Narrator: What does Stephen King dream about?

What nightmarish visions haunt this superstar writer whose novels have inspired countless films and TV series?

What scares this master of suspense and horror?

King: People ask what scares me.

Everything scares me.

I want to be your friend.

I want to come up to you and put my arm around you and say, "Hey, you want to see something great?

Wait till you see it!

You'll really like this."

[ Laughter ] That's what it's all about.

You're supposed to scare people.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: The world first discovered her name on April 5th, 1974.

She was the first heroine of an abundant literary work subverting the American dream.

Announcer: Carrie is a story of a lonely teenage girl who possesses a strange and evil power that turns a high school prom into a nightmare.

It contains scenes so terrifying they can't be shown in this commercial.

"Carrie."

Rated R. Narrator: Awkward and graceless in the novel, hypersensitive and tormented in the film adaptation that quickly followed, young Carrie pushes back the boundaries of horror by transforming her high school prom into the antechamber of hell to get revenge for her schoolmates' cruelty.

[ Indistinct shouting and screaming ] ♪♪ [ Rumbling ] Through the breach opened by "Carrie" rushed an abominable horde of monsters.

A bloodthirsty hound.

[ Dog growling ] A failed writer haunted by hateful ghosts.

[ Woman screams ] A gleaming car fueled by cruelty.

[ Engine revs ] A cannibal sewer-dwelling clown preying on children.

At the head of this horde, a single tormented mind, that of Stephen King.

Cavett: He is, in fact, simply the biggest-selling author in the world.

Would it embarrass him if I pointed him out?

King: No, it wouldn't.

That's all right.

It's all right.

Narrator: A novelist of almost superhuman productivity who for over half a century has remained the undefeated master of the bogeyman genre.

King: I have done my best to scare the...out of you guys.

[ Laughter and applause ] It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.

You know what I'm saying?

Narrator: An author who, from "The Dark Tower" saga to "The Green Mile" serial novel has placed the spotlight on the dark side of humanity like no other.

Shalit: Why do we have this rage for horror and killing and psychopaths in movies and books these days?

King: Well, I think there are about 12 different reasons, but the first 10 is people think horror is fun.

And the other two, I think, people are scared.

And I think that horror movies are always much bigger business when people feel frightened, when people feel concerned about their lives, and they see not only this is a way to get rid of some fear but is a way to outlet aggression as well.

♪♪ Society gives points, you know, for good emotional behavior.

So we get points for exercising those emotional muscles that society approves of -- love, friendship, loyalty, humor, that sort of thing.

But for every one of those good emotions, we have a dark one as well.

We have fear, we have aggressiveness, we have anger.

We all have, I suppose, urges that sometimes tend towards sadism, that sort of thing.

And a horror story or a horror movie gives us a chance to exercise that side in a comparatively harmless way.

[ Man screaming ] ♪♪ Man: Aaaah!

♪♪ King: Every now and then, people need to go there.

You have to have a little insanity in your life and in your conscious life, I think, as well as your -- your unconscious or your dreaming life.

[ Woman screams ] One of the other reasons that -- that people like this is because it -- it's a rehearsal for death.

It's a way to get ready.

Death is the biggie.

200 years from now, none of us is gonna be here.

We're all gonna be someplace else.

And we're in a very uncomfortable position.

We're the only creatures, at least as far as we know, that we're able to contemplate our own end.

We know it's gonna happen.

We have to do something about this that we can deal at all in our daily lives without going insane.

In that way, the horror story or the horror movie is a little bit like the amusement park ride that mimicked violent death.

You know, things like the parachute drop where you get to experience your own plane crash.

The bumper cars, where you get to have a harmless head-on collision and so on and so forth.

[ Creature hissing ] Ooh-ya to people.

Got you.

Woman: Ah!

You did.

You did.

King: I got you.

Oh, God.

Woman: [ Laughs ] King: See how low this is?

To want to do that to people?

Why?

Woman: Well, it's fun, obviously, but... King: Ah!

Narrator: The phenomenal success Stephen King has enjoyed from the outset of his career, both in bookstores and via the countless screen adaptations of his novels, reveals a voracious appetite for the macabre on the part of the public, including its most impressionable minds, which could be a cause for concern.

