The Woman in the Room [Pt. 2]

Aaron: Welcome back to We Who Watch Behind the Rows, and our discussion of The Woman in the Room. This time we delve into the 1983 short film based on that story, adapted by one Frank Darabont. The film is available on YouTube in its entirety, in two separate videos. Both of those videos are embedded below for your convenience:

The Woman in the Room (1983)

Written and directed by Frank Darabont

VHS Cover

Aaron: Stephen King started making deals with student filmmakers allowing them to adapt his shorter works in 1977, which means Frank Darabont is a few years away from being the first official Dollar Baby, although he is part of what we can consider the first wave, and he’s definitely the most successful graduate of that program. To hear Darabont himself tell it, though, he was unaware of King’s policy when, as a twenty-year-old with no movie industry experience, working various odd jobs, he wrote King a letter asking if he could make a short film based on The Woman in the Room. Three years later, the film was released, and was successful enough that Darabont submitted it for consideration at the Academy Awards (it did not get nominated, but was reportedly on the short list). It was also one of the very few Dollar Babies to be officially released on a home video format, and no less an authority than King called it “clearly the best of the short films” made from his work.

Time will tell if it actually is the best (and certainly there was a much less crowded field of competition for that title in 1983), but one thing is certain: Darabont’s film is the most professional Dollar Baby we’ve watched so far, and it’s easy to see why it was given a VHS release in the ‘80s. Even if it’s not the type of thing I’m normally drawn to, and not something I see myself returning to time and again, I can appreciate the skill that went into making this film on a minuscule budget, with very little experience. The film could easily stand alongside more professional releases from that same time period. I kept thinking back to the nonexistent Stephen King television series you speculated about in our Night Surf piece. The Woman in the Room is the best argument I’ve seen so far for an anthology series based on King’s work, a series that would allow aspiring and established filmmakers adapt the stories to their own strengths, as Darabont has clearly done here.

I said in the first part of the discussion that I don’t find King to be a very emotional writer. Certainly he gets us invested in his characters so that we feel concern for their outcomes, but I’ve never been really moved by his love stories or his more intimate moments. That was clearly not the case for The Woman in the Room, which is the most nakedly, affectingly emotional King has ever been. It makes sense, then, that Darabont would be drawn to this story for his first film. Darabont has, through his three feature length King adaptations, proven that he is at least as concerned in the emotional subtext of the source material as he is in the more fantastic elements on display. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile are melodramatic and heartwarming in a way that King films don’t normally attempt (though to be fair, those elements are present in the original stories as well), to the point that many people don’t actually realize King had a hand in writing them. Even Darabont’s adaptation of The Mist added a gut punch of grief to the gory bleakness of King’s original novella, so there is a very clear through-line in the stories that Darabont has adapted, and the elements to which he seems drawn.

Rik: And if they ever did make that Stephen King anthology show, how about Frank Darabont direct every single episode? Look, Darabont clearly gets King. A few directors have done a great job of adapting King to the big screen, but there have been far more misses than hits as far as quality overall, and even more misses as far as capturing what was so entrancing on the written page in the first place. But Darabont has yet to really make a misstep, even if I am not quite so enamored with The Green Mile as many people are. (The film is still pretty good, I just didn’t connect with King’s story either at the time. But that was one of those rare spots in the late ‘90s where I sneaked back in for a peak at King’s writing, and then slipped back out because what I found was lacking.) There is a clear artistic connection between the two that I am surprised hasn’t been developed even further than it has.

I know that, just between ourselves, I displayed some reticence in tackling the Dollar Baby films at first; in fact, we both wrestled over it. It was mostly because finding a lot of the films is really hard, if not downright impossible in many cases. And then there is the quality factor. It is one thing to criticize a bigger budget, Hollywood feature film adaptation of a King story that has been produced by a professional crew and actors, with the intent of global distribution in theatres and on home video or on television. Those things are fair game for critics and the public alike to rip apart or praise as they see fit. Once art is in the public eye, have at it. But Dollar Babies are student films, and while, as art, they should be prone to the same critical measures as anything else, you really don’t want to pound someone too hard who made a ten minute film for about $127 with amateur actors and his best friend Andy holding a rented boom mike with shaky hands. You don’t want want to shatter the dreams of the next Spielberg (unless, of course, you would prefer that you did) with a blistering review of a short he created simply to pass his film studies class.

Then we knuckled down and watched the five films we could locate for our piece on Night Surf, and I was fairly astounded by the wide variety of stances based on the same exact material. None of them were great, most of them were wildly off the mark as far as I was concerned, but a couple were fairly entertaining, and all of them (even the worst) seemed to capture at least a little snippet of the original story – whether in mood or fully captured scene – within their generally clumsy attempts at adapting a major writer to the screen on the cheap. While there were a couple of versions that I never wish to revisit again (at least, not in the low quality scrubs available on YouTube or elsewhere), I found the experience enlightening overall.

Frank Darabont

Enter Frank Darabont and his version of The Woman in the Room. Aaron, I am sure you’ve done a bit more research into the background of the making of this film than I have. From its very first frame, The Woman in the Room shows a higher degree of craftsmanship than the Dollar Babies we have watched thus far, and even if it is still a student short, the feel of the film at least approaches the standard look of television programming at the time of its release (1983). Frankly, it almost looks good enough that one could convince me that it was an episode of the 1985 revival of The Twilight Zone, that ran on CBS for a few years in that decade. However, I had only seen this one a long time ago on video, and apart from remembering that I had seen it at some point, had rather forgotten that it was actually pretty well done. What about you? 

Aaron: One quick clarification: This was not technically a student film, this was an independently produced short film from someone who would go on to become a highly successful director and screenwriter. A minor distinction, considering Darabont’s youth and means at the time, but an important one. Frank Darabont made this film without the benefit of school backing, meaning he had to scrounge together the money to get it made, and he spent several years filming it on borrowed or rented equipment, editing it himself in his bedroom. For Darabont, who had not yet had a job in the film industry when he began the project, this was more than just a means to a passing college grade, this was his shot to prove himself, and to adapt an author who clearly meant a lot to him. I want to make the distinction because I mostly agree with you; I think this is at least as good as a lot of the stuff that made it into The Twilight Zone remake, and surpasses the quality of many of the other anthology shows of the time, like Tales from the Darkside.

Each of the Dollar Babies we’ve seen so far has shown, at the very least, glimpses of talent. The Woman in the Room is the first one to show equal amounts of skill, passion, and an innate understanding of the source material. That understanding doesn’t mean the source material went untouched, of course, as The Woman in the Room makes a few excisions, and one major addition, to the story it was based on. Frankly, I’m OK with that. I’ve never been one of those people who negatively compares a filmed entertainment to its written origins because of what it changes or omits. I want a movie to change things around a bit, otherwise, what’s the point? I know we criticized some of the Night Surf shorts for the way they seemed to miss the point of the original story, or for how far afield they strayed from the events as written, but there is a difference here. A work of art has to have some resonance to the artist, or there will be no resonance for the audience. When it came to some of the Night Surf shorts I had trouble understanding, through their alterations, why they chose to adapt that particular story. I didn’t get the impression, even from the best of the bunch, that the story held any real significance to the filmmakers. With Darabont, on the other hand, it’s blindingly obvious that the story struck a chord in him, that it has some special meaning. Why else would he choose to adapt Stephen King, and then stay away from the monsters, the gore, or the spookiness?

Brian Libby as The Prisoner

The biggest change Darabont makes is with the addition of a character known only as Prisoner (played by Brian Libby, a prolific character actor who has had small roles in each of Darabont’s King adaptations). In the short film, John (Michael Cornelison) is a lawyer, and we see a short scene where he consults with his client, who is on death row, and asks him conversationally about what it’s like to kill a person. This character, a grizzled Vietnam vet who channeled his experience of the atrocity of the war into a career as a hitman once he got back home, seems like a character type King himself might have written. The scene itself is probably a bit too on the nose, as Brian Libby’s every line of dialogue is meant to subconsciously reverberate with the decision John has to make. It’s so directly addressing him that the character never feels like a real character, but instead feels like a totem, an oracle that John needs to hear from. But of course, that’s exactly what he’s meant to be in this story, and both actors (who would were in the midst of, or the beginnings of, healthy careers) are good enough to sell the scene.

Rik, I feel like this scene is the most obvious focal point for most discussions based around the short story and the short film. How did it sit with you?

Rik: It’s funny, you mention that both actors were in the midst of or at the beginnings of healthy careers, but when I watched The Woman in the Room again, I couldn’t place either actor at all and had to look them up. Sure enough, they have been acting a long time, and Cornelison has had a lot of stage success. But I could probably only pick Libby out of a police lineup and that is just because he is large and imposing. When I look at their credits, it turns out that I have seen a lot of their films and television shows, but it’s for a lot of parts like “Perimeter Guy” and “Employee #1” and “Embalmer”; even in films that I remember seeing, I cannot remember who they were.

