Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 18

Free Day:

The Other Christines

on the Assembly Line

Even by the early 1980s, one would have been forgiven for thinking of Stephen King as a fiction factory. Christine was King’s thirteenth published novel to come off the assembly line. Since the release of Carrie in 1974, King had published seven other books under his own name and four under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. 

By 1983, King was a household name, and his brand of horror had changed the literary landscape. The movies hadn’t quite caught up with Stephen’s output, however. By the time of Christine’s (the book) release, Hollywood had adapted only four of his works: Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma), ‘Salem’s Lot (1979, Tobe Hooper), The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick), and Creepshow (1982, George A. Romero).

(Only Carrie and The Shining could be considered true “Hollywood” pictures. Tobe Hooper’s ‘Salem’s Lot was a two-part miniseries for CBS television — which was still seen as “lesser-than” when compared to movies — and Creepshow was an original screenplay written by King for Romero and producer Richard P. Rubinstein’s independent production company Laurel Entertainment. Pittsburgh ain’t Los Angeles, Blog-o-weeners.)

After Christine’s publication, that number would more than double over the next five years. During the 1980s, King was ubiquitous — bookstore shelves groaned beneath the weight of his bibliography, cinema screens ran red with movies that ran in the black. Heck, even innocent TV viewers weren’t safe:

John Carpenter’s career, too, began in 1974 with the release of his science fiction comedy Dark Star. In 1978, he re-wrote the rules of both horror and independent filmmaking with Halloween. His career seemed on an ever-upward trajectory with popular and critically acclaimed hits such as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Fog (1980), and Escape from New York (1981). That is until the release of his remake of Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World (1951). The Thing (1982) was (at the time) a misstep. Deemed to be too downbeat for the audiences that made Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial such a hit, Carpenter’s gory film has since been reevaluated and is now considered to be a classic of the science fiction/horror genre.

Come 1983, Carpenter’s career was a bit wobbly. Two other projects that he had in the pipeline — adaptations of another of King’s novels, Firestarter, and Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja — were delayed. (Neither would be released under Carpenter’s guidance.) Carpenter needed the work; Richard Kobritz (Christine’s producer) needed a director. The two men had previously worked together in 1978 on the made-for-TV movie Someone’s Watching Me.

Along with screenwriter Bill Phillips, Carpenter began the job of adapting a novel that hadn’t even been published yet. The film’s budget was just under $10 million, which was less than what he had to work with on The Thing, but more than he spent on all of his previous movies combined. (The average film budget of an independent movie in the early 80s was around $2-3 million. Even big movies in 1983 — Return of the Jedi, for instance — had small-ish budgets of around $30 million. Peanuts when compared to the dollar-gobbling behemoths of today.) Still, the budget was small enough to allow Carpenter what he values most as a director: freedom.

I think Carpenter’s Christine is a model of efficiency when it comes to adaptation. Anytime you are charged with turning a 526-page book into a 110-page script (following the industry standard of one page equally one minute of screen time), you are going to have to make some hard choices. From the get-go, Carpenter and Phillips show that they are unafraid to make those hard choices. Within the first minute, they clear up the confusion of where the evil resides in the story. Throughout Blog-o-ween, I’ve been trying to figure it out — is it LeBay or Christine? Carpenter and Phillips cut through the knotty issue by showing us that it is Christine herself. To the pulsing boogie backbeat of George Thorogood and the Destoyers’ “Bad to the Bone,” we are shown that even before leaving the assembly line (which was merely an abandoned furniture factory in Irwindale, CA) Christine just ain’t no damn good.

Other scenes, as well as characters, from the book are combined and compressed to fit the film. Arnie’s confrontation with Buddy Repperton happens on the first day of school before he’s even found Christine. (Good work, Buddy, for getting expelled on the first day — that’s gotta be a record.) Roland D. LeBay and his brother George are smooshed together into the actor Roberts Blossom. Leigh’s near death experience happens at the drive-in not on the side of the road. There a more examples I could choose, but it all boils down to Carpenter’s ability to… well… boil down the story to its essentials. I think young filmmakers who are looking to adapt other media into a movie could do worse than study Carpenter’s work on Christine.

Christine did well enough at the box office. It pulled in around $21 million over seven weeks. Good, but not great numbers. Audiences liked it fine. Critics were relatively kind. Carpenter has been quoted as saying,

“I like it. I like it a lot. For reasons like the cast. I really dig them. And the car. It was fun. It’s not one of my favorites of mine, but that’s OK. It’s a good movie.”

