Rose Red is Stephen King’s mini-series that represents his most direct attempt at a haunted house story.

In King’s nonfiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, King gives high praise for Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and one gets the impression that King has been eager to embrace this subject matter for some time.

Unlike the films The Haunting and The Haunting of Hell House (not to be confused with Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House), Rose Red does not rely heavily on computer-generated images to scare the audience. Not surprisingly, King makes the most of the longer mini-series format to provide the audience with a rich history of a fictional manor outside of Seattle and to introduce the viewer to the unusual group of psychics that have gathered together to explore it.

While the common mechanisms of haunted house stories include walking corpses, rattling chains, and the occasional door to another dimension, King provides the audience with something altogether more innovative—a house that rebuilds itself, ever expanding and changing the layout of its rooms. This goes well with the common concept in horror of the haunted house as a living entity, one whose malignant and ancient personality exerts force over the physical world with tangible and often terrifying results. Rose Red is not simply a vast psychic tape recorder; it is a huge amplifier and shifting landscape for the sad and twisted souls that once lived and breathed within its walls.

King spends adequate time on characterization in Rose Red, from the driven professor leading the expedition who may be more interested in retaining tenure at the university than she is in unlocking the mysteries of the venerable estate to the introverted, hyper-sensitive little girl that may hold the key to Rose Red’s secrets, to the ghost-widow Ellen Rimbauer who haunts the manor’s sliding stairways and musty attic.

King understands that horror works if the viewer or reader can be enticed to suspend their disbelief. More than any other genre, horror places a tremendous burden on the rational reader, and King makes sure that the viewer/reader is rewarded by being introduced to an array of compelling characters before being pulled down into “the dark void.”

Although not the greatest ghost story ever told, Rose Red represents an almost necessary development for King, one that his body of work would appear incomplete without. While arguably the Overlook Hotel in The Shining is simply a larger form of the haunted house, the emphasis in The Shining is on the father’s descent into madness more than the hotel itself. In Rose Red, the manor itself is the main driver of the homicidal impulse.

If nothing else, King, such an avid fan of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, had to add one more haunted edifice to an already crowded landscape.

Developed relatively late in King’s career, one gets the sense that the ideas behind Rose Red, like the ever-changing manor itself, had been growing in King’s mind for many years.

Pet Sematary is the story of a doctor’s family that moves to Maine. Close to the property the family discovers a large pet cemetery, complete with makeshift headstones and eulogies to the deceased companions. The widower next door warns the family of the woods beyond the pet cemetery that in previous times contained an Indian burial ground.

The Indian burial ground has the power to bring back the dead, but only at a terrible cost. It is a new twist on an old idea, one present in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and other horror classics. It is the cautionary tale of playing God and reaping the consequences.

Pet Sematary is truly a modern tragedy. In classic King style, non-supernatural events are interwoven with supernatural events, drawing the reader into the story and enabling them to suspend their disbelief. For example, the family’s shy housekeeper hangs herself, a student at the local university is hit by a car and dies on the examination table in front of the doctor, and the audience is shown a flashback of what the Doctor’s wife endured growing up with a sister with spinal meningitis.

In my opinion, Pet Sematary is one of the most terrifying movies based on King’s work because of the multiple psychological pressure points it strikes and the large dose of human tragedy injected into the tale. When the viewer is shown the horrible physical appearance of the wife’s sister as she suffers with her disease, the viewer is reminded of “the shunned house” in their own neighborhood, that house that is avoided by the neighborhood kids due to whispered rumors that may or may not have been based upon true events. Although the motives behind the housekeeper’s suicide are not provided (indeed, she plays a very minor background role), the tough subject of suicide is touched upon in at least a peripheral way. The tragic tale also includes the loss of a pet, the loss of a child, and the loss of a spouse.

In addition, the dysfunctional relationship between the husband and his in-laws are also brought to bear. These realistic events weave a dark tapestry that holds the supernatural elements together.

Looking at Pet Sematary from the perspective of the horror movie, many common elements of the genre are represented as well. Th ere is the concept of the haunted woods, highlighted in such genre films as The Evil Dead and King’s own The Tommyknockers. There is the concept

of the possessed pet, manifested in the vicious black dog in The Omen or King’s own infamous canine Cujo.

There is the exhumation of graves, a concept that appears in too many horror movies to list, and the living dead, presented in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and every

zombie film ever since. Finally, there is the appearance of the cursed child, used so well in The Village of the Damned, The Omen, and King’s own The Children of the Corn.

Due to the elements above, and the chilling way that the camera describes them, Pet Sematary is the most complete film adaptation based on King’s body of work.

One final note for rock n’ roll fans: King’s favorite band, The Ramones, is featured on the Pet Sematary soundtrack.

Cujo is the story of a rabid Saint Bernard named Cujo
that goes on a killing spree. Most writers normally
would struggle to get enough material out of such a coarse
plot to fi ll up a short story, but somehow King managed
to produce a novel on this simple premise that was later
turned into a film.

Like many of King’s works, the actual threat or
“horror” plays a background role to the characters in the
story, which are richly fleshed out. The young family
in Cujo is certainly not the Brady Bunch; indeed, they
are in the midst of a significant family crisis, with the
couple barely speaking and the wife engaged in an affair
with another man. In addition to helping the audience
identify with the characters as real people, the family crisis
is skillfully used by King as a plot catalyst to isolate the
mother and son in the latter half of the movie.

This deteriorating state of affairs provides an
interesting parallel to Cujo’s own deteriorating physical
and mental health after being bitten by a rabid bat. This
provides an extra level of dramatic tension. The audience
knows that Cujo’s state is not likely to improve–is the
author also attempting to foreshadow a similar fate for
the family?

Cujo’s linear plot makes it successful. It starts
slowly, but early events make it evident that an explosive
climax is on the horizon. In one early scene, the boy of
the family that owns Cujo goes out looking for the dog
on a foggy night. Th e audience is shown Cujo’s hulking
form appear in the mist behind the boy, and it feels as if
at any moment an attack is imminent. Nothing happens, and
the terror subsides, but Cujo’s murderous potential is
masterfully hinted at before it becomes real several scenes
later.

In another scene designed to cause discomfort,
King probes at another fear, the fear of ingesting tainted
food and water, when the husband’s cereal company’s
new brand starts causing kids to get sick. The audience is
also let in on the wife’s affair well before the husband is,
providing another potential land mine that can erupt at
any moment.

The final confrontation in Cujo is brutal and
ferocious, but also very primal in a way that is easily
identified by the audience, if even on a subconscious level.
At its root, it is a mother protecting her young from the
predators of the wild. Although Cujo’s attack starts while
the mother and son are in the car, this modern contraption
is soon forgotten as it is smashed to bits during the epic
battle.

Wisely, King does not try to evoke sympathy for
the sick and feverish Cujo in the middle of this sequence.
Cujo comes at the mother and son again and again like
a freight train. His aggressiveness does not dissipate
over the hours and it is clear that Cujo has become a pure
killing machine, making any injuries suffered by the beast
tolerable; almost morally validated.

One other point of note is that Cujo contains a
very strong female character, as do other King big screen
adaptations such as Delores Claiborne, The Tommyknockers
and Misery.