And this is not to say that they are not both very good in their roles in this short. They do a fine job, and I have to say Libby is particularly appealing in his part as the convict. I agree with you: I don’t mind when a director or a screenwriter veers from the original work being adapted as long as the divergence adds something to the story that adds what you termed resonance to the work at hand. I think we both agree that it was what was so frustrating about the Night Surf shorts. They each took a different tack with the same material, but all of the shorts, even the barely best ones, really missed the point of the material, missed the painful, nostalgic soul at the center, the dying of the light, the slowly vanishing heartbeat of humanity. When I saw that this film was a half hour, I was really wondering just how Darabont would be able to carry what is rather slight material that far. Certainly it would be hard to make a feature film out of this story without greatly expanding it by giving both the son and the mother full backstories. And maybe Darabont felt that summing the slim story up in just fifteen minutes was just too brief a visit with these characters, like maybe to feel the real punch in the gut of the situation he had to draw it out at least a little bit. So maybe that is part of why he felt he needed to stretch it out and add an extra scene. But I really like the extra scene he did add.

I like the familiarity between the client and the lawyer. There is certainly a level of trust that has been established, the light smiles in jokes about courtroom attire that are easily accepted between the two, and there is a definite air of relaxation in even the lighting of a cigarette that signifies these two have spent a good deal of time together. Even when the Prisoner gets riled up about something, he is able to be defused by a steady gaze or a smirk. I enjoyed their interplay, and it would be interesting to see if these two would ever be friends “on the outside,” as it were. (Of course, he is telling the lawyer the story of how he killed a buddy of his, a guy who saved his life at one point in Vietnam, so you may not want to know him on the outside.) 

Michael Cornelison as John

When they do get to the meat of that discussion, about whether killing someone ever meant anything to the Prisoner, I feel like the relationship between the two characters serves to make the scene perhaps not quite as maudlin as it might have been in lesser hands, even hands as inexperienced as Darabont’s at that age. You say it is perhaps too on the nose; I agree, yes, but it does allow us to see another side of John that we otherwise would either not have gotten to see (we get to understand, in short order, both his professionalism and his basic humanity in one scene) without perhaps plunging into a series of all too obvious flashback sequences. And as such, I think it is a wise addition to the story.

Aaron: Although I do find the Prisoner scene a bit too obvious, that’s not as much of a complaint here as it would be in, as you say, lesser hands. Because you’re right; Frank Darabont “gets” Stephen King, but more than that, he also “gets” the mechanics of storytelling in much the same way that King does. The Prisoner sequence is essential in this story as Darabont tells it, because it humanizes Johnny and addresses his dilemma directly without having him break into tears and wail that he doesn’t want to kill his mother. It’s also, as you point out, important to get an outsider’s look at this character, to show us something outside of Johnny’s own head or perceptions. And it is, admittedly, entertainingly written. Much more gratifying than a series of generic flashbacks.

Stephen King’s short story is largely plotless, achronological, and full of impressions rather than concrete incident. That sort would be impossible to translate to film, unless you wanted to make an avant-garde, experimental film, which Darabont clearly was not interested in. Looking back over Darabont’s career, many of his scripts have been for potentially nostalgia-riddled movies like the remake of The Blob, the sequel to David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, an unproduced Doc Savage film, and the script for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as various episodes of Tales from the Crypt and Young Indiana Jones. Of the four movies Darabont has directed, three of them are set in the fifties, and one of them takes its cues from the creature-feature monster films of that era. Frank Darabont is a man clearly enamored of the films of Hollywood’s “golden age”, and as such uninterested in making impressionistic arthouse fare.

So how, then, do you go about filming an impressionistic story while also delivering a clear, audience-friendly, narratively simple film? Well, in this case, you whittle the story down to two or three important events, add a character to make external some of the internal struggles John is going through, and add a brief dream sequence. If I’m being honest, the dream sequence is probably cheesier and more on-the-nose than the Prisoner sequence, but we’re speaking comparatively, here. Although now that I’m nitpicking the film, I realize the obviousness of these aspects, but as I was watching it they didn’t bother me at all. More importantly, in the film as it exists, these two scenes are necessary.

One of the joys I’ve been getting out of this series of discussions with you lies in how deeply we delve into tiny moments. Some of our pieces so far have rivaled the original short stories in terms of length, and that’s allowed us to really explore different aspects of them. I’m not going to claim that our casual discussions here are encyclopedic, exhaustive, or even very academic, but it is a level of critical evaluation I don’t normally indulge in, outside of the odd college course. What I said up there about how Darabont “gets” how stories operate is true, because at this young age, with no formal training, he was able to distill Stephen King’s story to its elements, and then mold them to his own personal vision, and the resulting film is structurally satisfying and emotionally powerful. I wouldn’t say I’ve always been a fan of Darabont (I’m both looking forward to and dreading the day when we cover The Green Mile), but he has an eye for crowd-pleasing entertainments.

Darabont deploys the Prisoner scene at the right time in his film, turning it into the centerpiece of his short. It sheds light on the main character and adds shading to his emotional state, while also breaking up what could have become monotonous. Even the dream sequence serves a similar purpose, so who cares if it’s a bit more obvious than I normally like? Darabont had a limited amount of time with which to tell his story, and very limited means and experience. Things have to be more direct in a short film like this, where we don’t have time to get fully acquainted with the characters and their histories.

The Wrap-Up

Rik: I would say that I am neither a huge Darabont fan or a detractor. His greatest work is obvious, I greatly admire his take on The Mist though I dislike a couple of casting choices, I am cool on (not cool with) The Green Mile (I need to do a rewatch, but neither am I a fan of the story), and I have never fully seen The Majestic. That pretty much evens things out as far as his directorial efforts go for me.We started this piece ages ago and much has happened in our lives since we started it. I feel it is time we put this thing to bed. I think this is a pretty terrific short film that has held up marvelously over time. I don’t think it is great, but it’s pretty damn good considering its origins and the fact it was made for about a buck-thirty-seven. Like the story, I will plan to revisit it again in the future, and perhaps not wait quite so long the next time. But it is such a downer, that that “not wait quite so long” is still going to be a few years if I can help it.

Aaron: I believe we are in agreement on Frank Darabont (although I would be much harsher in my estimation of The Green Mile, but I’ll save that for whenever we actually focus on that film); he is a talented filmmaker who has created some works I love, some I modestly enjoy, and then some I just don’t care for. I figure I’ll always have a fondness for him, if only for his part in bringing forth the 1988 remake of The Blob, which is a pretty fun film that, while probably not underrated, still deserves to be seen. If I’m being honest, Darabont skews a little too much towards the emotional side of the spectrum, veering often into cheap sentimentality and schmaltz, but I think he acquits himself quite nicely here. The Woman in the Room never gets too maudlin, although it has every reason to.We also seem to be in agreement on this film, and while I enjoy it, I don’t see myself revisiting it, or the story that inspired it, anytime soon. It was a revelation, to be reminded of an aspect of King’s writing that I had forgotten (or, more likely, ignored), and it was interesting to see the humble beginnings of an Oscar winning director. I appreciate the ways in which the story affected me now that I’m older and, maybe, a little wiser (very little), but neither the story nor the film are the sorts of entertainments I normally seek out, so it may be awhile before I head this way again.

The Woman in the Room [Pt. 1]

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is finally time for another edition of We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King Print Vs. Film, an ongoing and exhaustive exploration of the works of Stephen King and the films derived from them. As always, Rik and I are here to discuss our reactions, thoughts, emotions, critiques, praises, musings, and, of course, our personal histories with the stories in question. For those wishing to read along at home and join the discussion, we are currently working through the short stories that make up Stephen King’s first collection, Night Shift. We have previously covered Graveyard Shift, Night Surf, and The Mangler, and this time we jump ahead a bit for a slight change of pace with The Woman in the Room.

The Story: The Woman in the Room
[Night Shift, 1978; Original to the publication]

Aaron: I said in the brief intro to this piece that The Woman in the Room represents a slight change of pace for our young blog, but now that I think about it, this is a larger gearshift than I initially thought. Not only are we skipping all the way to the end of the Night Shift collection (up until this point we had been more or less going in published order), but also we’re covering our first story to not feature any sign of the supernatural or fantastic. There are no demonic machines in The Woman in the Room, no rabid mutant vermin, and no apocalypses, unless you count the deeply personal, emotional kind. The tone here skews closest to the mood-piece that was Night Surf, but it lacks a hook as splashy as a humanity-destroying plague. Despite his evident love of the genre, not everything Stephen King has written has fit under the horror banner, and this stands out as an early example of his more conventional fiction.