Stephen King himself, sadly, said that Carpenter’s Christine and Kubrick’s The Shining were the only film versions of his work that had actually bored him.

Ouch!

There has been talk in recent years of there being a remake in the works, but isn’t there always talk of that? The last time Christine’s name rose from the graveyard of dead projects was 2023. Blumhouse Productions announced that they are developing the film with Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, etc.) as director. Nothing has happened yet. With the new Carrie remake doing well, maybe we will see Christine on the road sooner rather than later.

While Blumhouse gets its act together, we can enjoy other versions of King’s story. Sadly, there is no BBC Radio adaptation of Christine like there is for ‘Salem’s Lot. (I’m not sure how well an audio dramatization of Christine would work.) There is, however, a pretty good audiobook version from Simon & Schuster. (Look for it at your local library!) Holter Graham takes the wheel for the narration, and he does a pretty good job of it. He even attempts a Pittsburgh accent, most notably in the early scene where Arnie and Dennis change one of Christine’s tires in front of a house of yinzers. Not bad… but still not perfect.

I think if another audiobook is produced, then they should give the keys to Curt Wootton, better known on the internet as “Pittsburgh Dad.” He’d nail those accents!

There’s one last “adaptation” I want to talk about before we pull over and call it a night. The Stephen King Book Club has been creating videos on YouTube since 2022. They run the gamut from Top Ten lists to movie reviews to deep dives into characters and settings of King’s novels and short stories. Last year, they released a pair of videos about Christine. The first, entitled “Christine: Solving the Mystery of the ‘Evil Car,’” discusses one of the conundrums that I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of — namely, who is really in the driver’s seat: LeBay or Christine?

It is the channel’s second video that I want to bring to your attention. “A True-Crime Retelling of CHRISTINE: Stephen King's Cursed Car” is a pretty ingenious adaptation of the novel. Formatted as your typical true crime podcast, this video tells the story from outside the narrative of King’s book. I’d like to see more of this kind of approach with some of King’s other stories. One of my favorite audio drama podcasts of all time is The Black Tapes. This podcast had the feel of an NPR show, and it produced a lot of shivers up and down my spine. Man, a true-crime investigation into the events of The Shining, ‘Salem’s Lot, Carrie, or It could be a lot of fun.

You know what else is a lot of fun? Unwinding at the motel after a long day’s driving. I’ll order us food from room service, while you get to work on tomorrow’s reading: Part 2: Chapters 40 & 41. It’s Christmas Eve, and good ol’ Arnie’s luck finally runs out, Blog-o-weeners. That’s what you get, I suppose, for driving hundreds of miles all over the darn place.

That true crime rendition of Christine has me thinking of other pseudo-documentaries. My favorite ever is one that Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel aired back in 2012. Mermaids: The Body Found (and its sequel that aired the following year Mermaids: The New Evidence) follows the story of a scientific team's investigation into the source behind mysterious underwater recordings of an unidentified marine body.

It was all so silly, and I gotta admit that I loved it. (I thought it would make a great remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.) Those who bemoan the lack of skepticism in the culture and the deterioration of scientific eduction didn’t love it so much, however. Many who watched the shows were unable to separate fact from fiction and believed what they were watching was a factual documentary. I often wonder if politicians and the like pay close attention to these historical moments when the population is willing to believe anything so long as it is portrayed in a realistic manner. I mean, for those who are interested in pulling the wool over the electorate’s eyes, it’s a teachable moment and…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 17

Part 2: Chapters 38 & 39

Arnie reads about the deaths of Buddy Repperton, Richie Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton in the newspaper and becomes depressed and frightened. Somehow he feels responsible, but why should that be the case? He had been all the way on the other side of the state. He gets inside Christine and immediately feels better. Why should he worry about those shitters?

While he is cruising in Christine, Arie gets a hankering for some pizza from Gino’s. After he parks across the street, he realizes that he has forgotten his keys in the car. He goes back to get them and is assaulted by the rotten meat smell that Leigh had complained about. Arnie turns tail and runs into Gino’s.

In the phone booth in Gino’s, Arnie attempts to reach out to several people — his parents, Leigh, Dennis. None of them have the time or the patience for Arnie. Alienated from everyone and everything, Arnie runs back to the one “person” who really understands… Christine. Once inside, Arnie sees LeBay in the passenger seat, and the two men begin to motorvate.