King: I don't think that any kid was ever driven to an act of violence by a Metallica record or by a Marilyn Manson CD or by a Stephen King novel.

If you are looking for an excuse to ignore the real problem and treat a symptom, you can treat the movies or the books.

It's like killing the messenger because he brings you a message you don't like.

The real question about violence in America, as opposed to, say, the violence in -- in England or Scotland, those places, is you only have to correlate one thing, and that is the difference in the availability of guns.

Guns is what it's really about.

But there's a whole culture of violence in this -- in this country.

And I'd be the last person to deny that I'm a part of that.

But I'm only a child of my culture.

♪♪ Narrator: For Stephen King is a pure product of America, its traumas included.

This child of the '50s could not help but be deeply marked by the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy... [ Gunshot ] ...but also by the emergence of a form of violence hitherto unprecedented in Western society.

King: When I was a kid, I -- there was a guy who -- maybe the first of the modern serial killers.

He was a guy named Charlie Starkweather.

That sort of thing didn't happen, or at least it didn't happen very often.

And I had a scrapbook.

I cut out all these clippings of him, and my mother found this scrapbook.

And I think she said, "Why do you -- why are you interested in this guy?"

There was one picture of this young man who killed these people.

And there was a total double zero in that kid's face.

I really did see something in there that was inhuman.

But I don't mean inhuman like demonic.

It was like double zero.

Nothing.

No good, no evil.

And what I was not able to tell my mother was, "I need to look out for this guy.

I need to know everything about him so that if I ever meet him or anybody like him, I can go around."

And I think probably there's a hot circuit somewhere inside.

Even at 10, you're the potential of the person that you're gonna be.

And... Yeah, I suppose he called to me.

As story material he called to me.

Or there was a voice inside that said, "This is the guy.

You're gonna spend your life writing about this kind of evil, so here's -- here's where you start.

This is the starting line."

Narrator: Beyond the pleasurable thrill of scaring us, Stephen King's stories can be seen as modern fairy tales warning the readers against real-life monsters.

This ambition is even behind one of Stephen King's major works -- "It," a saga relating the battle of a group of friends against an evil entity they encounter first as children, then as adults.

Since its first publication, "It" has established itself as a cornerstone of Stephen King's work and of fantasy literature in general.

And 30 years after its publication, this saga has made big news once again by becoming the most lucrative horror film ever produced in an ambitious adaptation that has given pride of place to the monstrous clown, Pennywise.

[ Pennywise hisses ] Georgie: Oh!

Pennywise: Hiya, Georgie!

What a nice boat.

King: And what I really wanted to do with "It" was to write about how kids have a wider bandwidth when it comes to perception and belief and the ability to accept things.

It is about what I remember most and treasure best in my own childhood -- love and terror and finding a hand to hold when things get hard and living in the world hurt.

"It" has a coherent thematic core -- You cannot be an adult in this or any society until you are finished with your childhood.

♪♪ Pennywise: "Come on back," It says.

"Come on back.

Let's finish our business in Derry.

Bring your jacks and your marbles and your yo-yos.

We'll play.

Come on back and we'll see if you remember the simplest thing of all -- how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark."

♪♪ King: And so what I really wanted to do in "It" was to try to create a bridge.

And I wanted to give adult readers a chance to relive those years as much as possible.

And it goes back, I think, to that fairy-tale motif.

I think one of the things that the horror story is supposed to do is tumble us back into that condition of childhood, where everything seems out of control, because as adults we're supposed to be in control.

And yet we know when we sit down and think about it so often that we're not.

Narrator: Child characters inevitably have pride of place in Stephen King's horrific fairy tales.

[ Children shouting indistinctly ] "The horror story is also a reaffirmation of simple imagination," he once wrote.

"The job of a fantasy writer is therefore to pull us back into the condition of childhood for a while."

♪♪ King: If I give a child in one of my stories a gift like in "The Shining," Danny's ability to shine, to see the future, Carrie White's telekinesis, you know, that's another way of saying to the reader, "Look at your own child.

What gifts does your own child have?

Have you noticed the way your child thinks?"

Because kids don't think straight.

They think around corners.

They're bent.

Things about kids that interest me very much, that seem to make them open doors to worlds of make-believe and fantasy -- They believe anything.