At this point I’d normally begin talking about when I first read this story, and what memories I have associated with it, but right now any tale I told would be a lie, because I literally have no memory of reading this story. I know I did read it, I know that for a fact, but as I was reading along nothing stirred my memory. For everything we’ve covered so far, events would unfold in my memory slightly ahead of me reading them, and yet everything in this story was brand new. That’s not entirely surprising, because once again we need to take into account the age at which I first read these stories. As I said in an earlier piece, I was around thirteen or fourteen years old at the time, and so the stories that really stuck with me were the more outrageous, gory, macabre, and vicious tales. I wasn’t really in the market for more mature meditations on death and loss, and so The Woman in the Room failed to make a huge impression on my younger self, and I just never revisited it over the years in the way I did with some of the other stories in this collection. I think that’s for the best, actually; I think I’ve rediscovered this story at an age where I can now fully appreciate its style and themes.

Before I go too much further, Rik, I’d like to hear your history with this story, if you have one. Did this one make any sort of impression on you when you first read it as a much younger man? Have you had occasion to revisit it over the years?

Rik: As I mentioned in our previous pieces on the stories that make up Night Shift, I have not read the collection in well over 25 years. So the answer would be, no, I have not revisited it at all. And frankly, apart from having seen Frank Darabont’s student film version of The Woman in the Room many years ago and keeping a nudging awareness of that short film’s presence in my more cinema-oriented mindset (despite my also not having seen in it in over a quarter century), I would have quite forgotten the story altogether.

This is not a critique of the King’s story, mind you; this is more of an admittance of my lack of interest in the subject at hand at the time of its publication. As an older teenager-slash-young adult, you feel immortal to a certain extent. Everything is ahead of you, and the common concerns of older people are simply not your worry. You, at such an age, bounce back from every type of pain, physical, mental, or emotional, and a big part of bouncing back seemingly scot-free is the ability to block out the drama around you. For me, this included what I considered to be “straight” drama, whether it was on TV, on the movie screen, or on the printed page. I had almost no interest in an Oscar-winning dramatic film like Robert Redford’s Ordinary People at the time, and a fully vested, 100% interest in a surrealistic nightmare like David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

In other words, a rather straight story that sinks deeply into the mind of a man obsessed with his mother’s impending death from cancer was just not in my wheelhouse at the time, and so it left little impression on me. Just as I then disdained what I considered to be normal dramatics, so I also chose the targets of my attention for their very weirdness in comparison to such normalcy. And I was definitely NOT reading King for depth of thought or the excellence he maintained in practicing his craft. No, I was reading him solely because he told better, scarier stories than anyone else that I had read at the time. He had the monsters that I craved, and the gruesomeness. I wanted sick, violent stories with last second twists or darkly comedic moments. While the notion of a man slowly feeding his mother an overdose of painkillers certainly ambles into “sick” territory on the measure of an episode of the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents show, it was not enough to capture my attention at the time that I read The Woman in the Room.

Thus, apart from the title (due to Darabont’s film), I had forgotten completely what the short story was even about, and it was only upon reading the opening paragraphs that the story and its style – as have other Night Shift stories – sprang back into my consciousness.

Before we continue to the story itself, I want to mention the title of the story briefly. The title The Woman in the Room never really struck me until I picked up the story to revisit recently. The starkness of the title suddenly revealed itself to me as efficiently cold; it suddenly became a description uttered by someone who is too numbed by tragic circumstances that wishes to distance oneself from the darkening and slowly tightening reality of such an unbearable situation.

Aaron: I’m right there with you on the title. The Woman in the Room. It’s evocative, to be sure, but it’s also nondescript and vague enough to give the reader no idea of what to expect. It certainly did me no favors as I tried to recall the plot of the story in advance of this piece. But then, in context of what the story actually is, the title becomes heartbreaking. The woman in the room, turns out to be Johnny’s mother, dying slowly and painfully of cancer in a hospital bed. That simple, impersonal noun in reference to the man’s clearly beloved mother is telling, as it reflects both the state “the woman” finds herself in, and the mental distancing the man goes through in order to do something he is deeply conflicted about. Johnny’s mother is no longer the mother he knew, she’s little more than a shell with periodic moments of lucidity, a shadow of her former self, and at times a near stranger. Johnny, in order to end her suffering, tries to redefine her as something other than the person who gave him life, and of course he can never be entirely successful in that regard.

The Woman in the Room is one of the most personal fictions I’ve ever read from Stephen King. The only other one that comes close, that I can recall, was Duma Key, in which a man’s recovery from a near-fatal vehicular accident through the aid of his art was intimately informed by King’s own recovery from the 1999 traffic accident that nearly killed him. I think he cuts a bit closer to the bone with this story, which was clearly inspired by the cancer-related death of King’s own mother in 1973. This story was never published anywhere prior to Night Shift in 1978, but it’s safe to assume the emotion was still fresh in King’s mind while he wrote this tale. While Stephen King may not have lovingly fed his mother an overdose of pain medication, it’s hard to read this story without imagining the flights of fancy King must have indulged in during, and after, his mother’s death.

One of the reasons you can tell this was a deeply personal story is the way King absolutely nails, through both words and technique, the way time passes when facing the imminent death of a loved one. The dazed manner in which events are processed, so that your life enters a dreamlike state, where scenes bleed into each other, punctuated by moments of clarity. I said up above that I rediscovered this story at the right age, because as a young teen I was completely unfamiliar with death as anything beyond a vague concept. Now, two decades on, I’ve lost a few friends, a few family members, and I’ve watched friends and family deal with the shocking fact of death. Several years ago, one of my uncles passed away from cancer, and it was impossible to not think of him while I read this story. 

When I say one of my uncles, it should also be said that I grew up in constant contact with all of my aunts and uncles, as we all shared a large house with my grandparents for most of my childhood, and even when people moved away it was still within a near enough distance that we saw each other several times a week. And so we were all very close as I grew up, although that changed a bit over time, as my teenage years kicked in and people started families of their own.  When my uncle got sick he was already fading out of my life, though I still saw him frequently. I remember visiting him, though, on the night he passed away, and being shocked at what I saw before me. This man, who had been such a huge part of my life, who had been a captain for a highly successful charter tour company that he started, who had taken me camping several times every summer of my childhood, who had taken me skiing and sledding and fishing countless times, and tried his best to impress a love of nature on his odd, bookworm nephew, was entirely unrecognizable. He was, almost literally, a skeleton, shrunken down to such a body mass that seems inconceivable that he could still be living, even with the expensive row of medical equipment aiding him in most bodily functions. He was more than just physically different, and it was hard to see him as the same man who had introduced me to Bruce Lee and Die Hard.

The other great insight Stephen King had in this story is the way that death can become, paradoxically, really fairly boring. When someone close to you is dying, there always comes a time when part of you just wants the horrible final act to just happen already. It’s maybe not the nicest thing to say, but it can be so much worse waiting for the other shoe to drop that you get the urge to tear the band-aid off and get into the business of grieving and moving on. The endless flow of incidents and events in your life become heightened in the mundanity, a string of awkward silences and interchangeable waiting rooms and repeated platitudes. The effect is numbing, and it can seem appealing to just get it over with, to get past the hard part. Because death is easy, it’s dying that’s hard. Especially on the living.

But hey, I fear I may have brought the tone down in a small wave of despair, allowing my often-maudlin nature to seep into my writing here (a cumulative side effect of my many sleepless nights recently), so I’ll throw it over to you. I’m assuming this story had it’s own newfound associations for you, as you revisited it as an adult with an entirely different set of priorities and emotional connections. How did you find the experience of revisiting this tale?

Rik: Wow. Given the heartache at the center of this story and the more obvious heartache which must have overwhelmed King during its writing, your reflections are entirely apt. For myself, the story doesn’t hit home quite as precisely for me, even a quarter of a century later. Now that I have slipped over to the farther side of middle age, and wrestled hard with the issue of my own self-destruction in recent years, the subject of mortality seems to be a recurring one in my life. I made the realization a couple of years ago that my life has been blessedly free of major tragedy. A grandparent dies of old age or the parents of close friends go a bit earlier than expected here and there. My wife (then my girlfriend) had a bout with cancer early on in our relationship, but that ship righted itself in short order (though I did lose a first cousin to cancer not long ago as well). Otherwise, all of my nearest, dearest, and closest are still kicking about in the world.

And that is the catch of making such a realization about the good fortune of your friends and family (and thus, yourself)… when does the onslaught of misery begin? When does life become an endless procession of funeral service after funeral service, or relentless visits to hospitals, or tragic phone calls in the middle of the night? Truthfully, while some might believe that my life has been largely blessed by avoiding major tragedy to this point, I see nothing but pain and woe ahead, and because I have not had to deal very harshly with the realities of life in this area, I am terribly unprepared for it. I had a hard enough time when my beloved dog died a while back, enough so that it added to my suicidal ideation and need for medical guidance and therapy.