At Darnell’s Garage, Arnie is visited again by Rudolph Junkins. The state police detective has more questions for Arnie in the wake of Repperton’s “accident.” He has evidence that suggests a second car was involved — there were tire tracks in the snow and red paint on one of the barriers. (Not to mention the red paint that was embedded — embedded! — in the flesh of Moochie Welch.) Unable to make the logical (or illogical) leap that Darnell has made about Christine, Junkins leaves Arnie to his car. But before he goes, he tells Arnie that he seems different this time around, harder, older… over twenty years older, in fact…

“How did you hurt your back, Arnie?”

Well, now we know, eh, Blog-o-weeners?

We will talk more about the movie adaptation of Christine tomorrow (it’s our next to last “Free Day,” don’cha know!), but I think we can discuss it here a bit without ruining what’s to come. One of the things that I really love about Christine the book and feel that I am missing in Christine the movie is the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that Arnie himself pours into her. Christine’s (and LeBay’s) relationship with Arnie is a parasitic one. They need him to live. They must feed off of him in order to maintain whatever semblance of life (if you call that living) that they have.

After imagining himself being married to Christine (a frightful vision if ever there was one), Arnie remembers how it was that he hurt his back:

“[H]e had put Christine’s transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tires, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and abandoned hulls with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he had pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the odometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tires, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then…

“It had been a miracle.

“He remembered how it had suddenly become easier to push the car because the tires were healing themselves magically, kneading themselves together without a scar and then inflating. The broken glass had begun to reassemble from nowhere, knitting itself upward with small, scratchy, crystalline sounds. The dents began to pop back out.

“He simply pushed her until she as right enough to run, and then he had driven her, cruising between the rows until the odometer ran back past what Repperton and his friends had done. And then Christine was okay.” (320-1)

In King’s description, Arnie is nothing more than a dray horse for Christine. With the sweat pouring off of him and his heart pounding away, Arnie seems more like Boxer the workhorse from George Orwell’s Animal Farm than a man. One wonders what Christine will do with Arnie when, like Boxer, he comes to the end of his productive use.

I also like the hidden reference that King seems to make to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” In that song, it is mentioned that

“With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more

Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty

That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed

When the gales of November came early

“…

“The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound

And a wave broke over the railin’

And every man knew, as the captain did too

'Twas the witch of November come stealin’”

A November Gale is a series of strong winds that blow over the Great Lakes in the fall. Often referred to as “The Witch of November,” these winds can gain hurricane-like strength. They have been known to cause rivers to “run backward” as the lake water is blown back into the mouths of rivers.

King writes that as he pushed Christine around the junkyard behind Darnell’s Garage, Arnie “could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and abandoned hulls” (320). A “keen” is an Irish funeral song accompanied by wailing in lamentation for the dead. “Keen” as a verb describes the action of wailing in grief for a dead person. The Witch of November keens for the dying Christine. Perhaps the force of the gales, along with Arnie’s body and LeBay’s will, causes the river of time to “run backward,” pulling her from the brink?

(The lines from Lightfoot’s song

“When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin'

‘Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya’

At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in, he said

‘Fellas, it's been good to know ya’”

are still some of the most haunting lyrics I’ve ever heard. Brr!)

Addiction rears its ugly head again in Chapter 38. Arnie seems to be feeling the post-party, hangover blues that every alcoholic feels come morning. The news of the deaths of Buddy, Richie, and Bobby hits Arnie hard. He feels responsible in some vague way that he can’t quite recall. He runs to Christine like a drinker taking a nip of the hair of the dog that bit them. Once inside, all those bad feelings seem just to float away and disappear.

As he cruises around Libertyville, Arnie’s eyes move “restlessly from side to side, looking mistrustfully out at a world full of crazy drivers and stupid pedestrians and general idiocy” (312). King describes these thoughts as running in a “softly paranoid and bitterly comforting fashion” (312). This brings us back to the idea of Christine as a force of returning conservatism in the culture. Inside Christine, Arnie can safely look out at the world and bemoan the idiots that surround him on all sides. Arnie, like any good Fox News viewer or talk radio listener, lives in the paranoid, but comforting world of conspiracy theory. “They” are stupid and crazy, but not “me.”

