I realize now why I have confused Secret Window with 1408. They’re technically different films from the same fertile source, Stephen King’s limitless imagination. Yet they’re also fundamentally the same movie.
> I’ve spent the last year exclusively reading E.C. compilations from the early to mid-1950s. There are some endlessly recycled templates and twists. One of my favorite is what I call, “Oh shit! It’s a vampire!” where the big sort of twist is that the character behaving unmistakably like a blood-sucking child of darkness is a vampire.
I remember reading "Bat-Boy and Rubin" in several Mad reprints when I was a kid and finding its ending ("I am a VAMPIRE Bat-Boy!") completely baffling. I was probably in my twenties before I read the EC horror comic it was referencing.
::Golden Age; the Silver Age wouldn't kick off for another few years yet.::
Are you sure? I thought the Golden Age ended in 1954 with the creation of the Comics Code Authority, and MAD MAGAZINE—
...and I see that MAD MAGAZINE #8, where Bat-Boy and Rubin first appeared, was published on December 10, 1953, according to GoCollect and MyComicsShop.com. That means you're right, they are lampoons of Golden Age Batman and Robin.
Mad didn't switch from comic book to magazine format until issue #24. And while its change in format is often attributed to the introduction of the Comics Code (including by David Hajdu in The Ten-Cent Plague), it was actually more of a lucky coincidence. Mad became a magazine because Harvey Kurtzman wanted to be a magazine editor; magazines were a higher-quality format and at the time were considered a much more reputable industry. That it happened right around the time the CCA was introduced and saved Mad from getting wiped out like the rest of the EC line was happenstance, not an intentional plan.
Where the Silver Age started is subject to debate (and the whole Golden/Silver/Bronze/etc. delimiters are pretty focused on superhero comics and largely ignore other genres, though the CCA was one of those things that affected the entire industry) but for DC it's typically associated with the introduction of the Barry Allen version of the Flash in 1956.
::saved Mad from getting wiped out like the rest of the EC line was happenstance, not an intentional plan.::
Huh.
I wonder why Bill Gaines didn't try that with more of his comics—or did he and they weren't as successful? He seems to have pretty much stuck to running MAD after it switched formats from comic to magazine, despite having great success publishing horror comics before that fake "Doctor" Wertham bent the very spine of comics in the Fifties.
I grew up reading Silver Age comics, and the older I get the more I hate how they encouraged lying, manipulation, and general assholery among their "heroes", and treated marriage (or uncovering who Superman really was) as an end in themselves.
I wonder if King wrote this shortly before, or right after, his family staged the intervention he spoke about in his nonfiction book ON WRITING. If the screenplay is remotely faithful to the story it's based on, it kind of sounds like Big Steve was working through some stuff! 😯
Okay, he also might've projected the hate he felt over getting hit by that van driver (which he already did with KINGDOM HOSPITAL, his Americanization of Lars von Trier's Danish television series THE KINGDOM—which, despite being a fan of Stephen King's, is really much better than KINGDOM HOSPITAL, and well worth watching!) onto a writer pissed off over his decaying marriage. I know if I almost got killed by a driver who was busier paying attention to his dog than he was to the road ahead, I might harbor vengeful fantasies myself!
Thank you for another brilliant pan! Stephen King really does go to that well an awful lot. The Dark Half was my first King book, and I recognized its silliness as an undiscriminating 13-year-old!
This sort of twist had been cheesy for decades, but you could still get away with it if it was pulled off well (i.e. Fight Club). Unfortunately, Charlie Kaufman ruined it for everyone with Adaptation by making to THE symbol for hack writing. Secret Window had the bad sense to use it so shortly after Adaptation came out.
I've never seen this, but it was cited in a screenwriting class as one of the worst screenplays of all time.
> I’ve spent the last year exclusively reading E.C. compilations from the early to mid-1950s. There are some endlessly recycled templates and twists. One of my favorite is what I call, “Oh shit! It’s a vampire!” where the big sort of twist is that the character behaving unmistakably like a blood-sucking child of darkness is a vampire.
I remember reading "Bat-Boy and Rubin" in several Mad reprints when I was a kid and finding its ending ("I am a VAMPIRE Bat-Boy!") completely baffling. I was probably in my twenties before I read the EC horror comic it was referencing.
::"Bat-Boy and Rubin" in several Mad reprints when I was a kid ::
I just figured it was Harvey Kurtzman riffing on Silver Age Batman, not a callback to EC Comics' horror titles.
Golden Age; the Silver Age wouldn't kick off for another few years yet.
And yeah, it's mostly a parody of Golden Age Batman, but the ending is from a Jack Davis comic where the protagonist realizes "I am a *vampire* bat!"
::Golden Age; the Silver Age wouldn't kick off for another few years yet.::
Are you sure? I thought the Golden Age ended in 1954 with the creation of the Comics Code Authority, and MAD MAGAZINE—
...and I see that MAD MAGAZINE #8, where Bat-Boy and Rubin first appeared, was published on December 10, 1953, according to GoCollect and MyComicsShop.com. That means you're right, they are lampoons of Golden Age Batman and Robin.
Mad didn't switch from comic book to magazine format until issue #24. And while its change in format is often attributed to the introduction of the Comics Code (including by David Hajdu in The Ten-Cent Plague), it was actually more of a lucky coincidence. Mad became a magazine because Harvey Kurtzman wanted to be a magazine editor; magazines were a higher-quality format and at the time were considered a much more reputable industry. That it happened right around the time the CCA was introduced and saved Mad from getting wiped out like the rest of the EC line was happenstance, not an intentional plan.
Where the Silver Age started is subject to debate (and the whole Golden/Silver/Bronze/etc. delimiters are pretty focused on superhero comics and largely ignore other genres, though the CCA was one of those things that affected the entire industry) but for DC it's typically associated with the introduction of the Barry Allen version of the Flash in 1956.
::saved Mad from getting wiped out like the rest of the EC line was happenstance, not an intentional plan.::
Huh.
I wonder why Bill Gaines didn't try that with more of his comics—or did he and they weren't as successful? He seems to have pretty much stuck to running MAD after it switched formats from comic to magazine, despite having great success publishing horror comics before that fake "Doctor" Wertham bent the very spine of comics in the Fifties.
I grew up reading Silver Age comics, and the older I get the more I hate how they encouraged lying, manipulation, and general assholery among their "heroes", and treated marriage (or uncovering who Superman really was) as an end in themselves.
I wonder if King wrote this shortly before, or right after, his family staged the intervention he spoke about in his nonfiction book ON WRITING. If the screenplay is remotely faithful to the story it's based on, it kind of sounds like Big Steve was working through some stuff! 😯
Okay, he also might've projected the hate he felt over getting hit by that van driver (which he already did with KINGDOM HOSPITAL, his Americanization of Lars von Trier's Danish television series THE KINGDOM—which, despite being a fan of Stephen King's, is really much better than KINGDOM HOSPITAL, and well worth watching!) onto a writer pissed off over his decaying marriage. I know if I almost got killed by a driver who was busier paying attention to his dog than he was to the road ahead, I might harbor vengeful fantasies myself!
Thank you for another brilliant pan! Stephen King really does go to that well an awful lot. The Dark Half was my first King book, and I recognized its silliness as an undiscriminating 13-year-old!
This sort of twist had been cheesy for decades, but you could still get away with it if it was pulled off well (i.e. Fight Club). Unfortunately, Charlie Kaufman ruined it for everyone with Adaptation by making to THE symbol for hack writing. Secret Window had the bad sense to use it so shortly after Adaptation came out.