The Dark Halves: How Stephen King and George Romero Reflect Themselves in The Dark Half

In 1991, an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1993), written and directed by George Romero, began filming. Though both men are well-regarded artists within the horror genre, the pairing of Romero and King is not the most obvious. Romero has always had a very critical eye for the world around him, whereas King revels in the American world as much as Lovecraft revelled in New England. King’s Christine is not just about a car; it's about growing up in the American way of life, and the vision is pretty optimistic, murderous car or not. Romero’s zombie-besieged farmhouses and shopping malls are his vision of American life's true nature--violent and rotten. The concerns each artist has in the same subject matter of The Dark Half are therefore quite distinct. I think it would illuminate the thematic interests of both to see how they each exploit the narrative.

The narrative of The Dark Half concerns a professor of creative literature, Thad Beaumont. He writes literary novels under his own name and violent crime novels under the pseudonym ‘George Stark’. When a snoop learns Stark’s true identity and tries to blackmail Beaumont, Beaumont goes public and gets some media attention. With Stark effectively dead, Beaumont begins work on his literary masterpiece in comfort. But this is interrupted when Stark enters existence and begins killing everyone involved in his ‘death’, leaving the police at Beaumont’s door. All Stark wants is for Beaumont to write a new violent crime novel so he can exist again. The problem is that it's now either/or: if Stark exists, Beaumont's has to go.

The most obvious and most important difference between King’s and Romero’s representation of the narrative is Stark’s appearance. For King, Stark is a huge, muscular, blond man, looking nothing like Beaumont, but rather like the hero of Stark’s novels, Alexis Machine. For Romero, Beaumont and Stark are twins, the only difference being that Stark slicks his hair back, wears all black, and is physically stronger. 

I think the reason King portrays Stark as being very different in appearance is because King is using the duality of Beaumont and Stark more allegorically than Romero is. The narrative, for King, allegorically expresses his own often conflicting attitudes toward the creative act and toward producing literature for an audience.

King’s position in literary hierarchy is, to put it simply, in the lower rungs. He’s a successful popular writer to most critics, a crowd-pleaser with no real literary talent. He is, as far as they’re concerned, George Stark. I don’t think King would agree that he is, or at least has always been, George Stark. There is ample evidence in his writing that he aspired to be an artist. Christine is certainly a literary novel to a degree, and it is in fact quite a good novel. In his early career King wrote his unapologetically populist novels under the name ‘Richard Bachman.’ The Dark Half was written after he let Bachman go and began to write as King only. That King had literary ambitions and had a pseudonym for populist novels does, of course, mirror Beaumont in an obvious way, though King was never as pretentious as Beaumont. Beaumont fancies himself the next Updike. What all this suggests is a certain attitude toward the production of literature. King has two conflicting desires that it seems impossible to simultaneously fulfill. The first is the desire to write 'great books,' masterpieces like David Copperfield. The other is the desire to just write, to just let loose and write with the heart, the guts, and the balls. No concern for perfect word choice or the harmony of the phrase or the quadruple meaning of a line, just visceral storytelling dripping with blood, shit, and semen as needed.

I suspect many writers suffer from these conflicting desires. Some writers like Dickens and Georges Simenon could write from the guts and still write great books. Others, like Flaubert, could take years to write a short novel. Producing literature is hard work and producing visceral storytelling is easy, exciting, freeing, and, best of all, lucrative, because gutsy, ballsy writing sells. In The Dark Half, King explicitly states that writing does not come easy for Beaumont (whose name, incidentally, resembles Flaubert’s). When he writes as Stark, on the other hand, Beaumont falls into a trance and writes frantically. What I think interests King in this duality, then, is how it allegorically represents the duality he feels in himself between the two distinct approaches to the act of writing.

There is further evidence throughout The Dark Half that suggests this duality. King references several literary writers, like Oliver Goldsmith, Saul Bellows, Hunter Thompson, Hemingway, Burroughs, and occasionally writers of non-fiction, like Chomsky, that it appears King himself really does read, or at least has read. He also references pulp crime writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Horace McCoy quite approvingly. In his Afterward, King states that the crime novels of Shane Stevens are ‘as striking’ as McTeague and Sister Carrie, and are some “of the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream.” (King 1989: 433) King seems at pains to decide between writing pure, critically valueless pulp novels and writing critically praiseworthy literary novels, and at last settles for the hope that we will mature enough to elevate what is fun and for ‘pure entertainment’ to the level of art. Unfortunately, many in the critical establishment remain dubious. For King, the answer is embodied in the text: do away with the cowardly pseudonym and write whatever you want, which, for better or worse, is just what he did.