If you tell them that people can fly, they'll believe that.

They'll believe anything at all.

Well, they believe this because they're insane and we allow them to be insane.

[ Laughter ] No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Kids -- Kids talk to people who aren't there until the disease of rationality sets in.

♪♪ ♪♪ We allow our children to be crazy until they're about eight.

And then we start to say, "Why don't you grow up?

Grow up."

And they do.

They do grow up.

They become doctors.

They become engineers.

What happens to their imaginations?

Shrinks.

As their bodies grow, their ability to imagine.

The whole range, the whole world of wonders begins to shrink in on them.

You understand what I mean?

You pay a price to grow up.

It's a high price.

And with adults, can you teach them to use their imaginations again?

Yes, I think you can.

I think one of the reasons they come to my books is because what I'm trying to say to them is, "Look, use your imagination again."

Narrator: Stephen King's stories thus aim at reviving our ability to dream by inviting us to seek out fantasy in the most banal, the most dehumanized of realities.

He even made this the subject of his first and only film as a director -- "Maximum Overdrive" -- in which machines declare war on humanity.

King: We live in a technological society, for God's sakes, where most of us employ such things -- television, electric lights, microwave ovens.

We don't have the slightest idea how any of those things work.

That in itself is a kind of magic.

[ Man groans ] ♪♪ Man: Look out!

Look out!

[ Man screams ] [ Truck horn blares ] King: I'm afraid of trucks and cars -- I mean, "Maximum Overdrive" is about trucks, "Christine" was about a car that drives by itself -- because as a child they seemed so large and I seemed so small.

I had the same imagination then that I do now.

I can remember always being afraid that one of them would back up over me, and looking at the headlights and thinking that they looked like eyes.

And then a lot of cars actually looked as though they were alive.

I love machines, and at the same time I'm terrified of machines.

Machines don't like us, you know?

Machines don't like us at all, which is why people get electrical shocks.

Man: Hey!

King: It's why our cars break down when we need them the most and it's rainy at night.

Arnie: Come on.

[ Key clicks ] Come on, Christine.

Come on, baby, please.

It's all right.

Everything is the same.

[ Engine starts ] King: This just, to me, it looks dangerous.

[ Laughs ] Woman: It does, doesn't it?

[ Engine revving ] King: Well, I loved Carpenter's "Christine."

I -- mostly what I did was to sort of laugh my way through it because -- not because it was funny, but because it's the kind of way that you laugh when you're discovering that somebody else knows what you meant.

[ Engine revving ] [ Tires screeching ] [ Man screaming ] [ Brakes hiss ] [ Birds chirping ] Narrator: And in the same way as he derails machines, Stephen King uses fantasy to distort his reality and that of his readers.

King: People would say you ought to write about what you know.

But what I knew was boring.

I grew up in a small town.

We had no running water.

I went to a one-room school with all the grades together.

This is where I grew up.

Here.

This was our house.

The old Hood place.

It's changed a lot.

But that was my bedroom.

I wrote two books that were eventually published in that room.

Our father deserted us when I was two.

According to my mother, he told her one night he was gonna go out for a package of cigarettes and just never came back.

We found boxes of his -- of his things in -- Man: Books?

King: These books and papers.

And he was a navigator in the merchant marine.

And we found boxes of his books and papers in my aunt's attic.

And I'd started to publish "Weird Tales" by then, and I found a whole box of paperbacks about monsters and demons and boogeymen.

So apparently he had some of the same interests.

To me, the whole existence was not pastoral or beautiful or anything.

It was just boring.

I wanted to be in outer space.

I wanted to fight monsters in the swamps of the Amazon.

So those were the things that I wrote about.

And later I found a way to blend those two interests -- my interest in what was strange and -- and alien and the modern world.

For me, the trick was to find some kind of bridge between the sort of Gothic horror stories that were written in the 18th century and the world that I live in today.

Because "Frankenstein," "Dracula," they're both set in Europe, and there's a feeling of antiquity about them.

There are castles, moors.

And I don't live in that world.

♪♪ I liked a guy named Richard Matheson.

He was the first guy that I ever read as a teenager who seemed to be doing something that Lovecraft wasn't doing.

It wasn't Eastern Europe.

It was like the horror could be in the 7-Eleven store down the block, or it could be, you know, just up the street, something terrible could be going on.

