Well, howdy there! What’s a good lookin’ thumb jockey like you doin’ hitchhikin’ on a lonely stretch o’ highway like this? Don’cha know that’s dangerous? Lucky for you I’m the trustworthy type. Where ya headed? That far?! Well, hop in! I don’t mind the drive if’n you don’t mind the company.
What’s that? “Grass, gas, or ass?” None o’ the above, doll! You wanna ride with me, then you gotta just sit back and let me talk. What am I gonna talk about? How’s about a ghost story to make the miles go by faster? Better yet — how’s about a ghost story that’s also a love story. The love of a man for his car. The love of one Arnie Cunningham for…
Okay… that’s enough of the “good ol’ bwah” patois. Let’s you and me get down to bidness — er… I mean business.
For the next thirty-one days, Blog-o-weeners, I will be behind the wheel as we motorvate our way through Stephen King’s 1983 novel Christine. Consider this post to be the pre-road trip planning session, where we sit down with our trusty old road atlas and trace out our main routes and a few alternatives just in case. Sorry, but where we are going, there is no GPS, no internet, no wi-fi, no nothing outside of what Messrs. Rand and McNally could fit on both sides of a fold-up map and what gossip we can pick up at the gas stations and diners along the way.
Of course, if we’re getting our directions from a Mountie, we may have taken a wrong turn!
There’s apt to be a lot of twists and turns to our travels. Some days, we’ll be on the highway, and it’ll be smooth cruising; other days, we’ll be taking some of the lonesomest backroads you’ve ever seen. We may even get lost once or twice. Not to worry, though. By the time we get to 31 October, we will have reached our destination.
Whether or not we will have “safely” reached that destination is something else entirely.
Much like our trip through Stephen King's novel ‘Salem’s Lot a few years ago, I think I’ve broken up our journey across the hi-ways and by-ways of Christine into twenty-seven doable legs. I don’t believe that any one night’s reading assignment will be too overwhelming for the average reader. If there are any longer sections to read, I think that the spooky story and kooky characters will act as a little nitro spat into your engine’s blower to give you a bit more oomph to get you over the finish line for the night.
As you math majors out there have already figured out, twenty-seven official nights of reading Christine leave us four “free” days to play around with. On these days, I’ll cut loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle about Stephen King, the writing of the novel, adaptations, and what I think it all means.
And, boy, do I have some opinions!
Plug yer ears all you want! It won't make a lick of difference!
So with that said, here is your first reading assignment, Blog-o-weeners: for tomorrow, let’s all read the Prologue and Part 1: Chapters 1 & 2. Depending on your edition, that’s should be around twenty-four pages. Not a bad stretch o’ distance for our first day on the road.
It’s still early days yet, but I’ll try to point out as many interesting roadside attractions and points-of-interest as I can in these first twenty-four pages. I can't promise I'll get to everything — I gotta keep my eyes on the road, after all — and I might not always sound like I know what I’m talking about, but just remember…
Hey-o, Blog-o-weeners! Long time, no see, huh? Well, that’s just the way it goes around these parts. I suppose that’s what makes the time that we do spend together so special, huh, champ?
Hey, I’ve been busy!
Last year’s Blog-o-ween, as you will recall, was a truncated one, because no matter how I approached it, I could not find a novel way to celebrate the Horror High Howl-idays. (Heh-heh-heh!) You know how we here at LARPCo like to do things in October: a blog post a day on an overarching theme. We’ve covered the gory gamut, so to speak. We’ve had month-long discussions about some of the horror genre’s best short stories and radio shows. Well, last year I felt like I’d finally hit the wall blogging-wise. Sure, we ended up throwing together a mini Blog-o-ween at the last minute by writing all about the oeuvre of British writer Nigel Kneale, but I was really worried about future Blog-o-weens. Could I find something — anything! — new to write about that would keep me (and of course you, too, Blog-o-weeners) coming back everyday for more?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, I think I’ve found a topic that excites me and makes we want to hit the keys throughout the month of October.
No, the topic I’ve chosen isn’t a particularly “new” one.
Blog-o-ween 2024, as I am sure you recall (and if you don’t, you can check it out here), was a month-long discussion of a single text: Stephen King’s 1975 novel about vampires in small town America, ‘Salem’s Lot. I had a really great time digging my teeth into one of my favorite novels. ‘Salem’s Lot is a book that I read every October to get the juices flowing and the blood pumping. (If you know what I mean, and I think you do. Heh-heh-heh!)
This year, I thought, why not do the same with another favorite book? But which one? There were plenty of books to choose from on my shelves, but I needed one that had the right balance between a spooky, Halloweeny setting, a creepy story, a cast of characters about whom the reader will care whether they live or not, and a lot of interesting things to say about the time and place in which it was written.
Also, it had to be the right fit length-wise.