Such concerns are the chief reason why I dove into fantasy, science fiction, and horror in the first place. While there may be real situations that inspired some of the stories, the element of the fantastical is so strong that one can divorce oneself from the reality behind it and just enjoy the tale being told. You may be well aware of the metaphorical thrust of the writing, but there is usually enough fantasy coating the proceedings that you can choose to ignore any of the more dramatic elements built into the piece.

Which is why The Woman in the Room is so hard-hitting today. I must have discounted it back then as unnecessary to my enjoyment of Night Shift, and thereby forgot about it in the process. I know that I read it, but because The Woman in the Room wasn’t all bloody and extreme in violence or had a serial killer hiding in a closet or a malevolent force hiding behind cornrows or a ravenous monster somewhere or other, I accepted it as too much of real life and not worthy of true attention at the time. 

Reading it now, while it certainly doesn’t hit as close to home for me as it does for you (and is really not something I want to read even now, especially given that someone in my own life is going in for surgery soon, so I really want it to hit even further away from home than it already does), the story is staggering in its quiet intensity. The Woman in the Room is a gut-puncher. King really makes you wonder how you will do in such a situation (and odds are, such a situation will greet most of us in the future, near or far). The answer is, most of us will do OK, and we are going to make some small mistakes, and we will have some regrets of not saying this or that when we possibly should have, but in the end, it will be about making our loved one as comfortable in their exit as we can. I doubt most of us would ever go to the lengths as Johnny does in The Woman in the Room, and I would hope that I never have to do so.

When I first started reading the story on the Kindle on my iPhone, there was a strange break early on where the text leaves off after the word “She” and picks up again a few lines down with “is in the Central Maine Hospital”. At first, because Kindle does strange things with page layout -- I have had books with photos where the text completely realigns when going back and forth a few times -- I thought maybe it was just a problem with the file. But then I realized (because it had been so long since I actually held the book version) that it was a stylistic thing that King was attempting, providing short breaks in his story (almost like chapters) while reinforcing the feeling, at least for me, that because of the tragedy of the situation, Johnny was possibly having blackouts in his memory, or losing track of time or meaning in his life, or was simply blocking out as much as possibly to keep carrying forward. The abrupt breaks in the middle of the sentence were meant to amplify this mood, one of being utterly lost in one’s own circumstances, quite at sea as to what he should do. How do you feel about this?

Aaron: Before I answer your question, I feel the need to address something you said up above. You mention your reaction to the death of your dog as some sort of indicator that you will not handle loss well, and yet I beg to differ. Of all the losses in my life, I have never cried harder or mourned more deeply than when I had to put both of my cats, who I’d raised from kittenhood sixteen years earlier, to sleep within the same week. In fact, as callow as this may sound, I’ve never cried at the death of any person, no matter how deep the connection or close the relation. But my pets? Uncontrollable sobbing for hours, and a deep depression for weeks. But that makes sense in a way, as well. Animals are blank slates, in a way, informed more by the personalities we read into their actions or the bonds we impose upon them. The love and companionship is pure and unsullied, which can never be true for a human being, no matter how beloved they are. I think King acknowledges this in the story, where the only memory Johnny indulges in of his mother before her illness is one where he was punished fairly severely (at least by today’s standards of child-rearing). Our relationships with our families are so complicated by moments of comfort and joy and instances of profound anger and hurt. It’s a lot of emotion to process at once, and I’ve found that I have a pretty delayed reaction to the losses I’ve experienced; I feel saddened, but not shattered, and it’s only over time that the magnitude of what is missing reveals itself. My uncle and I had not been on good terms when he passed, and I never took the chance to make proper amends, although plenty of chances I was definitely given. At the time of his death I felt sad, but more for the people around me who were so clearly grieving. (As I said up above; death is hardest for the living.) But over the years I’ve had several dreams about him, and often I’ll say something in a tone of voice that I immediately recognize as his, and it’s at these times that I realize he’s gone, and, perhaps a bit selfishly, so is that part of my life.

I used to feel guilty about this lack of overwhelming sadness when faced with the death of a loved one. When my grandfather was killed by a drunk driver (again, he had been a constant presence in my life) I couldn’t get away from my family fast enough, and ran off to spend the day with friends. That I do feel bad about, but I was terrified of spending the day with people I would feel incapable of connecting with. All that grief, and me with no hope of mirroring it or easing it. I don’t want to give the impression that I am uncaring, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s taken me a few years, but I’ve come to understand my reaction to these circumstances a bit better. I, personally, find nothing to be sad about for the person who has passed. Whatever your personal belief structure, I think we can agree that whatever their problems had been, they’re over now. Instead I see grief at someone’s death not about the fact that they’ve died, but about the loss we will experience in our life. The dead are beyond it all, while the living will carry the memory. And I think that’s lovely. I see no reason to be sad when a person has died, beyond knowing that I won’t be able to hang out with them anymore. But the astronomical odds against two specific people occupying the same space and time in this universe make the simple fact of knowing and loving someone a cause for celebration. To spend my time depressed that it’s over seems… vain, somehow.

But to answer your question, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head, but I wouldn’t quite use the term “blackout” to describe what Johnny is going through. I think the elliptical nature of the passages, how each one leads into the next, while also starting and stopping in mid-sentence, letting paragraphs trail off unfinished, highlights the emotionally stunned headspace Johnny finds himself in. Johnny’s life is now a string of obligatory hospital visits, dutifully and lovingly made but unpleasant and depressing. There’s no real defining moment in his life right now beyond the approaching death of his mother, and everything else becomes a dissociated blur. But look then at what does make it through the haze: the way IV bags hang down, the water fountain in the hallway, the way the doctor looks at the ceiling tiles while he thinks. Utter mundanity. The things you’d normally ignore become bright and crystal clear, burned into your memory. Perhap that is just a coping mechanism, a way to focus on smaller things in order to avoid the larger issue at hand. Or perhaps it’s a way of preserving the moment, of taking in everything that you normally overlook and storing it away. It could be Johnny’s mind creating a sort of personal file for this experience, segmenting and compartmentalizing this moment away from the rest of his life while storing everything in this event in crystal clarity. THIS is important stuff. THIS is what you will remember for the rest of your life.

That story structure really impressed me on my first read through (technically second, but we’ll say first because I had no memory of the earlier reading), and then blew me away on my second. First, we have the elliptical nature of the segments, which combine two different statements and sentiments and still remain coherent, but then you have the combined effect of the segments themselves. Nothing in this story is presented in a strictly chronological order, and there’s really no attempt made to ground the reader in a specific time, or to delineate between the visits. Johnny arrives at the hospital room a couple of times, leaves a few more, and we’re never sure which visit is the climactic one and which were earlier on before the fateful decision was made. An oblique non sequitur will occur, and then a few pages later we’ll see the explanation for the reference. The reader is as untethered as Johnny, and yet the story still makes complete sense, and nothing is confusing or inscrutable by the end of the tale.

What makes this even more striking for me is the emotion at play in the story (though clearly I bring a lot of that emotion to the table myself). If I were to single out one complaint about Stephen King’s writing in general, it’s that he is not a very emotional writer. Not that he’s a callow robot; I believe he’s a warm and emotional person in his personal life, but in his books he never really succeeds at conveying the mystifying effects of love, loss, sadness, or joy. Needless to say, I did not find that the case with The Woman in the Room, which had such a depth of emotion in it that I find the prospect of picking it up again a little daunting. Despite its focus on the dull and commonplace, King was writing from a place of deep personal feeling, and that informed every page, paragraph, and sentence. 

What say you? Am I alone in thinking King does not normally handle emotion with the skill he displays here?

Rik: First, some unfinished business. You differed with me on how I might handle personal loss in regards to my reaction when my dog died, believing that I might be OK, since you have cried more at the loss of pets over people in your experience. That’s the catch: your opinion on how I may handle such loss is based on your own reactions, and not on mine. In my sentence about my dog’s death, this is the key phrase: “that it added to my suicidal ideation and need for medical guidance and therapy.” Losing Isabelle didn’t cause my depression, anxiousness, eventual nervous breakdown, and urge towards self destruction. Her loss merely amplified my already long-existing depressive state and anxiety to a point where hospitalization was an eventuality. At no point in my previous text did I speak of my own physical reactions to the deaths of others, i.e. humans, in my personal circle. I just expressed my fear of them. Assuredly, I have cried quite robustly many times over the deaths of grandparents, my cousin, parents of friends with whom I had a close relationship, and even a few celebrities of whom I had no personal acquaintance at all, just deep worship of their talents. I am a veritable waterworks. I am a fountain for hire, if the pay is decent. (Hell, I can be rented cheaply these days.) In my spousal relationship, I am the emotional one. Compared to me, Jen is practically a Vulcan. 