To further cement the idea that what Arnie is experiencing is closer to raw emotion than rational thought, Christine (via WDIL) fills herself with

“a steady flood of golden oldies, and today all of the them seemed to be instrumentals — ‘Rebel Rouser,’ ‘Wild Weekend,’ ‘Telstar,’ Sandy Nelson’s jungle-driven ‘Teen Beat,’ and ‘Rumble’ by Linc Wray, the greatest of the them all.” (312)

In other words, no words are necessary. In fact, as Depeche Mode would say, “Words are very unnecessary/They can only do harm.” Words just might help break the spell Arnie is under. Better — for Christine and LeBay — to just remove them and let Arnie stew in the soup of pure anger.

Okay… enough of all that… let’s have a little fun, hmmm?

The old lady who called the ranger station because she had seen flames in the park a little after ten. How did she know that? Easy —

“She reckoned it to be around quarter past ten, because she had been watching the Tuesday Night Movie on CBS and it hadn’t been but half over.” (309)

The CBS Tuesday Night Movies (which began life as The CBS Friday Night Movies) was a weekly showcase for that beloved format: the made-for-TV movie. At first, these were movies with no formal connection between them, but as time went on CBS copied a format that both ABC and NBC were following. CBS created two series-like projects that they alternated with non-connected television movies. These projects were Shaft (TV versions of the blaxploitation film franchise starring Richard Roundtree) and Hawkins, which starred Jimmy Stewart as a rural lawyer investigating cases.

What movie was the old woman enjoying the night Christine smooshed Buddy Repperton? On the night of 12 December 1978, the CBS Tuesday Night Movie was The Jordan Chance.

Raymond Burr stars as Frank Jordan, a man who was wrongfully imprisoned. He becomes a lawyer upon his release, and through his Jordan Foundation, he gives other wrongfully imprisoned people a chance to absolve themselves. I could see this as being part of a string of connected made-for-TV movies. Unfortunately, this is the only film about Jordan’s exploits that CBS produced.

A more Christine-appropriate TV-movie wouldn’t be broadcast on the CBS Tuesday Night Movie until the following September:

Oooo Nelly… I think we oughta pull off into that motel up there. My back is killing me for some reason. I know, I know… I should have taken your advice about buying one of those beaded seat covers at the last gif shop. Before I crash out with a hot bath and a cold beer, let’s talk about one last thing.

When Arnie dives for cover in Christine, he sees himself in the passenger seat as a twisted old man à la Roland LeBay. As the young Arnie loses his mind, the old Arnie says over and over again “See anything green?” (322).

See anything what now?

I’ve never heard this phrase before. The only real explanation of it I could find was from the appropriately titled website Green’s Dictionary of Slang. According to Green’s, the complete version of the phrase is “see anything green about me.” There is also another version that is “see anything green in my eye.” Whatever the version you use, according to Green’s, when you ask this of someone, you are asking them if they think you are a fool, or if they think you are stupid.

I’m not sure what this phrase has to do within the context of the scene. Does the young Arnie take the old Arnie for a fool? Beats me. Just roll with it, says I.

Okay, we’re done for real now. Luckily, I brought along some Epsom salt and a couple of lavender bath bombs. While I try to untangle my back, you can head on down to the lounge or take a dip in the pool or do whatever — you don’t have any reading for tomorrow, after all. Instead, we’ll talk about the adaptations of Christine that are available to us. There’s John Carpenter’s movie, a terrific audiobook, and a pretty creative reimagining of Christine’s crimes as a faux-true crime podcast.

Saaay! Lookie what I found in the TV Guide. They’re showing Deadly Messages starring the one and only Kathleen Beller. Looks like I’ve got my post-bath night planned! You know, the made-for-TV movie gets a lot of hate from your average hoity-toity cinephile, but I think, in a lot of ways, they are more entertaining than their big screen brethren. They had to find ways around the rules of TV decency as set forth by the networks’ Standards and Practices divisions. People look down on TV as being an intellectual wasteland, but really sometimes…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 16

Part 2: Chapters 36 & 37

Buddy Repperton, along with Richie Trelawney and freshman Bobby Stanton, are cruising the back roads of rural Pennsylvania. The Texas Driver is flowing. In his Camaro’s rearview mirror, Buddy sees a pair of dual headlights in the distance. Whoever is back there, they are gaining on Buddy. No matter what speed he pushes his car to — seventy, eighty, ninety — that car chasing him is always gaining.

Christine bumps Buddy’s Camaro at well over 100 m.p.h. Buddy is thrown from his car as it strikes a concrete barrier. Bobby Stanton is killed instantly; Richie Trelawney is burned to death in the wreckage.