♪♪ ♪♪ And to me, as a kid, that was a revelation.

That was extremely exciting.

He was putting the horror in places that I could relate to.

♪♪ I was teaching "Dracula" in high school, and I taught it three or four times, and every time I taught it I got more interested in what a really strong novel it was, a story.

And we were talking about it one night, and I said -- this is the magic question -- I said, "What would happen if Dracula came back today?"

But suppose he came back to a little town somewhere inland in Maine.

You know, you go through those towns and everybody could be dead and you'd never know it anyway.

[ Audience laughter ] And I wrote a novel called "'Salem's Lot," where a European vampire comes to a small Maine town, Jerusalem's Lot, and settles in and opens an antique store and turns this whole town of boardinghouse owners and barbers, small-town policemen into vampires.

Man: It is a sprawling, comfortable township, familiarly called the Lot by its previous inhabitants, where little of any note ever took place.

But a little over a year ago, something began to happen in Jerusalem's Lot that was not usual.

People began to drop out of sight.

[ Bell tolling ] [ Birds cawing ] Woman: Many of your stories are set in Maine.

What is it about that atmosphere that is conducive to a Stephen King novel?

King: Well, I don't think it's just -- just the atmosphere.

I think that I would be writing some kind of spooky stories wherever I live because it's the way that I'm built.

It's what I'm built to do.

♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: Beyond his unrestrained inventiveness, Stephen King remains attached to the idea of writing about and for the inhabitants of his native region, where he still resides in an old mansion renovated in his image.

[ Indistinct shouting and cheering ] ♪♪ King: I stayed because everybody knows me and I know everybody.

And as a -- as a writer, I stay for the same reason that William Faulkner stayed in Mississippi, because there are only so many places in the world that are yours, that you can really know and really describe.

♪♪ The people here seem very honest and very, very, very real to me in the sense of they're just people that are there.

They work hard.

[ Laughs ] Man: Yeah.

King: I've been treated here like I was a human being and not as a freak.

They treat me the way that I feel that I am, as just a sort of an ordinary person who's doing a job and working hard at it.

Narrator: Deeply anchored in an often economically disadvantaged small-town America, the work of Stephen King is unashamedly popular literature, accessible to all, and as such has long been snubbed by literary critics as being an example of the lowering of literary values.

King: I'm a creature of my culture, and I hate the idea that there even is a line drawn between serious literature and popular literature.

But I also think that there's a critical view that says, "We critics are the few, the proud, the brave, and we understand what real literary quality is.

And there aren't very many of us guys, us real pencil-neck geeks who understand the true meaning of a piece."

Rose: You're just getting them all in, aren't you?

King: Oh, well, I'm sort of sliding that in there.

But the idea is, is that, that tends to be critical approval for people who have a fairly narrow range of appeal.

And there is a feeling among the real critical intelligentsia that anybody who's being read by a lot of people can't be very good because the middle range is fairly low.

And that's -- that's total bull.

I'm sort of resigned to the idea that I'm gonna be regarded as a popular novelist with a popular novelist's virtues and a popular novelist's faults.

[ Fire whooshing and crackling ] You know, sometimes I get letters from people saying, "They won't let our teacher teach your book in class."

My reaction is, "...great.

Good."

Go read it yourself and make up your own analysis of it.

Get it outside of class.

You know?

If it matters to you, it matters.

But if you come back to it again, I'd like to think that there would be something else as well other than that emotional hit, that -- that emotional E-ticket ride.

People talk about "reading between the lines."

Any piece of horror fiction, whether it's in the form of a novel or in the form of a -- of a movie, has subtexts.

In other words, horror fiction, fantasy fiction, imaginative fiction is like a dream.

A lot of the frights, a lot of the nightmares that we get in books and in movies really are symbolic.

Narrator: Stephen King inherits this love of subtext from the science fiction novels, horror comic books, and especially monster movies that he greedily devoured during his youth because this seemingly light and lurid pop culture resonates deeply with the concerns of a child of the '50s.

King: In the '50s, there was a spate of horror movies in the United States that were about these giant bugs.

There were giant bugs everywhere.

There was a movie with James Arness called "Them!"

And there were these giant ants in the storm drains in Los Angeles.