What I am saying is that I handle these things as poorly with humans as I do with animals. Sure, I cried rivers of tears over losing three dogs and a cat in the past decade or so, but what I really fear is losing my family and friends. And because my life to this point has been largely tragedy free, especially given how large my circle of friends is, it makes that fear almost untenable at times for me. I actually have sleepless nights mulling over it. As an example, Jen’s cancer scare was at the very beginning of our relationship; were it to occur now, I don’t know what I would do. Thankfully, she has been clear of further problems with it over the fifteen years since, but were it to reoccur, my world would be rocked. I am fairly certain that on most days, she is all that holds me from spinning out altogether.

Once more getting back to the point of this article (not that all of this musing on the morbidity of death isn’t the point), and to answer your question, I agree that this is probably is the most emotional I remember King being on paper. This is not to say that he is not emotional in other writings. It is hard, as a horror writer, to sell the terror of a situation if you not keyed in somehow to the feelings of your characters. But The Woman in the Room, as you stated in reference to the basis for the story, is probably the most nakedly emotional he has been. It is clear that this raw nerve that has been uncovered in the form of Johnny is really his raw nerve. Every thought, though perhaps altered for a fictional narrative, is drawn from a form of thought he probably had sitting up late nights bleary-eyed in an uncomfortable chair in the corner of a hospital room, hearing the repetitive click-clack-wheezing and blip-blip-bleeping of mechanical devices meant to prolong the life of someone who would rather just let go of the constant pain already.

I have to say, this story, while exceedingly intriguing and well-written, is a bit too painful to really for me to carry on about it much more. I would prefer that we skip over to Frank Darabont’s filmed Dollar Baby version of the story at this juncture. 

Aaron: I certainly did not mean to imply that your emotional reactions are somehow “wrong” while mine are somehow “right”. Nobody reacts to anything the same way, and we all process emotions differently. Rather I meant to explain my viewpoint, and possibly a few words of support or comfort to anyone who has dealt with, or is currently dealing with, loss. In fact, for many years I felt there was something wrong in the way I reacted to the death of loved ones, and it left me feeling lonely, guilty, and excluded when I found myself unable to join in the healing, natural mourning process. This attitude I have today is the result of years of thought and emotional searching, and I’ve reached a place where I feel comfortable with the fact of death (though, like you, I am not immune to sleepless, worried nights, often related to my status as a father of two). If, through my words here, I can help someone in some small ways come to grips with this most universal, and most intensely personal of human experiences, then I would be overjoyed. Certainly that was part of what the original intention behind The Woman In The Room was; to work through grief while also, hopefully, helping readers to connect with the emotion in the story and in turn exorcise some of their own pain.

I’m with you; I think it may be time to move forward in our coverage. It’s funny, actually. I chose to cover this story as a way to bang out a quick edition of We Who Watch while we both deal with unpredictably busy summers, and yet it turned out to be a deeper commitment than I had expected. Certainly we’ve both gone deeper in our personal disclosures than ever before on this blog, and while I wouldn’t say it’s been draining or trying, I would say I’m ready to close the book (pun only partially intended) on this one.

So what say we pick this back up in a couple of days, with a discussion of Frank Darabont’s student film version of the story, and the birth of the Dollar Baby?

[To be continued in Part II on Friday, August 26...]

The Mangler [Pt. 2]

Rik Tod Johnson: Welcome to Part 2 of our discussion of Stephen King's The Mangler. In the first part, Aaron Lowe and I tackled the original short story, which you can find in King's first story collection, Night Shift. In this part, we are going to discuss the 1995 film adaptation. We hope that you survive it better than we did.

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The Film: The Mangler

[1995, New Line Cinema; directed by Tobe Hooper; screenplay by Tobe Hooper, Stephen Brooks and Peter Welbeck]

Rik: Much like with Graveyard Shift, the film version of The Mangler was thoroughly disappointing to me when it was first released to theatres in 1995. We (speaking for my gang of close friends and I) had high hopes, too; the film was to be directed by Tobe Hooper, the man behind bona fide genre classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Salem’s Lot, and Poltergeist, and also cult classics (and faves of mine) such as Lifeforce and the first Leatherface sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. True, he has proven vexing as a director at times in his career. I was profoundly upset over his remake of Invaders from Mars – the original from 1953 was one of the more influential sci-fi films in my youth – and I remember being less than satisfied from the results of seeing The Funhouse and Spontaneous Combustion when they were released. Still, at the time of The Mangler’s release, and even now really, despite some other setbacks, I still try to see anything that has Hooper’s name on it, just as I do with Stephen King.

Besides Hooper and King, there was a third thing about the film adaptation of The Mangler that it supposedly had going for it: Robert Englund. Freddy Krueger himself was set to be the big star of the film, and from reading the story, I assumed that he would be set in the lead role of Officer Hunton. I really couldn’t envision another role within the story that would be suitable for an actor of his then considerable cachet. The only other truly substantive roles were those of Mark Jackson, Hunton’s pal, who seems to have the knowledge of the ages at his fingertips right when it is needed most, and George Stanner, the plant foreman. And Englund did not seem right for either role anyway. How he was to be used was beyond me.

And then the trailer came out, and we discovered the truth. Englund was playing someone never really described at all, or even physically encountered, in the short story. Honestly, seeing the trailer made me wonder if I had actually read the story before, though the diabolical and mangling laundry ironer was most definitely in attendance in the clip, so I knew I was thinking of the right story. But who could Robert Englund possibly be playing? In the trailer, he seemed to be attacking the role in the grotesque style of Lon Chaney (a hero of Englund’s), with over-the-top mannerisms and his legs clad in metal braces so that he staggers back and forth mechanically. The film seemed to have a look bordering on (or downright aping) German Expressionism, and for someone who was obsessed with that particular style of filmmaking, I was willing to give it a go (not that I wasn’t going to see it regardless.)

I will save discussion of my further feelings towards the film and the mystery surrounding Robert Englund’s character and his subsequent portrayal for later. Aaron, I would first like to ask you if you had any connection to or history with this film before now?

Aaron: Back when this film came out on home video in 1995 or 1996, I rented it with some measure of excitement for many of the reasons you mentioned: Stephen King, Tobe Hooper, Robert Englund. But also there was interest in the involvement of Ted Levine, who at that point was known to me only as Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. It seemed like the film couldn’t miss. I didn’t remember the trailer until I just watched it recently, but I certainly recall being thrilled at the announcer saying “Three modern masters of horror…” over footage of the film. In fact, the trailer does a pretty good job of selling the film overall (though of course it looks silly and outdated now), and probably only stoked my interest in the finished product.

I remember renting it with my friend Justin, and getting maybe half an hour into it before we just shut it off in disgust. I rarely ever do that, and I certainly did it less back then when I had nothing but time to spend on films of questionable quality. The Mangler as a film was so disappointing, so tonally confused, that even at 17, I just had no patience for it. At some point I know I finished the film, but I couldn’t even tell you when that was. The only memory I had of the film was turning it off in disappointment. That, and the surprise I felt at learning Ted Levine wasn’t just doing a creepy voice for The Silence of the Lambs; he really talks that way!

From the brief conversations we’ve had surrounding this project, I know we’ve both got a lot to say about this film, so I think it’s best to get right into the movie and we can unpack things as we go along.

The film opens in the Blue Ribbon Laundry, where a few dozen women slave over industrial laundry machines like the titular Mangler. In very short order (practically right after the opening credits end) we’ll see Sherry Ouelette cut her hand on the Mangler (losing a worrying amount of blood over the machine), the beginnings of the haunted icebox from the short story, and the death of poor Mrs. Frawley. In written form, all this business is done with before the story even starts, and the incidents are all meant to be random occurrences that add up to something horrible. In the film they all happen at once, like the final flurry of activity from a Rube Goldberg machine. Two men bump into Sherry, and there’s a weird burst of lightning and a lot of blood as she cuts herself and rubs her bloody hand on the fridge, then in the ensuing confusion, Mrs. Frawley absentmindedly puts her hand into the Mangler (in some of the laziest suspense building I’ve ever seen).

The sudden commotion draws out the owner, Bill Gartley, giving us our first glimpse of Robert Englund and how he’ll be playing the character. To put it briefly, he plays the character like a cartoon. I don’t just mean he goes over the top, but that he acts as if he’d somehow stepped out of a particularly foul-mouthed Popeye short. There’s nothing remotely realistic in this performance, which is not helped by the unconvincing old age makeup or weird medical braces on his legs that cause him to adopt a walk that looks like an exaggerated version of Everett Sloane’s already exaggerated walk in The Lady From Shanghai.

