The Twenty-Ninth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Dark Half (1993), directed by the late, great George Romero and based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. 

A boy named Thad suffers from dizzy spells and hears birds that aren’t there. He undergoes surgery. The remnant of a parasitic twin, kind of a teratoma complete with an eye and teeth, is found in his brain. After the twin is removed, Thad’s condition improves. Twenty years later, Thad is an unsuccessful literary author who teaches creative writing at a college in Ludlow, Maine (one of King’s favorite settings, along with the fictional towns of Derry and Castlerock). Secretly, however, Thad writes pulpy slasher novels under the pseudonym “George Stark.” George Stark himself appears in the novels as a vicious hardboiled killer who sports a greaser look and drives a ‘66 Toronado. The Stark books are wildly successful and generate enough revenue for Thad to live comfortably in a large house with his wife and twin baby boys. One day, a blackmailer who has learned that Thad writes the Stark books threatens to expose him unless he pays out. Since Thad resents that his genre work sells so much better than his “serious” fiction, he decides to just announce the truth to the world. He “kills” George Stark in a mock burial for a People magazine article. Unfortunately, George Stark is more than a pseudonym. He is a psychic entity that inhabited Thad’s parasitic twin and has subsequently manifested materially as a tulpa through the George Stark novels. He doesn’t appreciate Thad’s attempt to get rid of him. In retaliation, he starts slicing up people in Thad’s life. The sheriff suspects Thad of these murders because he and George Stark share the same fingerprints and face. No one believes Thad’s story about a fictional character coming to life. Meanwhile, George Stark threatens to slice up Thad’s wife and babies as well if he doesn’t start writing another Stark sequel. 

I love the novel this movie is based on. I think it’s up there with Pet Sematary and Misery as one of the best horror novels from Stephen King’s prime, i.e. one of his best works period. It owes much of its success to the fact that it is essentially a retelling through the lens of supernatural horror of something that actually happened to King. During the late 70’s and early 80’s, King wrote a few of his more controversial works, including Rage, a novel about a school shooting, and Roadwork, a novel about a Ruby Ridge-type standoff, under the pseudonym “Richard Bachman.” A bookseller discovered that Bachman was really King and threatened to expose him, just as The Dark Half’s blackmailer does. Like Thad, King replied by going public and “killing” Bachman. The prose of The Dark Half reflects the author’s intimate familiarity with this situation and gives the reader a lot of insight into the writing process for both Thad’s “serious” work and his pulp novels. It also provides extensive excerpts from the George Stark novels, which are a delight to read for their exaggerated indulgence in salacious ultraviolence. 

While of course Romero is one of the all-time great horror directors, and while his talent for engrossing the viewer with clever shots and editing is fully in evidence here, a great deal is lost in the conversion from page to screen. I’m not sure a work that depends on the internal experience of reading and writing fiction for its best effects could ever work well as a film, even with a director as innovative as Romero. Still, it’s certainly an above average King adaptation. It’s just that I would very much recommend the novel over the movie. One highlight is Timothy Hutton in the dual role of Thad and Stark. Hutton manages to make Stark a terrifying monster who is completely distinct from Thad’s easygoing yuppie dad. 

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

As Thad explains to his creative writing class, “Each one of us is two separate beings. There’s the outer being, the one we show to the world at large, inhibited, timid, often a pathological liar. And then there’s the inner being, the truthful one, passionate, uninhibited, even lustful. Most of us keep that inner being hidden away, locked up. But the fiction writer doesn’t have to do that.” 

The Dark Half obviously deals with the doppelgänger as antagonistic self, along with many other aspects we’ve already encountered, but the new turn here is hinted at by the last line of Thad’s speech: the doppelgänger as fictional creation made flesh. All the way back to The Other, we have seen doppelgängers that are products of a traumatized mind forming alternate identities through delusion or disguise. But The Dark Half’s Stark goes much further. First, the particulars of his appearance and mannerisms have been richly detailed, and meat has been put on his bones in the form of a decades-spanning backstory. Next, he has been allowed to self-actualize himself over the course of dozens of adventures. Finally, he has come to life in the minds of millions of readers. Together these factors work to create a doppelgänger that is not merely a repressed aspect of Thad’s psyche or his memory of a lost sibling but is in fact a wholly independent being. If Stark were not a mass murderer, we would have to say that he has as much a right to live as the person whose face he shares. 

This is the doppelgänger as tulpa. A tulpa is a sentient being who comes into existence through the concentrated imagination of a creator, i.e. it is a being that is imagined into existence. King often speaks of his writing process in parallel terms. He claims that his characters have wills of their own, such that he must follow them wherever they go, whether he wants to or not. So, composition for King is closer to spirit channeling than to carefully designing a building. 

Meanwhile, once fictional characters are released into the wilds of the public imagination, they do seem to have their own wills. The more popular of these characters are materially embodied in many different forms, including various actors’ portrayals and fan cosplays. Each embodiment of, say, King’s most famous villain, Pennywise, is a doppelgänger to all the others. It’s also one cell of a larger body that allows Pennywise as a coherent entity on another plane to gain a stronger foothold in our world. That is, a tulpa becomes its own doppelgänger as it attempts to take on physical substance through its scattered presence in various bodies. Particularly powerful tulpas of this nature, i.e. figures of worship, plant their doubles in our highest institutions and have been known to elicit human sacrifice in order to further substantiate their reality.