I suspect, further, that the novel’s main theme is also somewhat allegorical. The passage that most embodies this theme is, “The overflow of make-believe into one’s own life seemed to be an almost unavoidable side-effect of story-telling—like getting calluses on the pads of your fingers from playing the guitar…” (King 249) The act of writing, in The Dark Half, is a ritual, “There had been no mystic decision to write the Stark novels longhand, although time had turned it into a kind of ritual” (King 249) Later, more explicitly, “Writing is not what we’re doing here, not really. Writing is just the ritual” (King 403). Writing is also a quasi-spiritualist ritual Beaumont uses for accessing Stark’s mind long-distance. Writing is a ritual that summons things into being. This is an allegorical way of speaking which I find to be rather flakey, but which many writers believe to varying degrees of literality. They speak of their characters as real people who, once created, pretty much take over the story with their reality. For some writers, it just feels that way; others sorta, kinda believe their own bullshit. In The Dark Half, the metaphor is very literalized, as Stark, and with him Alexis Machine, become real enough to embody the soul of Beaumont’s excised potential twin, medically known as ‘fetiform teratoma’.

The belief that characters are who they are and will do what they will do presents an escape from concerns over art versus entertainment. Like Dickens or Shakespeare, the characters are central. Writing is merely the ritual that grants us access to them, just as Thad uses the ritual of writing to read Stark’s thoughts. One is no longer responsible for writing either penny dreadfuls or literary masterpieces, but only for revealing the characters as they are and honestly reporting what they do.

Thus, everywhere throughout The Dark Half, King affirms Beaumont’s relationship to Stark as creator and creature. Stark’s difference in appearance is important also because he is not another side of Beaumont, but something created by Beaumont. His appearance conforms to how Beaumont imagines he looks. Beaumont’s ‘dark half’ is referred to in the text not just as Stark, but as his own imagination, “[t]hat eye, glowing in the dark half of him, the side which was in constant shade… that was like a God, and he was glad they could not see it” (King 157). As when Beaumont subconsciously makes Stark write ‘THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN’ in a murder scene, there are hints in the text that Beaumont is, in a sense, writing Stark’s reality with his mind. So what King is doing with The Dark Half, most of all, is investigating the relationship between the artist and his character through a magic realist lens.

Where King makes Beaumont and Stark distinct in appearance to emphasize the different sorts of literature they allegorically represent, Romero has no such allegorical interests. There are doubtless very pragmatic reasons for adapting a Stephen King work, such as mainstream success, but I think Romero had personal reasons for adapting this particular King novel. These reasons, his thematic interests, are difficult to see in this particular film as a standalone project. However, in light of Romero’s previous films, we can see The Dark Half continues his explorations of a particular family of themes, and, even more, gives Romero an opportunity to reflect upon his own career and films.

Throughout Romero’s career, he has had two types of film, each type dealing with a different family of thematic concerns to which Romero repeatedly returns. One of these is obviously the zombie films, which allows Romero to study the nature of human cooperation in modern society. The focus of these films is always on how the humans treat each other rather than how the zombies treat, or eat, the humans. The other films are his dark dramas like Jack’s Wife (1972), Martin (1976), Monkey Shines (1988), most recently Bruiser (2000), and, between Monkey Shines and Bruiser, The Dark Half. Below I will briefly discuss the thematic concerns of this set of films in order to show how The Dark Half fits into this group of films and, thus, how Romero adapts King’s material to his long-time thematic concerns.

All of these films follow a similar pattern. They begin with a character who holds some set of oppressive ideas and who is, in one way or another, actually oppressed. The nature and source of the oppression varies according to the theme Romero is investigating, but the theme is always about some sort of social oppression. In response to the oppression, the character has violent fantasies. Through some instrument in the real world, these violent fantasies are involuntarily transformed into violent action. This process leaves the character liberated from both the oppression and the oppressive ideas. In order to illustrate this pattern, I will describe the structure of both Jack’s Wife and Monkey Shines to show that, despite being radically different films, they share a structure and family of thematic concerns.

In Jack’s Wife, Joan Mitchell (Jan White), a housewife, is stifled by her husband and the traditional, patriarchal values he embodies. After her husband strikes her, she begins having dreams about a threatening intruder breaking into her house. Around the same time, a friend turns her on to studying witchcraft. The more she studies witchcraft, a traditionally matriarchal religion, the freer she becomes from traditional attitudes. Meanwhile, the dreams become increasingly threatening and she becomes increasingly active in her own dreams. Ultimately, a real intruder appears to be trying to break into the house and, confusing dream and reality, Joan shoots the intruder, only to discover it is her husband. The form of oppression Romero is interested in with Jack’s Wife is clearly patriarchal oppression. Joan isn’t free to think or do as she wishes. In her frustration, she fantasizes, in this case through dreams, of violence. As she studies witchcraft, she is empowered to do things she normally would not have done. Finally, witchcraft gives her the confidence she needs to translate the violence that would have remained pure fantasy into the real world, killing the dream-intruder and her oppressor simultaneously. Thanks to the violence witchcraft has enabled her to perform, she is left free from her husband and free from oppressive values.