At this early moment, I thought I had an idea of what Tobe Hooper’s ultimate goal was. I thought he was going for the heightened reality of, if not German Expressionism, then at least the lurid Italian horror films of the sixties and seventies. I got a definite Dario Argento vibe from the camera movements, the color palette, and the questionable dubbing of the largely South African cast. I’m not sure if that was what he was aiming for, though, because the film keeps changing in tone from scene to scene, and rambles on from here in fits and starts. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but the best word I can use to describe my reaction to this film is “befuddled”. But then, Hooper has always been the most confounding of the accepted horror greats.

Tobe Hooper became a feature director at the right place and right time, and the film he made his name on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, is justifiably remembered as a great piece of art and a defining horror film of its time period. Since then, he’s been very hard to pin down. Not quite as ruthless as Wes Craven in his prime, not quite as elegant as John Carpenter, and not nearly as political as George Romero. It can be hard (at least it is for me) to really pin down what Hooper’s style is. It doesn’t help that he seems to have spent much of the eighties trying to disprove the persistent rumors that Steven Spielberg secretly directed Poltergeist. I imagine this is what led to the ill-advised Invaders From Mars remake, and the alien sex-vampire epic Lifeforce. Lifeforce has long been a personal favorite of mine, but its placement in his filmography gives the impression that he was still trying to prove he could handle big budgets and impressive special effects without Spielberg’s involvement. Since then he’s kept busy with a steady mix of television and low budget film work, and I have to admit I’ve mostly stopped following him since The Mangler. I’ve seen at least one of his films since then, and it did not quite convince me I was missing out on anything.

To get back to my statement about The Mangler’s look, I think it’s actually pretty great, visually. The Blue Ribbon Laundry, where we’ll be spending a lot of time, is vast and cavernous, with lots of great intersecting lines, thudding machinery, and billowing steam. In a lesser film this would have just been confused and under lit, but if anything Hooper and cinematographer Amnon Solomon pour an excess of light into the shots. There are dark spaces in this film, but even during the night scenes, there’s a nice definition to the surroundings. The Mangler in the film itself is an imposing piece of machinery, but also designed in a completely unrealistic way. First off, it appears to have been embedded partially in a huge chunk of obsidian rock, which I can’t imagine any manufacturer actually designing. But also its gears and cables are as oversized as the machinery in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Whatever else we’re going to say about this film, I found it visually interesting and fun to look at.

Rik, I can already practically sense you itching to jump in here with your own take, so I’m going to pass it off to you. How do you feel about the look of The Mangler?

Rik: You had me at Chaplin, so I will jump to your last point first. The film does look great, almost exactly what I like from a horror film, especially one featuring a demonic machine. There are wonderful establishing shots – such as our first glimpse of the Mangler – and the humid atmosphere of the laundry plant itself is impressively dense and oppressive. If one were to base their opinion of the film solely on how sharply Hooper and his crew set up each succeeding scene and the attention given in delivering a visual experience, one might be convinced that this is a film worthy of more attention. I have always said that every film, even the worst film, is a cult film for somebody out there, and in looking around the web in recent days, it appears there are a good amount of people who think this film has been unfairly maligned. I would say, that in a cinematographic sense, they might have a point. I watched a chunk of the film (the first ten minutes) with the sound off and the subtitles on, and imagined The Mangler as a modern take on a silent expressionistic horror epic, and found the results, at the very least, an intriguing concept.

However, in a modern film that was designed to be told by words in a screenplay that are delivered to our ears by paid actors, who speak those words to the best (or worst) of their ability, one cannot merely turn the sound off for the duration of the film. It is fun in jest or in experimentation, but to experience the film as intended, one must hear the dialogue and the score and the sound effects. One must have the complete package, and it is here where The Mangler runs into problems.

Getting back to your point on the design of the machine itself, it is too obviously ominous from the start, and I would rather there had been a slight transmutation when the possessed refrigerator transfers its demonic energy. But following this moment early on in the film, the Mangler still looks exactly the same as it did: overly designed and preposterous in conception. I tried to research older folding machines going back decades, and found some odd designs, but nothing to approximate the look of the ironer in this film.

But, the scenes in the laundry did remind me distinctly of a particular film that arose out of the German Expressionistic period: Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s dystopian masterpiece from 1927. I flashed back on the scenes involving the downtrodden workers of the factories under the city, and the ridiculously huge and ungainly machinery, much of it of purposefully unknown function. There is one scene where one of the main characters is staring at a huge bank of machinery and has a strange hallucination. In the mist and steam of the factory, his vision blurs as he imagines the machinery as nothing more than the gaping mouth of the ancient god Moloch, being fed workers sacrificially. After a short visit to this bygone period of prehistory, his vision clears to the dire present of his reality.

I would not be surprised to hear that Metropolis was indeed watched relentlessly by Hooper’s team before they worked on The Mangler. (You also name-checked Modern Times, which is the other obvious choice for a “man caught in the senseless machinery of the modern age film”.) The difference here is that the demonic machine in The Mangler is supposed to represent the reality of the story from which it springs, not a pipe dream.

And you are correct about Robert Englund. I have had a sometimes hot and most often cold relationship with Mr. Englund since he started becoming a “thing” with the first Elm Street film. Wonderfully cast as Freddy Krueger as he was, Englund has most often appeared to lack the one thing that similar actors such as Chaney and Boris Karloff had in spades: the ability to play it straight when needed. I would feel differently about him if he would sometimes just take straight roles, but he has mainly stuck to genre films since he became a star (or genre films have stuck to him, the more likely vein). The problem here is one of lack of range; he is decidedly one-note in most of his choices, and never seems to turn down an opportunity to play “up”.

Here, he is just too loud, too abrasive, from the very start. We see him in the opening scene, and for me, he is an instant headache. The film immediately becomes a particularly painful visit to the doctor that you know will not be over for 106 excruciatingly mind-numbing minutes. The novocain has been applied, to be sure, but you still feel every cut of the gums and every revolution of the drill bit against your flesh and bone. And it is also clear that he is playing this movie as comedy. When he chimes musically, “Hell’s bells, Adelle!” as Mrs. Frawley is sucked into the Mangler, there is the sense that his character has said this line many times before to Mrs. Frawley, but never in such dire circumstances. However, as Englund gives us the line, it is clear he doesn’t care if he sucks the air out of the film. And just a few minutes into it, he sucks away my interest as well.

His character also has a penchant for saying the strangest combinations of phrases in rapid fire succession such as “Go draw a bath. Skedaddle. Shoo, fly, shoo.” Englund’s tongue in cheek delivery, in which it is quite clear that none of these words really have anything behind them, doesn’t help matters. There is another moment, clearly meant to be funny, where he is taunting his niece and yells out, “I’ll do a little dance for you, Sherry! A little jig!” There is just too much Freddy Krueger in his voice here, and then his exaggerated movements as he attempts that little jig wearing his leg braces shreds apart whatever other atmosphere the film had going for it that that moment.

I want to ask you, Aaron, about the character of Bill Gartley. This is the character to which I referred earlier in this article, as one who does not appear bodily in the text of the original short story, and is only mentioned five times within the text, but never with real consequence to the story. Here, he has been made – outside of the machine, of course – into the main villain of the piece. I imagine it was necessary for them to create such a character in order to attract a horror icon the size of Englund to the project, but I feel the story really doesn’t need the interference. Your thoughts?

Aaron: I’m not quite sure how to answer that. If you are asking me if the short story – or a short film version of – The Mangler needs the Gartley character, I would say most definitely not. The story Stephen King provided could have been expanded in a manner in which Gartley appeared and was an actual character, but there are many ways this could have been done other than what we got. Some of them would probably be better; some of them would probably be worse. If you are asking me if this film that Tobe Hooper has given us needs the Gartley character, all I can say is that he does exist in this film, and I cannot imagine this version of the story being told without him. I will also say that Robert Englund’s portrayal of the character does lessen the impact of the film overall, and perhaps a different actor with much the same script would have improved our impression of the movie.

I don’t want to be too harsh on Englund, but you are correct; the man is only capable of chewing scenery, or at least that’s the mode he’s chosen to operate in since the Nightmare films took off. But, as a counterpoint, I just finished watching Angel Heart, in which Robert De Niro plays a character of significant evil, and yet he chooses the opposite route; he underplays everything. He’s quiet and controlled and even friendly at times, and yet he’s still able to come across as menacing, or at least capable of great menace. It was an odd juxtaposition to this film, because my thoughts went immediately to how The Mangler would have worked had they gone in that direction with the character. I think Englund’s hamminess detracts from the already outsized mode the film is working in. He takes what was probably intended to be a blackly comic film of elevated reality and attempts to turn it into a wacky cartoon. I’m not sure how much of that blame to lay on him though, as he’s only doing what the director has asked of him. Or the director was incapable of reining him in. Either way it’s a mess.

