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.
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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