Buddy, his leg broken, crawls to the top of a snow embankment as he pleads for his life. Christine rams into the embankment over and over again. Just as she is about to bring Buddy down to the ground, however, she stops. Buddy looks up to see the corpse of Roland D. LeBay standing over him. Buddy screams at the top of his lungs.

Will Darnell sits in his office, waiting. Earlier in the evening, Jimmy Sykes said that Arnie’s car had pulled out of its parking space and left the garage. Darnell knows that Arnie is out of town with the Libertyville Chess Club. He also knows that Arnie’s best — and only — friend, Dennis Guilder, is still in the hospital and that Cunningham’s girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, doesn’t drive. So who took Christine out?

Later that night, Christine returns to the garage. Darnell walks down to her parking space. No one gets out of the car. Darnell opens the driver side door and is assailed by a rotten, earthy smell. Christine looks pristine, and her odometer is down to 52,000 miles. Darnell understands that there is something supernatural happening, and he wonders how he can use it to his advantage.

Suffice to say, there is no Squantic Hills State Park in the Pittsburgh Area. There are plenty of places with odd names — Monongahela, Susquehanna, Aliquippa, Connoquenessing — but no Squantic Hills. That sounds like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story — "The dark and brooding Squantic Hills of Western Vermont." There are plenty of state parks in Western Pennsylvania with lakes and ski lodges, though. Buddy and his friends are near New Stanton, PA, (southeast of Pittsburgh and Libertyville) so they could be heading towards Keystone State Park or Laurel Ridge State Park.

During the car chase, Buddy turns his steering wheel with a “death knob that held one bobbing red die in alcohol” (288).

A what now?

A brodie knob (aka “suicide knob,” “knuckle-buster,” “wheel spinner,”  “granny knob,” and “necker's knob”) was invented by Joel R. Thorp of Wisconsin in 1936. The name “brodie knob” refers to well-known 19th century daredevil Steve Brodie, whose death-defying leaps from bridges made his name. Indeed, “to do a Brodie” entered the lexicon to describe any suicidal (and stupid) stunt.

Brodie knobs are attached to steering wheels in order to allow the driver more leverage when making tight turns. Unfortunately for Buddy Repperton et al. such was not the case.

Roland LeBay’s appearance outside of Christine throws another spanner into the works when it comes to figuring out just who is in control — the car or the owner. We’ve seen LeBay inside of Christine before. (Just yesterday as a matter of fact.) We’ve also seen the ways in which Arnie is taking on the personality of LeBay. Yet, we also had the moment when LeBay calls Christine “that shitting car” and “the Ace of Spades,” so at that time it felt that Christine was the controlling force. I’m not sure what to think now that LeBay has stood outside of Christine to taunt Buddy.

There’s a wonderfully creepy moment at the end of Chapter 36 when a cross-country skier, out for a jaunt under the stars, hears Christine’s engines roar with the thrill of the kill:

“Abruptly the skin on his back prickled into bumps, as if a goose had just walked over his grave, and although he know it was only a car somewhere on the other side — sound carried a long way up here on still winter nights — his first thought was that something prehistoric had awakened and had tracked its prey to earth: a great wolf, or perhaps a saber-toothed tiger.” (293)

His feeling that “something prehistoric had awakened” fits right in there with our overall theme of the past come back to life in the present, does it not, Blog-o-weeners?

Will Darnell is no dummy. He senses that there is something very wrong with Arnie’s car. He sees that the odometer has gone backwards, and chalks it up to the way that a used car salesman will turn the clock back (pun intended!) to make an old jalopy look newer than it really is. He saw the damage that Repperton and his gang laid on Christine, and Darnell knows that Arnie getting Christine back to the way she was before — better even! — is not possible. He knows that Arnie has not had very much to do (in the traditional sense) with either of Christine’s miraculous resurrections. Darnell sits in his office, cogitating and pulling together the many threads of Arnie’s time with Christine. The pattern that emerges is a distinctly supernatural one.

I like how King shows us the steps of Darnell’s thinking. Junkins is doing the same thing, but he seems unable to do what Darnell does: namely, make the leap that there is something “magical” at work. Darnell is not a credulous man, but when the facts in the case suggest something out of the ordinary, then he’s willing to accept that.