There was the "Beginning of the End," where giant grasshoppers took over Chicago.

[ Gunfire ] And the way that they got rid of the giant grasshoppers was they recorded the mating call of the wild grasshopper and got a bunch of boats out on Lake Michigan and put it through loudspeakers, and all those grasshoppers came off the buildings and went into the lake and got drowned.

Because sex always gets you in the end.

[ Laughter ] [ Gunfire ] [ Projector whirring, sound distorts ] Man: What happened?

King: The cause in all of these movies was the same.

It was always the same thing.

It was radiation.

The film would start with news footage of bombs being exploded.

And again and again, these huge bugs come down on the cities and stomp them flat in a fairly clear, symbolic representation of what a real nuclear weapon would do to a real city.

[ Explosion ] Man: Watch out for the mist.

It's radioactive, packed with poison, and it moves fast.

King: The old scientist at the end of "Them!"

says, "We've opened a door that we can never close."

And there's a white light behind that door.

[ Civil defense siren blaring ] [ Siren wails ] [ Man screaming ] [ People gasp ] ♪♪ I write each book twice.

The first time, when it comes out of my head and onto the page, what I'm mostly concerned about is the emotional gradient.

But there can be more to a book.

This came to me in the writing of "Carrie," when I realized that the book was, in addition to a story about a sad little girl with psychokinetic powers, a story about blood and what blood means to us.

An actual substance, it provides powerful metaphoric connections to such things as religion -- washed in the blood of the lamb -- and adulthood, which for girls is symbolized in part by my first menstruation.

Blood also symbolizes powerful family connections which we sometimes hate and find we still can't ditch.

Carrie: No, Mama!

Margaret: Eve was weak.

Carrie: No!

Margaret: Eve was weak!

Carrie: No!

Margaret: Eve was weak.

Say it, woman!

Carrie: No, Mama!

Margaret: Say it!

Carrie: Eve was weak.

Eve was weak.

Margaret: And the Lord visited Eve with a curse.

The curse was the curse of blood.

Carrie: You should have told me, Mama!

You should have told me!

King: I think that young people who don't ordinarily read are attracted by that combination of emotional heat and honest, if sometimes simplistic, intellectual investigation.

I think that even those who wouldn't know a thematic unity if it bit them on the ... sense that books are better when they're about something and, best of all, when the something they are about pertains to their own lives.

Because, like, a book like "The Shining," I spent a year on that thing.

A year of my life.

It ought to be about something.

Narrator: Attached to his working-class roots, but also to a visceral writing style, Stephen King could not help but feel betrayed by Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel "The Shining," because this very cerebral film distances itself from the exuberant nature of the original work, filled with emaciated ghosts and carnivorous plant animals guarding an isolated haunted hotel in the mountains.

Jack: I love you, Danny.

I love you more than anything else in the whole world.

And I would never do anything to hurt you.

Never.

You know that, don't you?

Huh?

Danny: Yes, Dad.

Jack: Good.

♪♪ King: Stanley Kubrick was, like, the coldest guy in the universe.

[ Audience laughter ] And I'm a very sort of warm, gooey, sentimental... [ Laughter ] ...guy.

The difference between Kubrick's version of "The Shining" and my version of "The Shining" is mine ends with the hotel burning and his ends with the hotel freezing.

Jack: Danny!

Danny!

♪♪ ♪♪ King: I think that it's really ambitious.

I love the way it looks.

I've gotten to like it more and more as time has gone by.

But I do have my days when I think that I'd given Kubrick a live grenade which he heroically threw his body on.

Singer: ♪ Held a message tender ♪ Narrator: Stephen King's dissatisfaction with Kubrick's adaptation can also be explained by the highly autobiographical character of the novel, because, through the violent and alcoholic writer Jack Torrance, Stephen King summons up his own personal demons.

King: I came home one day.

Joe, my oldest boy, who was then three or four, had done all these cartoons and crayon drawings on this manuscript that I'd been working on.

And it was this sweet stuff like, "Hello, Daddy," and cars and suns and big tall guys, you know, like kids draw with crayons where the legs look like daddy longlegs things.

And I was thinking to myself, "Little son of a bitch.

I could kill him.

I could kill him.

Look at this stuff."