But Robert Englund isn’t the only one playing a character created entirely for the screen; he’s just the loudest. This is a feature-length adaptation of a story that is only 29 pages long, and so of course characters need to be invented, while the existing ones need to be expanded. Gotta eat up that time somehow! The character that actually bothered me the most was the police photographer, known only as Pictureman in the film and in the credits. He’s a youngish actor, wearing more unconvincing old age makeup, and he pops up throughout the film during significant moments. Hunton is initially antagonistic towards him, but the relationship develops through the film and there are hints that they have a pretty long shared history. I do not understand what this character’s deal is. He seems surprised by the demonic activity he witnesses when Hunton destroys the icebox, but he also seems to know more than he says about the weird stuff going on in this town. Near the end of the film it turns out he does know quite a bit, as he dies of cancer and leaves Officer Hunton a big book of evidence, as well as a creepy collage of newspaper stories on his wall, including one about the car-crash death of Hunton’s wife.

Clearly this character is meant to be a sort of cryptic guide for our characters, but it never develops in a satisfying way, and, like most of the film, ends up more mystifying than anything else. There’s a scene in the film where Hunton visits the morgue after a child is found dead in that icebox we keep talking about. He has a brief interaction with the mortician about the quality of the mortician’s work putting Mrs. Frawley back together, before Hunton is left alone to brood some more. This morgue is ridiculously far underground, as Hunton descends several large staircases to get there, and what’s weirder is that when the mortician leaves the morgue, we can see him in the far left of the frame punching the ‘down’ button on the elevator. A few minutes later, Hunton is caught off guard by Pictureman, who then snaps a candid shot of Hunton brooding between the two dead bodies. They have some more cryptic conversations before Hunton leaves again. And here’s what bothers me: the mortician and Pictureman are both played by the same actor for no reason that I can discern. I kept expecting that to mean something, and when I saw that in the credits, I re-watched those scenes (I actually watched the entire film twice, for some reason) trying to pick out any hidden meanings, but there are none. The mortician conversation is pretty mundane, and the Pictureman stuff is just more of the same. It’s one of many things in this film that feel like they were supposed to add up to something, and the fact that they don’t just confuses me.

How about you, Rik? What were your thoughts on this bizarre character, or Lin Sue, the other character invented for the film?

Rik: Oh, I loved Angel Heart so much when it first came out to theatres. Saw it four times and kept dragging people to it. None of them liked it half as much as me, however.

Pictureman the, uh, picture man is a ridiculous character to encounter right after just being introduced to Gartley mere minutes before, in too short a time to have really recovered from the first bout of subpar makeup and acting. Honestly, when I first saw this film, everyone in my group thought Pictureman – J.J.J. Pictureman, to be precise, as he stresses in the film – was just Robert Englund in another disguise. We couldn’t even grapple with the thought there might be another actor in the film playing dual roles besides him, and a very young, non-established actor at that. This is where I really wish there a commentary track to go along with the film, because I would really like to find out why they went this route. Was Englund supposed to play the character but then either he refused, they were running out of time or budget, or they thought the character was too close in looks or age to Englund’s Gartley, and so wanted someone a bit different? Or was he a young buck trying to establish himself in the same mold as Englund – perhaps a pal of his – and was granted the chance to prove his range in The Mangler? The actor, Jeremy Crutchley, has been around ever since, with a lot of minor roles in a lot of minor (and some OK) projects (and a voice in a Game of Thrones video game). But given that he is an English actor who has a Spanish Wikipedia page but not an English one, I would say he has never really broken through. And that name… Pictureman? It’s just too on the nose for a cameraman’s moniker. (I’m surprised we didn’t meet the local plumber, John Poopflusher, as well…)

I really had not given the Lin Sue character any thought at all, not even in my notes, so that’s how much she impacted my viewing of The Mangler. I know she is primarily there to make Gartley’s niece Sherry jealous that she is stealing Sherry’s uncle’s attentions, but apart from using Lin Sue to show how empowering it is to become a “part of the machine,” thereby gaining power and a bad post-‘80s haircut, she really didn’t affect me.

No, the character I would really like to discuss is Officer Hunton, played by Ted Levine. I know that one of Stephen King’s biggest gripes about the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, apart from the fact that Kubrick snubbed his nose at King’s own screenplay, is that he believes that Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance is way off where he would like it. He thinks that Nicholson starts out the film as crazy, and so he has no arc in his performance, because he is just crazy non-stop throughout the film. I don’t really want to argue this here – let’s save that for further down the road when we tackle that book – but King does have a solid point, even if I don’t fully agree with it.

I have not read King’s opinion of the filmed version of The Mangler, but if he is upset at Nicholson in The Shining, he has to be equally so with Levine in this film. Levine’s Hunton starts out sick and nauseous and screaming every line, and ends up sick and nauseous and screaming every line. The Hunton character shares the same traits with the film version – near addiction to antacids because of a queasy possibly ulcerous stomach and a penchant for throwing up at crime scenes – but the character in the story at least starts out at a reduced level of histrionics when matched up against the film Hunton.

A big problem for me is that there is not a bit of subtlety in this film, which does not allow one to have a base from which to explore the story. I don’t always need one – I am a fan of true surrealism – but this film is presented, despite the pushy camera angles and design touches and bizarre acting choices of its biggest name actor, as a straightforward horror picture. For this, you need a solid character in the lead that, if you can’t trust, at least gives you the impression that you can trust them for a while. Levine does have some quieter moments, but only when paired with Daniel Matmor, who plays the most sensible character in the film, Mark Jackson, even though he is the one obsessed with black magic and demons. But for the most part, at any possible moment, Levine is bellowing at the top of his lungs or crying in disbelief or throwing up on the ground or screaming at people. He is a trainwreck at the beginning of the picture and never lets up from that impression. If he hadn’t gone on to play Captain Stottlemeyer on Monk with such consistent charm and humor over many years (in addition to other small roles), it is possible I would have written him off as an actor wholesale following The Mangler.

Aaron, you had intimated that Ted Levine’s Officer Hunton pretty much sounds like his Jame Gumb to you. Admittedly, Levine does not have a lot of vocal diversity in his performances over the years. He is largely marble-mouthed, so you have to figure that factor in when you hire him. But how did you feel about Levine’s overall performance here and its effect on Hunton as a character? Did you find it as strident and unnecessary as I did?

Aaron: One of the few things I remembered distinctly about this film was, strangely enough, the tone of Ted Levine’s performance. I remembered very clearly how tightly wound and bitter he was, and yet how quickly he’d fly into overacted rages. I’m not sure why that stayed with me, but I did go into this movie with a favorable impression of Ted Levine. The Silence of the Lambs aside, I now mostly remember him from Monk, as you said, and more paternal roles like the one he played on the FX series The Bridge. That gave me a certain perspective here, and I believe that in this film he is a good actor completely out to sea on the material. He actually has a few really good moments in this film that I think he played quite nicely, like this moment late in the film with Pictureman, who says that he doesn’t think Hunton likes him anymore, to which Hunton says “No, it’s my job I can’t stand.” At times like this he captures the right balance of bitterness and humanity, but I just don’t think he quite understood the tone of the film, or how to play some of the more exaggerated moments. That’s understandable; I’ve seen this movie twice in as many days and I still don’t understand the tone they were going for. I can only imagine how confusing it must have been in its unfinished form.

As to how I felt this performance informed the character, I think you hit the nail on the head in regards to how it removes anything close to a character arc. I do not get the impression that Hunton in the film is any good at his job, or that anyone particularly likes him, outside of Mark Jackson. He seems too emotional, too embittered, too… angry. Keep in mind this is a small town cop, whose main duties are probably speeding tickets and drunken brawls, not a jaded homicide detective from the big city. Of course, a lot of his bad attitude seems to stem from the death of his wife an undetermined amount of time before this film begins.

This brings up another facet of this film I’m still trying to wrap my head around; the odd doubling or intertwining of certain story elements that should, logically, be unrelated. Hunton’s wife has died in a car crash, and Hunton’s demeanor stems from his guilt at being the driver of the vehicle at the time. In the film, Mark Jackson isn’t just Hunton’s friend, he’s his brother-in-law, and yet during the frequent discussions about Hunton’s dead wife this never comes up; it’s only mentioned once in a single line of dialogue that I missed on my first viewing of the film. In fact, Mark never seems to be upset at all that he’s also lost his sister, he only seems intent on getting Hunton to move on. He describes the accident that killed his sister as “People make mistakes, and then they move on.” But Mrs. Hunton isn’t the only person who died in a car crash: there are also Sherry’s parents.

