based on a King short story, the second segment in this anthology sequel sees a foursome get more than they bargained for with a day at the lake when they discover it’s inhabited by a strange oil slick. An oil slick type sludge that painfully devours any living thing it comes in contact with. The two remaining survivors let their guards down (or more like Randy opts to fondle Laverne while she sleeps), and the sludge takes that opportunity to continue its feeding frenzy. Poor Laverne. It’s a gross way to go.
Dreamcatcher – Bowel Movement from Hell
Four friends on a camping trip discover the area is plagued with weird alien parasites that are spreading fast. They learn that the hard way when they let a sickly man rest inside their cabin, only to later find him dead and sitting bloodied on the toilet. The three-foot-long lamprey-like parasite destroyed him coming out, and is trapped in the toilet until poor Beaver’s OCD causes it to get loose. Yup. It’s Beaver versus the bowel-movement parasite. Talk about an unpleasant way to go, both for the sickly stranger and Beaver.
The Mist – Spider Massacre
Thanks to the monstrous creatures lurking in the strange mist that envelopes the small town in this King adaptation, very few deaths are tame. The things rip at flesh, bisect bodies with ease, and poison with stingers. But the most gruesome moment of all is the spider sequence, which sees a handful of volunteers venture over to the Pharmacy next door to check for supplies and possible survivors. Instead, they’re ambushed by spider-creatures that have acidic webs and flesh-ripping fangs. Spiders that like to also impregnate their human prey with eggs. It’s arguably the most gruesome way to go in the entire movie.
The Green Mile – Sabotaged Execution
One of the most gruesome moments doesn’t even come from a horror film. Inmate Eduard Delacroix is slated for execution, but The Green Mile makes it clear who the antagonists are long before his final day comes. Percy Wetmore brutally steps on his pet mouse, breaks his fingers with a baton, and takes every chance to verbally abuse him. The worst of it comes with his execution by electric chair. Wetmore deliberately avoids soaking a sponge in water to act as an electricity conduct so that Delacroix suffers a far more painful and elongated death- eventually burning alive. It’s one thing to read that aloud, but it’s another to spend an excruciatingly long three minutes watching it happen.
The Dark Half – Sparrow death
This time it’s not a character we sympathize with that gets a gruesome demise, but the evil protagonist getting his just desserts. At the end of The Dark Half, a massive flock of sparrows – agents of Hell come to collect their evil soul – swarms the Beaumont household to retrieve George Stark. They don’t carry him away; they peck, claw, and tear away his flesh to the bone until there’s nothing left. King has always been a master at taking benevolent objects and making them terrifying. In this case, it’s sparrows.
It – Georgie Floats Too
Fans of King’s novel know that little Georgie’s death is pretty graphic, but was tamed quite a bit for the 1990 made-for-TV movie. Director Andy Muschietti made sure to give quite a brutal introduction to Pennywise, with the temptation of Georgie that gives way to his harrowing attempt to crawl away once Pennywise has bitten off his arm. If you want to show audiences that you’re not messing around with a King adaptation, this is how you do it.
Misery – Hobbling
Really, this is one scene that needs no preface or introduction. Annie Wilkes is a monster, and boy does this make me cringe every single time.
Gerald’s Game – Degloving
Mike Flanagan successfully adapted a novel that was once considered unadaptable for film. Then he took it a step further by delivering a moment so gruesome that it caused people to pass out. Yup. The degloving scene. Jessie Burlingame’s final attempt to free herself from the handcuffs comes with some serious levels of self-mutilation that we never knew was physically possible until Flanagan put it on screen.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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