And that became the basis of "The Shining."

♪♪ Man: "I think it's best if you understand everything, Doctor," Jack said.

"Shortly after Danny was born, I became an alcoholic.

I'd had a drinking problem all the way through college.

It subsided a little after Wendy and I met, cropped up worse than ever after Danny was born, and the writing I considered to be my real work was going badly.

When Danny was three and a half, he spilled some beer on a bunch of papers.

I was working on... papers I was shuffling around, anyway... and I...well...oh..." ♪♪ King: What goes on in my life shows up in my -- in my fiction.

I can remember writing "The Shining" about this dry drunk, Jack Torrance, and thinking to myself, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not that guy.

I drink a lot, but I don't drink that much.

I'm not that bad."

And then coming back to it years later after sobering up and saying, "I was that guy."

But I've -- you know, I read early on -- and probably you did too -- "Write about what you know."

And I know about the writing life because I've been a writer for a lot of years.

♪♪ I don't think that writing, as an act, is very interesting.

I can write about the act of writing a little bit, but the real story has to be somewhere else.

Annie: It'll be a book in my honor for saving your life and nursing you back to health.

Oh, Paul!

You're gonna make me the envy of the whole world.

Paul: You just expect me to whip something off?

Is that it?

Annie: I expect nothing less than your masterpiece.

King: In the case of "Misery," which is about a writer who's taken prisoner by his number one fan, the real interest is sort of in that relationship, the dynamic between the sane person, who happens to be a writer, and the crazed -- the crazed fan.

Annie: Ohh!

Misery's alive!

Misery's alive!

Oh, it's so romantic!

Oh, this whole house is gonna be filled with romance.

[ Gasps ] I'm gonna put on my Liberace records!

King: And so it was a chance for me to do a couple of things, to talk a little bit about the sort of unhealthy relationship a lot of fans have with either writers -- whether they're writers or whether they're pop stars or whether they're movie stars.

Paul: Annie, for God's... Annie: Shh, darling.

Trust me.

Paul: ...God's sake!

Annie: It's for the best.

King: What Paul Sheldon finds out is that -- that Annie Wilkes, in a way, is sort of expressing to him that what he's really good at is writing these bodice-ripper romances, and he better stick to what he's good at.

Annie: Hi, punkin!

King: Kind of sad, but there it is.

Annie: Such a kidder.

King: You write books to find out how you feel about things.

Don't you think that's true to a degree?

Man: Oh, yeah.

Well, you have -- if you start out knowing and you end up knowing the same thing you started with, it's gonna be a bad book, I think.

King: Yeah, that's right.

You got to know more.

A little bit more than when you started.

You got to have a different view of it.

And one of the things is, like, if you spend all that time to write a book, you ought to be able to come out with something more important than a paycheck.

Narrator: Stephen King's novels thus contain an element of introspection, in that he frequently questions his condition as a writer of suspense and horror, as in "The Dark Half," adapted for the screen by an old accomplice of the novelist, the director of "Night of the Living Dead," George Romero.

George: It's time to start a new book.

Thad: Oh, I don't think so.

I'm finished with you.

George Stark is dead.

George: Heh.

I'm not dead, hoss.

Not hardly.

I'm just getting started.

King: It's about this -- this literary writer, Thad Beaumont, who has a crime-writing alter ego, a pen name, named George Stark.

And when he tries to dump the Stark pen name, Stark actually comes to life and starts to stalk people to get Thad to write about them again.

I really wanted to write about the different people that we are.

I've always wondered who I am when I write, because once I'm doing it, I'm not really in the room with myself.

Thad: He has to do that.

It's essential.

The writer has to let that inner being out of the lockup.

He has to let it have a voice in his work.

Otherwise the work itself will be inhibited, timid, and without passion.

It'll be a pack of lies.

King: The one time that I thought I had gone too far was I wrote a book called "Pet Sematary."

And it was so close to reality.

The town, Ludlow, was a real town.

It was Orrington.

I was teaching creative writing there.

And my little boy, who's now a writer in his own right, Owen, was very young and he ran for the road.

I ran after him.

Rachel: Get that baby!

Get that baby!

[ Truck horn blaring ] Louis: Gage!

Stop!

Stop!

King: The only difference between the book and real life is I caught my son, and Louis didn't catch his.