Today was just a short pleasure cruise compared to our past trips. Let’s pull into that motel up ahead and enjoy the evening. Maybe we could go up into the hills and go for a cross-country ski?

Before we do that, however, I want to talk about one last thing. Darnell, in his reveries of his high school years and his one true love Wanda Haskins, recalls

“he had had the lead part in the senior play. His part had been that of the minister who is driven to suicide by his lust for Sadie Thompson, the girl he has set out to save.” (305)

Who now?

The short story “Rain” by British writer W. Somerset Maugham was published in the April 1921 issue of The Smart Set. Set in the South Pacific, it tells the story of a group of people held in quarantine on the island of Pago Pago. One of the group, Miss Sadie Thompson, entertains men in her room. (Ooo-la-la!) It is mentioned that she came aboard the ship in Hawaii and that she is from Iwelei, the red-light district there. A missionary, Davidson, attempts to save Miss Thompson from herself. She is told by the island governor that she will return to the United States on the next boat. Fearing imprisonment in San Francisco, Thompson repents her ways and becomes a God-fearing woman. Days later, Davidson is found on the beach, his throat cut. Thompson is in the hotel, back to her old, debauched ways and laughing at the narrator and all the other men.

Maugham’s short story was turned into a stage play in 1922. It  was filmed many times over the years, most famously in 1932 starring Joan Crawford in the role of Sadie Thompson and Walter Huston as Davidson.

It’s rather sad to be in Will’s memory of his youth, remembering the taste of Wanda Haskins lipstick. In his own way, he ended up like Davidson at the end of the story: dead at the hands of his own worst impulses.

Well, isn’t that a bright and cheery way to end the day, Blog-o-weeners? Sheesh… sorry about that. I am sorry to say, too, that it isn’t going to get any better in tomorrow’s reading: Part 2: Chapters 38 & 39. Arnie is fighting for his life in the clutches of Christine/LeBay. Can someone help him? His parents? Leigh? Dennis? Anyone? We shall see, Blog-o-weeners… we shall see…

You know… another crazy moment is as Buddy Repperton gets bumped by Christine, it is said it is the first time that he ever put a seatbelt on. Although seatbelts had been in use around the world for as long as cars were on the road, there were no mandatory laws for their use in the United States until the 1980s. Many consumers were against them and cut them out of their cars. It seems crazy, I know, but a lot of people aren’t really keen on their own protection. Maybe we can use Chapter 36 as case study? After all…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 15

Part 2: Chapters 34 & 35

In order to smooth things over with Leigh, Arnie takes her (in Christine, natch) Christmas shopping at the Monroeville Mall. Ice cream is eaten, presents are bought, ice skaters are watched  — a fine time is had by one and all.

That is until, on the way home, they pick up a hitchhiker and stop at McDonald’s. While Arnie goes inside the fast food restaurant to get their order, the hitchhiker (a Pitt student on his way home for the holidays) tells Leigh that he senses “bad vibes” sitting in the backseat. He also asks her if she smells something bad. She says no, but the truth is she does smell it.

Arnie drops the hitchhiker off on JFK Drive, but before he can pull away from the curb, Leigh chokes on her hamburger. As she tries to cough up the bite of burger, Leigh sees Christine’s dashboard light up like a pair of eyes watching her die. Before Arnie can act, the hitchhiker pulls Leigh out of the car, performs the Heimlich maneuver, and saves her life. As they drive to Leigh’s house, the smell of rot and decomposition overwhelms her.

Once at her house, Leigh puts her foot down. She tells Arnie that she refuses to go anywhere with Arnie in Christine. Arnie, of course, tries to tell her that she is crazy and that she sounds just like his mother. Leigh is adamant. She goes on to accuse Arnie of letting her choke in his car because that is what Christine wants.

Infuriated with Leigh’s accusations and demands, Arnie runs off to motorvate with Christine… and someone else…

Things started off pretty well for Arnie and Leigh, did they not, Blog-o-weeners? Heck, Arnie was even charming the support hose off of Leigh’s mom. Even a trip to the mall during the height of the holiday shopping season wasn’t enough to poop the lovebirds’ party. I suppose it’s true: there’s nothing like a trip to the mall during the Christmas shopping season to fill the heart to overflowing even as it empties the wallet down to moths, amirite?

You know, that reminds me… there were a few other people who spent Christmas at a mall in Pittsburgh in December of 1978. Of course, they had the whole place to themselves. Business at the mall was… dead.

