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 inate 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.
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Image: Blank on Blank