[ Tires screeching, body thudding ] I thought, "This is the most awful thing.

Nobody will want to read this book about this little kid coming back and chowing up on everybody."

Oh, boy.

Just some of the things.

It was very black.

And when I finished the book, I actually put it in a drawer because I didn't think anybody would want to read anything like that.

But they did, so... [ Jud groaning ] ...'em.

[ Laughter ] [ Gage snarling ] Jud: Aah!

King: Once I sit down in front of the typewriter, I become an amoral being.

But I think that my responsibility as an artist is only to tell the truth.

[ Projector whirring ] I may have told a few whoppers about ghosts, goblins, vampires, and the living dead, but I like to think I've told the truth, as best I've been able to manage it, about the human being.

And I also like to think that it's the human beings that my books are mostly about.

And if that truth involves violent behavior as a result of a situation, then I must tell that truth.

Otherwise I begin to lie, and that's when I become an immoral being.

Amanda: You don't have much faith in humanity, do you?

Dan: None whatsoever.

Amanda: I can't accept that.

People are basically good, decent.

My God, David, we're a civilized society.

David: Sure, as long as the machines are working and you can dial 911.

But you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the...out of them -- no more rules -- you'll see how primitive they get.

Dan: You scare people badly enough, you can get them to do anything.

Narrator: In encouraging these monsters to push humanity to its limits, Stephen King seeks to spotlight the dysfunctions of our societies with an often pleasurable ferocity.

King: I've had a chance to do some fairly subversive things.

In "The Stand" I got a chance to write about what happens when we finally realize that our technology has outraced our morality.

In "The Dead Zone" I got a chance to talk about the alienation of the prodigy -- the person who knows something or can do something that's different from everyone else.

In "Needful Things" I got to talk about greed in the '80s and how funny greed really is when you get right down to it, and how hilarious it was to be an American during the eight years of the Reagan administration.

On one level, it really was a scream to be there.

[ Laughter ] Danforth: ... I sell quality pre-owned yachts, you miserable... scuzz bucket!

Alan: Shut up!

Shut up!

Shut up!

You know, guys, I moved here, and I thought, great, I'm out of the big city, and I'm finally in a place where everybody isn't gonna be crawling up everybody's...every day.

A place where maybe my biggest nightmare was gonna be getting some goddamn cat out of a tree.

But forget that.

Everybody is insane everywhere!

[ Crowd cheering ] I'm not gonna say that we're a lazy, overweight society, a fast-food-eating, SUV-riding, soda-guzzling, beer-guzzling, TV-watching, size-XL-wearing, walk-don't-run generation... ...uh, but I guess I just did.

[ Laughter ] I was raised to believe that writers were the secret agents of the arts and that we pretty much went and had to go unobserved and unseen.

And that way we gathered material, we saw what people were doing, you know, and we were able to bring it back and -- and work it in our stories.

Meehan: Rose!

In the name of Christ, man, beg for his mercy, 'cause you'll get none from me!

Rose: Be struck down by his almighty swift sword... Alan: Stop it!

Rose: ...Meehan!

You godless heathen!

Meehan: Rot in hell, Willie Rose!

Narrator: At the forefront of the evil powers King combats in his work stand the religious fanatics whose mystical violence is presented as a formidable destructive force.

Isaac: Behold.

A dream did come to me in the night.

And the Lord did show all this to me.

Children: Praise God!

Praise the Lord!

King: My wife is a lapsed Catholic, and she's fond of quoting something that she heard as a little girl who went to school in parochial schools and got to church every day.

And apparently the Catholic Church's attitude toward children is, "Give us your children, and they'll be ours forever."

And when children are raised in this sort of strict, fundamental atmosphere -- and I was -- it sets into your mind and becomes a part of your psyche ever after.

And part of the sin, as far as I'm concerned, is taking the plastic minds of small children and molding them.

And in "Children of the Corn," what I tried to present was an extreme case, the result of religious mania.

[ Indistinct shouting ] That's a more clear-cut example of the way that I feel about religion, and my idea is that all organized religion leads, sooner or later, to the mass grave.

If somebody offers you a Bible for your right hand, sooner or later they will offer to put a gun in your left.

Carmody: There is one God.