Sherry’s parents were killed in a car crash, leaving Bill Gartley, her uncle, as her legal guardian. For some reason the film makes sure we know the exact date this happened, but once again that knowledge never amounts to anything. Then there’s Gartley’s daughter who was killed by the Mangler when she was sixteen. Clearly this daughter wasn’t Sherry’s mother, but it seems odd that two of the main characters in this film have, as primary character origins, the deaths of loved ones in car accidents, and the film never comments on it. Were they in the same accident? It seems doubtful, because Hunton’s wife’s death seems more recent than the death of Sherry’s parents, but they’re both so oddly emphasized that they have to mean something. That’s my biggest problem with this film; so much of it seems important, meaningful, and yet it never adds up to anything. To the extent that it can be hard to focus on what the actual story is.

And as for that story: in the written version of this tale, the Mangler is possessed after Sherry bleeds onto it. That seems to be the case for much of the film version as well, until it’s revealed that the machine has always been possessed, that in fact, the town leaders have been sacrificing body parts and children to it for decades. As ways to expand a brief story about a demonically possessed piece of machinery, that’s certainly an understandable direction to go in. I have no problem with this development in theory, but it’s oddly handled in the film. If the Mangler was always possessed, why did it only start killing people after Sherry cut her hand on it? Why is it such a big deal that Sherry bled on the machine if that had nothing to do with the demonic activity? And if our heroes know that people have been sacrificing their children in the Mangler for decades, why do they still attempt the exorcism under the impression that it was Sherry’s blood that caused it? The film even pulls the same reveal about the antacids and hand of glory, but we already know that doesn’t mean anything, because the machine has been possessed for decades. And yet the film still acts as if this changes things, and the Mangler suddenly springs to life with enhanced demonic energy.

At this point I’m just nitpicking a film we’ve already decided is not very good. As much fun as nitpicking can be, I feel like it would be belaboring the point if I were to continue. I’ll throw it back to you, then. Were you as confused as I about the details that kept popping up in this film? Is there anything that really stuck out for you as head-scratchingly bizarre?

Rik: I, too, found the piling up of confusing details about the Mangler’s purpose and victims utterly bewildering. With each succeeding revelation of how deep this conspiracy of evil is embedded in the town’s history, where a series of top brass officials and businessmen have all mysteriously lost daughters at the age of sixteen, I would quite literally shake my head in exasperation, much in the way my cat does when we surprise her with something when we play. (It’s this odd thing she does that we find immensely endearing. Our cat does double takes.) Trying to piece together whether the fridge scene at the beginning, where it supposedly sparks the Mangler to demonic life, is even necessary at all once we find out about the history of the machine can lead one to exhaustion.

I have a few things that bother me about this film and I want to get them out of my system, so I apologize for keeping this going a bit longer. There is a line later in the film after a “kid” gets locked in the refrigeration unit and dies (the kid in the morgue looks like he is played by a 43-year-old actor, I swear), where a character says, in proving their point about what has occurred with the Mangler, “It’s transference of evil.” I don’t know what their definition of “transfer” is, but it generally means to move or shift something from one place or thing to another. This is more “sharing of evil,” because that goddamned fridge is still evil, if it is still killing birds and kids and snapping its door shut on people’s arms after it has supposedly “transferred” its demonic force over to the Mangler. When you transfer from one bus to the other, you don’t stay on the same bus in which you arrived. You move to the other bus. (Or ironing machine, as it were…)

Speaking of inappropriately aged actors, the actress that plays Sherry, Vanessa Pike, does not look sixteen at all. She might be playing it small-voiced and innocent, but she is not sixteen for even a second. My first thought when I heard that the character of Sherry was supposed to be sixteen was “I’ll bet she’s really 26,” because, in the role she is playing, she looks at least 26 or even older. While there is no birthdate for her on IMDb, its biographical section does say she earned a university degree in 1991, four years before this film. So unless she was a child prodigy, she was probably pretty much around 26 when this was filmed. I’m not trying to age-shame here, and I am very used to actors deep into their twenties playing much younger in film after film after film (and especially in television). It’s just hard to buy into a detail that is supposedly so damn important to the story (when it ultimately isn’t anyway) – that Sherry is Gartley’s sixteen-year-old niece, thus making her necessary to sacrifice to the machine – when it is so abundantly clear she is not that particular age.

Now, the purpose of all this evil lurking in the machines and killing of sixteen-year-old daughters and nieces and businessmen and women have weird hairstyles is supposed to be so that town – Riker’s Valley – can continue having what is called at one point a “perfect” existence. The problem is that there has been nothing shown to us to give us that impression. The film starts and stays in darkness. Where is this ideal community? We never get to meet anyone that isn’t screaming, crying, puking, bleeding, getting folded, turning evil, already evil, or about to die. We see brief outsides of houses or office buildings in some shots, but they are all tied to scenes leading to violence or the aftermath of violence. I mentioned much earlier that the filmmakers do a good job with establishing camera shots for scenes, but what they never do is establish this picture perfect little town around which the entire plot is based. Graveyard Shift did a much better job in establishing its small New England town setting on film than this one did, and it really didn’t matter to the story as much there.

Aaron: I had the same thought about Sherry, when I learned she was just celebrating her 16th birthday. I actually looked a little bit further into it than you did, as I was convinced this woman was in her thirties, and her childish demeanor was meant to be a result of living with Gartley, which would certainly leave its mark on anybody. You may be pleased to know how close you were in your estimation of her age; from what I could find on a South African theatre page, she was 25 during filming.

But to your point about the narrow focus of the film, I had the exact same thought. We never get a sense of what the town is like, and when Gartley kept saying the machine helped keep the town perfect, I wished that we had been given a glimpse of that perfection, because it seems like a pretty shitty place, all told. This feeds into my final observation; The Mangler, amazingly, takes place over the course of one night. I almost didn’t believe this fact when I thought back to the movie, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to watch it a second time. I had to confirm this information. And yes, from the opening scene to the final exorcism, less than 24 hours has passed. And yet so much happens, there is so much driving across town and revisiting locations for long discussions that at first I thought it must have been a week or two.

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The Wrap-Up

Aaron: I’m ready to call this one: The Mangler is itself a mangled mess. The movie is almost punishingly awful at times, and bewilderingly peculiar at others. I will admit that when I watched it for the second time I found it a slightly improved experience, albeit one that left me exhausted and in desperate need of a three-hour midday nap. But on second viewing, I actually appreciated the film’s loopiness a bit more, and allowed the often excellent visuals to win me over. Seriously, every time Tobe Hooper uses a crane shot to move through the laundry, or move between its upper and lower levels, it reminded me why he had such a great reputation to begin with. Stephen King was bang on with this film when he said:

“Tobe Hooper, who directed it, is something of a genius...The Texas Chain Saw Massacre proves that beyond doubt. But when genius goes wrong, brother, watch out.”

I am now safely done with The Mangler. But as cinematic failures go, it does have glimmers of actual artistry beneath the obscuring layers of crap. If someone wants to make the case that The Mangler is an overlooked gem, a movie considered bad only because people don’t understand it, I’m certainly not going to argue the point, because I think they would be correct. I think this movie is bad, and I don’t understand it.

Rik: As you are aware, I had a similar experience in watching this film for the first time since 1995. Having successfully avoided it for 21 years, the re-watch was instantly annoying to me. I wanted to turn it off mere minutes into the film, and once Englund kicked into high gear (which, as we know, is his only gear), I realized that the only way I was going to get through it was in small chunks. It took me over half the day because of how disheartening the experience was to me. (A second viewing the next morning, once the disappointment mostly wore off, was accomplished in one non-stop sitting.) 

Despite this struggle, I managed to recognize and still enjoy the few elements I appreciated when the film came out: the effects, the set design, and above all the camerawork. Make that “most” of the camerawork; I hate the scene in Gartley’s office where we get a little too intimate with the ceiling above Robert Englund’s head as he moves around in a swinging POV haze. It is an extended shot which is intentionally showy but its nauseating actuality only works in favor of my opinion that this film is composed of mostly awful directorial and screenwriting choices. 

And yet, the film always feels like it is of a piece with the rest of the work of Tobe Hooper (including Poltergeist, which some idiotic people don't). While I wish the outcome here were more positive, any discussion of his career is going to have to come to grips with the rather frequent downturns within it. I am hoping that someday we get the full story of what happened behind the scenes on this film, because it will probably be far more interesting and suspenseful than The Mangler. Until such a time that said details comes to light, I will be content to throw The Mangler in with the other washouts in the great laundry pile of failed King adaptations.

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Next time: We tackle another story in Night Shift, this time with an ominous sounding title that I can really get into for a very, very personal reason: The Boogeyman. What is this reason? We will discuss that in the next edition of We Who Watch Behind the Rows. I'd say "we will see you then," but of course we will, because we are always watching... behind the rows!