Heh-heh-heh!

Before the postwar boom in the 1950s, Monroeville, PA, (next-door neighbor to Libertyville) was mostly rural farmland. With the construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 376 (the road that Dennis and Arnie spent the summer working on), Monroeville had a growth spurt both commercially and residentially.

Come the mid-1960s, Don-Mark Realty proposed the building of a shopping mall on a site once known as Harper’s Mine. The mall was to be the largest in the United States. Construction began in 1967, and two years later the Monroeville Mall opened for business.

The Monroeville Mall had it all: 125 stores, a large clock tower that featured twelve animated puppets (each one representing an ethnic group in the Pittsburgh area — yikes!), a large skating rink with the picture windows of an Italian restaurant lining one side (so you could twirl your spaghetti while watching the skaters twirl their Salchows), a bank, several restaurants (including The Brown Derby — which was not associated with the more famous Hollywood eatery), pharmacies, and even a ministry center. Don-Mark Realty envisioned the mall as the indoor “town center” for the entire Monroeville community.

Which is why it made for the perfect setting of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the follow-up to his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. While not a strict sequel to Night, Dawn follows the exploits of four people who are trying to leave modern society and the zombie revolution behind. Instead of pushing on to Canada, our fearless foursome stop over at the Monroeville Mall. Sealing themselves off from the rest of the world like a modern retelling of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” our heroes soon discover that having 24/7 access to everything they desire isn’t the panacea that they think it is.

Dawn of the Dead was filmed during the winter of 1977 at the mall. Romero and his crew filmed overnight, so that meant taking down then resetting all of the mall’s Christmas decorations every day. If you watch the movie, then you can get a sense of what Arnie and Leigh are experiencing — except for the gun shop. The mall never had a gun store on the premises. Romero filmed those scenes at a downtown Pittsburgh gun shop. I mean could you imagine… a gun store… at an American mall? That’s crazy!

Isn’t it…?

Sadly, things have not been as rosy for the Monroeville Mall as of late. In January 2025, it was announced that the mall had been sold to an anonymous buyer. A month later, the buyer was revealed to be Walmart, who planned on demolishing the building. Formal plans for this demolition (originally scheduled for April 2027), however, have not been submitted to the municipality, so who knows? The mall, as of now is still opened.

In June 2026, some 3,000 fans of Dawn of the Dead attended the Living Dead Weekend at the mall. In addition to the fans, there were more than sixty cast and crew members, including three of the four principal stars Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross (sadly David Emge passed away in 2024). There is another Living Dead Weekend planned for THIS VERY WEEKEND! If you are in the Pittsburgh area (and not, say, in Burlington, VT!), get your tickets here and check it out.

Things go south for Arnie and Leigh after they leave the mall. It begins with them picking up a hitchhiker on the way back to Libertyville. He’s described as looking a bit like Charles Manson, with his wild shoulder-length hair. I like to think that this is King himself making an appearance. In his college days, ol’ Stevie looked a bit like the Prophet of Spahn Ranch.

Arnie and Leigh had originally planned to go to dinner at the British Lion Steak House. There’s no such place that I could find, but it does remind me of a steak joint that we used to eat at when we went to the Beaver Valley Mall: York Steak House.

York Steak House began in Columbus, Ohio, in 1966. A second link in the chain was opened in 1971 in the Maine Mall in South Portland, Maine. Somewhere along the way from its inception to it dissolution in 1989, a York Steak House opened in the Beaver Valley Mall. York had a “Ye Olde English” decor that matches with the idea of the British Lion Steak House that King references. 

Not having enough time for a “fancy” dinner, Arnie and Leigh decide to stop at that old stand-by, Mickey-Ds. Oddly enough, Arnie parks Christine and leaves Leigh with the hitchhiker while he goes inside the restaurant to order their food. Why didn’t they just use the drive-thru?

Long story, short: McDonald’s restaurants did not offer drive-thrus until 1975. In Sierra Vista, Arizona, soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Huachuca Army Base were not allowed to appear in public in uniform. Therefore, they could not do what Arnie does in this chapter: park their cars and enter the restaurant. In order to help these soldiers enjoy the freedoms of America, McDonald’s built their first drive-thru window. (Other restaurants had already been offering this service.) It was a big hit, and McDonald’s began building drive-thru windows at their other stores. It just may be that the Libertyville McDonald’s had yet to catch up with the times.