The God of the Israelites, and he is a stern and vengeful God, and we have been mocking him far too long.

And now he demands retribution in blood.

It is time to declare yourselves.

Take sides.

The saved and the damned.

Read the Good Book.

It calls for expiation, blood.

Amanda: What?

Narrator: And whether his heroes take on the enlightened or the bullies, King always warns his readers against the dumbing down of the masses, particularly when the characters he creates are charismatic rulers who feed off the weaknesses of their prey, as is the case with the populist politician Greg Stillson, played by Martin Sheen in David Cronenberg's screen adaptation of "Dead Zone."

Stillson: Boy, you got to be in good shape to go the full distance for those big boys down in Washington.

You got to stay in shape all the time with those boys.

You can't turn your back on them.

You got to stay in better shape than this country.

What the hell is happening to this country?

Can anybody tell me what the hell is going on?

King: You know, it's funny.

I foresaw Donald Trump.

I wrote a book called "The Dead Zone" and... [ Laughter and applause ] Trump: We will be stronger and bigger and better as a nation than ever before.

We're right on track.

King: Note the way Donald Trump falls back on saying this and such is going to be "huge," or this and such is "beautiful."

Those words by themselves mean absolutely nothing.

Politicians are allowed to slide by with generalities rather than specific.

When not dealing in generalities, elected officials who are supposed to be the best, the smartest, often resort to outright misinformation.

Alan: Don't you see what he's done?!

We're all decent people!

We are!

And he's preyed on our weaknesses and our hatred and our greed and our prejudice and our fear!

Don't you understand?

He runs on hate.

And he's used it to turn us all against each other.

Narrator: From his nightmares to his stories, King ultimately tells us the same thing -- Only an awakened mind can repel monsters -- like the heroes of his novella "The Body," adapted into the film "Stand by Me," directed by Rob Reiner.

King thus invites us to face our fears to come out of this ordeal a little better, a little wiser.

King: The film "Stand by Me" and the story are about four little boys who walk down a set of railroad tracks to see a dead body.

It's a quest story.

It's very, very simple.

They're four boys who want to go and see something.

And along the way, one of the classical purposes of the quest story is that you're supposed to discover things about yourself.

Chris: You could be a real writer someday, Gordie.

Gordie: ...writing.

I don't want to be a writer.

It's stupid.

It's a stupid waste of time.

Chris: That's your dad talking.

Gordie: ... Chris: Bull true!

King: We live in a society where many believe that libraries and other cultural endeavors are of minor importance, as if learning to think is a thing that just happens naturally, like learning to walk.

Believe me, it's not.

Learning to think is the result of hard work and steady effort.

I don't believe in the so-called dumbing down of America, but as everyday reading declines -- and it has -- analytical thought also declines.

My wife and I have a foundation, and we -- we try to support as many libraries as we can because I feel like they're very important resources and communities.

And they meant a lot to -- to she and I when we were younger because we didn't really have any money, either one of us, and we loved books, and that's where you go to get the books.

The ability to think clearly and logically leads to good decision making, and I believe the ability to think clearly grows along with the ability to read.

[ Applause ] Chris: It's like God gave you something, man.

All those stories that you can make up.

And he said, "This is what we got for you, kid.

Try not to lose it."

But kids lose everything unless there's someone there to look out for them.

And if your parents are too...up to do it, then maybe I should.

Narrator: At over 70 years old, Stephen King holds an unparalleled position in contemporary literature -- philanthropist, loving husband and father, patron.

He has established himself in half a century as one of the greatest storytellers of our time, both a regional and universal artist, profound but always accessible.

And it's the power of his nightmares that continues to make us believe in the possibility of an ideal, of a dream.

Man: What do you think is the sum of what you've done?

King: Mm.

Well, I think that I've given a lot of people a certain amount of twisted pleasure, and I think that I've taken a lot of people away from their daily lives and taken them on ghost trains, and -- and people have gone on them and maybe enjoyed themselves.

Um... I'm not sure that there's anything beyond that.

I don't hold out any big brief for literature as a -- an ennobling thing.

Although I do think that literature -- that stories -- save lives, that they literally save lives and make life possible, that they open up our lives and make them richer and better.

If you asked me, is what I've done important, the answer is, to me, yes.

To other people, maybe.

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