That’s a heckuva Venn diagram, I know, but I think I found the right book:
Stephen King’s 1983 novel about a 1958 Plymouth Fury that’s a killer-diller in more ways than one ticks all the boxes for me. I mean, is there any spookier setting than high school? C’mon! Add to that two — count ‘em: TWO! — lover’s triangles. In this corner, we have two boys, Dennis and Arnie, in love with the same girl, Leigh. And in the other corner, we have Arnie who is in love with two women: Leigh and… Christine. On top of all that, King sets his novel in my old stomping grounds:
So, pick up your copy of Christine now, because in one week — 30 September — we will be hitting the highway to hell. Our 31 day road trip through the hills and dales of King’s novel will be an eventful one, so pack accordingly. (i.e., make sure you have clean underwear in case we get into an accident.) Don’t worry, we’ll take some time off in our journey to get out of the car, stretch our legs, see the sights — you know, engage in a discussion of the historical links between the car and the American teenager, a brief history of the writing of the novel, a look at its adaptation to the screen, and if we’re lucky…
Huh? Huh? Wha’dya say?!
Fine, fine… I’m trying to educate as well as entertain here, but you know best. I think it should be pointed out, however, that…
Well, Blog-o-weeners, we done did it. We made it through another Spooky Season together — albeit a condensed version of Blog-o-weens past. For the previous eight days we have indulged in the creepy confectionary treat that is Nigel Kneale. We’ve read his short stories, listened to his radio programs, and watched his tv series (and the motion pictures based on them). It’s been, I hope, informative and entertaining in equal measure.
For today, the ninth and final day of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, I’ve scheduled a trick of sorts. You’ll forgive me for my little joke, but it’s that time of year, is it not? The time for tricks? Instead of talking about another of Kneale’s typewritten triumphs, I thought we would discuss something that he considered to be a failure, something of which he was so embarrassed that he had producers remove his name from the script. As we’ve come to realize from having read/listened to/watched Kneale’s previous works, however, the past doesn’t just go away when you tell it to. You may think you’ve gotten rid of it or covered it up, but if you scratch the surface — even just a little bit — you find that it’s still there, waiting to be released.
Such is the case with Nigel Kneale’s work on 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
I’ve talked briefly about Kneale’s connection to Tommy Lee Wallace’s film before. Back on Silver Shamrock Day (23 October, don’cha know!), I gave as the reason for my creation of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale the fact that he was the original scriptwriter on the movie. Hired by Joe Dante (who was to be the director of H3:SotW), Nigel Kneale turned in a first draft that was to take the franchise in a new and decidedly non-Michael Myers direction.
Dr. John Challis is called in to examine a patient who has just been brought into the hospital. This patient, Grimbridge, is very agitated, very disturbed. He seems capable only of muttering the word “Samhain” over and over again. Challis places Grimbridge under hypnosis to calm him and get him to explain what has happened to him. Instead, Grimbridge becomes the locus of poltergeist-like activity and dies from sheer fright.
Challis teams up with Grimbridge’s daughter to investigate her father’s death. Clues lead the duo to Sun Hills, an isolated, self-contained Irish society far from the city. The entire town works for a single toy company, Silver Shamrock, and its charismatic owner, Conal Corcoran. Indeed, Corcoran is treated like a king by the community. Challis discovers that Corcoran is an adherent to pre-historic Celtic ritualistic practices. Corcoran has designed the logo on each Silver Shamrock Halloween mask to be triggered by the company’s television advertisement.
Triggered to do what and for what end? Well...that would be telling, wouldn’t it?
Fans of H3:SotW will recognize much (if not all) that I outlined above. Indeed, much of what made it to the screen under Tommy Lee Wallace’s direction (and script rewrite) is there in Kneale’s first draft. We can probably go further than that and say that H3:SotW is really a summation of everything that Kneale was concerned with in his writing: the conflict between science/technology and the supernatural (“You Must Listen”, The Stone Tape), ancient practices/places that have survived to the present (“Minuke”, “Murrain”, “Baby”, Quatermass and the Pit). Quatermass II’s Winnerden Flats seems to be echoed in the Sun Hills community. Halloween III: Season of the Witch was to be a capstone of sorts, the culmination of Kneale’s work as a scriptwriter.
So what happened? Why do we not see his name in the picture’s credits?
As is so often the case in Hollywood, production-by-committee style thinking prevailed in the end. John Carpenter (who was operating as the picture’s producer) considered Kneale’s first draft to be just that — a first draft. Changes were asked for. Kneale acquiesced at first, cutting his script nearly in half, but after awhile, as more changes were demanded, he was unwilling to do them. What had been a more measured, psychological approach to the story was changed to reflect the demands of audiences of the time: more jump scares, more gore. As Kneale himself said:
“I asked [co-producer] Debra Hill if she could sell something like Psycho today, and she said, ‘No, the kids wouldn’t wear it. [sic] You’ve got to shock them every two or three minutes with any irrelevant thing, it doesn’t matter what.’”