If there’s one thing I am squeamish about its anything to do with choking. Brrr! It freaks me out, so this scene may be the scariest scene in all of Christine for me. Lucky for Leigh (and me!), Barry Gottfried, the Manson-esque hitchhiker, knows how to perform the Heimlich Maneuver.

Dr. Henry Heimlich, the man credited for popularizing the “abdominal thrust” to save choking victims, didn’t publish his views until 1974. So, although Gottfried says he learned the technique at the University of Pittsburgh cafeteria, it was still a relatively new idea.

This isn’t to excuse Arnie from attempting what Heimlich himself claimed only lodged the foreign matter deeper into the windpipe — the back slap — but I think it ameliorates his part in the situation somewhat. He’s a seventeen-year old kid, after all. 

And, as I’ve mentioned before, this is a horror novel. We know the history of Christine and the fate of people choking in her vicinity. We know that the back-slap method was tried on six-year-old Rita LeBay, and we know the person responsible for applying that disastrous method was her father, Roland. And we know how that turned out for her. And because this is a horror novel, I think we all know who or what kept Arnie from doing what I believe deep down he knew needed to be done to save Leigh’s life. But he — like Leigh — was under the watchful eyes of Christine.

We get more of Arnie/LeBay’s gaslighting of Leigh and his/their negation of her feelings about Christine. Leigh, however, remains steadfast in her refusal to ever ride in Christine again. (Do ya blame her?!) Arnie takes her criticism that he “seem[s] to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham” (276) with grace and dignity — NOT! He screams that he doesn’t need her, then runs back to the open arms of his one true love.

Together, Christine and Arnie go cruising, but it isn’t just the streets of Libertyville they traverse:

“The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL/CIO conventions, a future of labor and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock ’n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London’s Heathrow Airport; three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMs. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they got really dedicated. Fifties newscasts wow. That was

(never heard anything like that before)

a really neat idea. That was

(totally insane)

pretty neat.” (278-9)

Arnie, in those parenthetical asides, knows that something is desperately wrong. Arnie — the old Arnie — is still in there somewhere, and he knows that what he’s hearing isn’t some old time radio stunt. And if he didn’t know it then, LeBay’s appearance next to him as a rotting corpse surely helps him to realize it. That Arnie, however, is quickly put down as the new Arnie swims to the surface to motorvate though the streets of Libertyville and of time itself, thinking of ways to make the shitters pay.

Speaking of motorvating, I think we’ve done enough of it for one day. I see a motel up ahead. Before we pull in for the night, however, there’s one more fun reference I want to point out.

It’s mentioned that Sandy Galton, the look-out for Buddy and his gang when they beat the stuffing out of Christine at the airport parking lot, has disappeared. Some say he hightailed it out of Libertyville for the sun of Mexico. Others say that Buddy leaned on the young man to hit the road. No one seems broken up about his leaving. Not his mother and not his younger brother, “who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High (280).

Gornick Junior High is not a real school, but it is named after a real person. Michael Gornick was a longtime collaborator of George A. Romero’s. He was the director of photography on one of the best five picture runs in film history: Martin (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Knightriders (1980), Creepshow (1982), and Day of the Dead (1985). Gornick was the director of Creepshow 2 (1987), as well as episodes of Tales from the Darkside and Monsters.

The lady at the front desk says there’s a York Steak House nearby. Let’s freshen up, then get us a couple of sirloins and baked potatoes, and then come back to the room and crash out. Well, I’ll crash out. You, dear Blog-o-weener, have some reading to do first: Part 2: Chapters 36 & 37. Our friend Buddy Repperton shows up again. He and some friends are out motorvating when he sees a pair of dual headlights in his rearview mirror. Oddly, no matter how much gas he gives his old Camaro, those duals keep getting closer… and closer… and closer… 

Man, I used to love our yearly trip to the Monroeville Mall during the Christmas season. It was a big to-do driving from Beaver County all the way to the east of Pittsburgh. Watching the skaters on the old ice rink (now the site of a food court) was the highlight of the visit. I thought ice skating looked like a lot of fun — and it looked so easy, too.

Sadly, such was not the case when I finally got to try it for myself at the North Park outdoor skating rink years later. Getting up on my skates was the easy part… staying there was a little more challenging. Turning before I hit the curved wall was also harder than it seemed to be. It taught me that you can’t always learn how to do things by watching people who are skilled at them. I probably should have watched a few people like me who didn’t know what they were doing, because…