As Romero’s first film of the self-actualizing model, Jack’s Wife is somewhat primitive. Monkey Shines is a much more sophisticated instance. In this film, a successful lawyer, somewhat allegorically named ‘Allan Mann,’ (Jason Beghhe) with a nice house, sexy fiancée, and impressive physique, is hit by a truck and rendered paralyzed. Once paralyzed, his fiancée leaves him, his mother begins to take care of him like a child, and a live-in nurse takes over his house for herself. Frustrated with his powerlessness, Mann has fantasies of killing these women who take advantage of his impotence. The (female) helper monkey a cousin gives Mann psychically receives these fantasies and enacts them in reality. The more the monkey enacts Mann’s violence, the more she begins to dominate him. When the monkey tries to kill the one woman who treats Mann like a man, Mann summons the strength to kill the monkey. He then recovers and enters a relationship with the surviving woman.

In Monkey Shines, then, the same structure we find in Jack’s Wife is present. The difference is that Romero is interested in a different form of oppression. Instead of patriarchal values oppressing women, Romero is now interested in how traditional notions of masculinity, shared by men and women, can oppress a man. So, Mann’s physical weakness and inability to make money leaves him in self-loathing and permits him to be abused by the women in his life. Like Joan, Mann has violent fantasies, though his are more consciously directed against his abusers. And like Joan, Mann’s violent fantasy becomes violent action through a proxy, in this case a female monkey. Where Romero hones his structure is in making the proxy for violence something that then begins to dominate the protagonist. Mann has to face and destroy the monkey in order to regain his masculine strength. The ordeal leaves Mann self-actualized, represented in his ability to walk again, but shown really in his new girlfriend, an intelligent equal rather than a trophy fiancée.

There are obviously many subtleties to be examined in the development of Romero’s thematic concerns from film to film, and much vagueness that needs to be clarified. However, for the purposes of this essay, this brief overview is sufficient. The continuity and development of a structure for addressing a family of thematic concerns, namely themes that pertain to oppressive ideals, is all I needed to elucidate for our needs. Now it remains to show how Romero tries to mould the narrative of The Dark Half to this structure and these themes.

With The Dark Half, Romero begins with a man, Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton), who has already mastered his violent fantasies and has already given them a proxy. He has created a pseudonym in order to channel his violent fantasies into violent fictional action. When he is forced to publicly reveal that he is George Stark (Timothy Hutton), he effectively kills Stark and decides not to write violent literature any longer. With his outlet for violent action removed, his violent fantasies channel themselves into the real world, in real action, through the now-real proxy that is George Stark. Beaumont must face and destroy this proxy for violent action in real life, using violence himself, just as Allan Mann had to do with the monkey.

In this description, there are a few points from the structure I defined above that appear to be absent. First of all, it is not evident what the source of Beaumont’s oppression is. There are certainly issues in his life, but the violent fantasies predate these issues. That being the case, it is also not evident that Beaumont has liberated himself from any oppressive ideas by the film’s conclusion. There is clearly tension between King’s material and Romero’s thematic concerns, and this obscures Romero’s structure, but I don’t think it erases it.

One important issue that Romero would not be able to excise from the material even if he tried is the opposition between literary fiction and popular or pulp fiction that is so central to King’s text. Far from trying to remove this central theme, Romero exploits it for his own use. Beaumont’s oppression is due to this opposition between writing literary novels and pulp novels. Only, for Romero, the opposition is tweaked slightly. The various literary references are dropped and the issue becomes one not of literary classification but of violence. Beaumont is frustrated by the inability to write novels that are both violent and still deemed serious. Beaumont remarks that he had writer’s block and found writing violent fiction helped him get around it. What necessitates writing under the name George Stark, however, is the need for Beaumont to compartmentalize his aptitude for writing violent literature and preserve his literary reputation.