So, Blog-o-weeners, it would seem that, like in Walt Kelly’s comic Pogo:
As more and more of his ideas were mutated, mangle, or just plain moved on, Kneale got more and more frustrated until finally he asked to have his name removed from the script. Representatives from the Writers’ Guild of America were confused. Normally, a writer will fight tooth and nail to have their name attached to a script — any script — and here was some old fool who wanted his taken off. “What it means is,” Kneale said, “you lose all the residuals, and people don’t like doing that. . .But I didn’t want this to have my name.”
So, in the end, Kneale’s name was taken off of the script and Tommy Lee Wallace’s was put on. Wallace himself has graciously said in many interviews that the final script was something like 60% Kneale and 40% him. It is not easy, however, to find where Kneale ends and Wallace begins. Indeed, what I would consider to be one of the most Knealean tropes in the final movie — the use of Stonehenge to power Silver Shamrock’s masks — is nowhere to be found in Kneale’s draft. Who knew?!
My favorite moment from H3:SotW comes when Cochran (as he is called in Wallace's film) lays out his plan to Challis (named Dan in the final script). The filmed version of Cochran’s monologue is chilling, but — as evident from this excerpt from Jack Martin’s (psuedonym of writer Dennis Etchison) novelization — there was much more to it. Here, perhaps, one can find more of what Kneale thought made Corcoran/Cochran tick:
“Children,” said Challis, his words slurring. “All the children...”
“Yes,” hissed Cochran, “the children! A plague is on them. Now think of that in fifty million homes!”
“Sacrifices,” said Challis. His cheeks were burning and his body quaked. Strong black-gloved hands restrained him. “To what pagan god, Cochran? For what purpose?”
“God? What a quaint word! I am speaking to you of our way, the one way, the old way, as it was done long before your unshorn carpenter from Galilee chose to destroy himself on that rude cross. Do you know anything about Halloween, doctor?”
“I do now,” said Challis. His arms nearly broke as he strained forward.
“Tsk, tsk, my good man! Ignorance is such a convenient excuse for self-righteousness. No, of course you don't know. How could you? You've thought no further than that strange custom of letting your children dress themselves in morbid costumes and go begging for handouts.”
...
“It was the start of the new year in our old Celtic lands. We would wait in our houses made of turf. The barriers were down, you see, between the real and the unreal. The dead might look in, sit by our bit of fire. It was our glorious festival of Samhain. The last great one was three thousand years ago...”
His eyes glazed with rapture, mirroring some previously unspoken memory. He continued in a faraway voice.
“The hills ran with the blood of countless animals...and countless children...”
“I don't want to hear this,” said Challis.
“Oh, but you really should. It was part of our world, our craft.”
“Witchcraft!”
“Your term. To us it was a way of controlling our world. The only way. As it is once again.”
Cochran glowered at the television equipment, the high-tech products which surrounded him.
“All this has failed you and your kind, hasn't it, Doctor? You can't predict with certainty any event in your world, not even the rudimentary workings of your own bodies. Isn't that so?”
“We try,” said Challis. “We're getting better at it all the time.”
“But will time wait for you? I think not. Even my ancestors were left behind by the machinations of history. They had the power. But they lacked one ingredient: the harnessing and storing of that power. Which, ironically, is what you and yours have now provided.
“Times have not really changed, my friend. The quest for control remains a constant. And now it's time again. In the end, we don't decide these things, you know. We are but a part of the great plan. Today the planets are in alignment, the moon is in syzygy, and it's time. That's all.”
...
“Tell me one thing first,” said Challis. “Why children?”
“Do I need a reason? Oh, I could tell you that they are the easiest prey — and they are, you know. People nowadays no longer listen to them. They provide the easiest entry, the path of least resistance. What better reason, from a purely pragmatic view? But they are such irritating little creatures, don't you agree? You know that you do, deep down. They are as noisy as wretched sheep and twice as dirty, given to us from out of the filthiest part of woman. And you know what happens to dirty little lambs, don't you, Doctor? They are invariably given over to the slaughter.”
In this exchange, one can hear the echoes of Mr. Beeley, pig farmer and believer of the old ways, and Mr. Crich, veterinarian and deliver in modern science, from “Murrain”:
Beeley: All this talk! You’re tryin’ to prove there’s no such thing. Well, you won’t prove it to us. We know there is. They got you trained to thinking nothing’s true if you can’t find it in books or shove it in a bottle and analyze it! You work out the rules, and what the rule don’t fit, don’t happen! Then you find out you got the rules wrong!
Crich: Then, we change the rules —
Beeley: Oh, that’s handy!
Crich: — for better rules. But we don’t go back!
Chilling, absolutely chilling.
If you want to read more of Jack Martin’s novelization, you can find it here on the Internet Archive. You can also listen to this unofficial audiobook:
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is available on quite a few streaming platforms. You can also probably find it on the shelves of your local public library and — if you are so lucky — your friendly neighborhood video store. (They’re making a comeback, people!)
That’s all for this year’s Blog-o-ween festivities, kiddies. I hope you all enjoyed The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, and I hope that you will seek out some more of his work. I didn’t cover everything — you have to leave some mystery in the world, after all.