Looking at a few of the changes Romero makes to King’s material will lend some support to my contention that Romero shifts the focus to violence. For one, Romero introduces multiple instances in which Beaumont reveals a violent side, none of which occur in King’s text. The first is in the scene, totally absent from the novel, in which Beaumont meets his blackmailer face-to-face. Beaumont quickly and threateningly grabs the blackmailer’s wrist as the man reaches for a book; then he offers his autograph politely. The violence is present, just quickly diffused. Later, when speaking of the blackmailer, he suggests cutting off the man’s penis and stuffing it in his mouth, an action Stark later performs. Where King’s Beaumont is a clumsy man who has no real capacity for violence, Romero’s Beaumont is not. Given the importance Romero bestows upon having the potential for violence in his other dark dramas, this is not surprising.

This clarifies to some degree reasons Romero may have had for transforming Stark into a doppelganger. Romero makes Stark literally a twin of Beaumont. King’s approach to Stark’s ‘resurrection’ is always nebulous and spiritual, so to speak. The fetiform material having been hidden from Beaumont’s parents by the arrogant surgeon is presumably discarded with any other medical waste. Romero’s approach is quite the opposite. Romero makes a point of telling us that Beaumont’s parents were given the fetiform tissue, told what it was, and then proceeded to give the tissue a burial. The burial, naturally, is in the very same plot the photographer stages George Stark’s mock grave. This suggests a certain material component to Stark and with that a biological component, such that Stark is literally twinned with Beaumont. Where King’s notion of a ‘dark half’ is also rather spiritual, sometimes referring to Stark and sometimes referring to Beaumont’s inner creative forces, there is no ambiguity in Romero’s film. For Romero, the ‘dark half’ of Beaumont is his evil twin, Stark. But by referring to Stark as a ‘dark half’, Romero also tells us that this is a physical manifestation of Beaumont’s violent nature.

So, what is achieved by Romero’s modifications is an emphasis on Beaumont’s relationship to his own potential for violence. His oppression, therefore, arises from two related ideas, shared by society generally, that violence is contemptible in behaviour and that graphic violence has no place in serious art. When Beaumont’s means of coping with his frustration is removed, his violent fantasies are channelled into reality. What Beaumont liberates himself from at the end of the film is his compartmentalization of his violent nature into an Other, which, separated, directs itself at him and his family. He destroys that Other with his own violent action. Where King adds an ambiguous ending in which the sheriff wonders whether Beaumont’s wife can ever trust Beaumont again, Romero simply ends the film upon the destruction of Stark and the vanishing of the sparrows. Romero’s ending is unambiguously a happy one.

By transferring the emphasis of the narrative from literary style to violence, Romero also makes the narrative reflect upon his own career much as King makes the narrative reflect upon his. Romero’s niche has always been in the horror genre, a genre that is essentially violent, arguably the most violent of all fiction genres. His films have had critical acclaim, but there is a reluctance to view these films as serious works of art rather than as, to use Kael’s phrase, ‘great trash’. They are viewed as shallow and usually treated superficially. Just as Beaumont does in the film, many strive to deny the potential for violence as a part of themselves and to distance themselves from violent fantasy. This idea is as oppressive in Romero’s worldview as patriarchal values. In Romero’s films, violent fantasy is an important part of dealing with our own oppressive ideas and offers a potential path of relief. I am not suggested Romero advocates violence at the least provocation, but that violent fantasy appropriately channelled is a means of understanding and surmounting what oppresses us individually and socially. And his films, just as George Stark’s novels, are violent fantasies that we all can share. We deny them at our own peril.

All this is not to say Romero’s The Dark Half is a great film. The Dark Half is a decent film, but one of Romero’s worst. His clever modifications transform King’s narrative enough to put The Dark Half in Romero’s family of self-liberation films, but this structure is obscure and all but invisible without comparison to Romero’s previous films. Nor is The Dark Half a great novel. It is without a doubt a fascinating novel, but neither as sophisticated nor as rich as some of King’s earlier work. Though Romero and King are very distinct artists, however, The Dark Half is curiously a career midpoint they share. For King, The Dark Half is an optimistic novel looking forward to a new era of creativity in which Richard Bachman is retired and King can write from his brain and his balls simultaneously. For Romero, The Dark Half is a film in which he tries to reach the mainstream but sceptically doubts society is ready to accept his worldview that violence and violent fantasy are a valuable part of human nature not to be denied. For both artists, The Dark Half is an opportunity to move their career into new territory. But that territory has never been deemed generally, or by me, as being as good as what they had done prior. I do not think King has ever yet written another novel as good as Christine, nor has Romero ever yet made a film as good as Monkey Shines or Dawn of the Dead (1978). Still, from comparing The Dark Half the Stephen King novel and The Dark Half the George Romero film I hope we have learned more about the thematic concerns of two very different artists who both happen to labour in the horror genre, and their anticipated paths forward in their respective arts.

Works Cited

King, Stephen. (1989) The Dark Half. New York: Viking Penguin.