It's really unsettling to find out that there are things that scare people like Stephen King. Nothing should scare him; he's practically the master of the horror genre.
This is the man who wrote The Shining, It, Pet Semetary, and tons more. He has created some of the creepiest monsters ever for the page, which have gone on to horrify us on the screen, and he isn't slowing down. There will always be new Stephen King adaptations for television and film as long as King keeps writing, which he will do until the day he passes from this Earth, and they will always be bone-chilling. Even after he's gone, his work will be rebooted until the cows come home, and fans will concoct all manner of fan theories about his work as they can.
When he isn't writing (he's written 62 novels, five non-fiction books, and over 200 short stories) or helping to translate his works to the screen, he's critiquing other's work and endorsing whatever projects come his way. He loves to share what television shows or films are wowing him, to the delight of whoever worked on them.
But the cast and crew of one movie can't say they've helped make a film that King loves. Actually, we don't know if the cast and crew of this one such movie should feel upset or proud of themselves that they were a part of the one film that scared the living daylights out of King. Read on to find out which film King avoids just as much as the kids of Derry, Maine, avoid the sewers.
He Couldn't Even Finish Watching The Film
With all the creepy things that King has written about in his books, like haunted hotels, alien clowns, telekinetic teenagers, resurrected pets, evil mist, and creepily obsessed fans, you'd think that King would have a high tolerance when it came to horror. But we guess everyone has their limits.
We've recently found out what those limits are.
Apparently, the horror film that managed to scare King so badly he couldn't finish watching was 1999's The Blair Witch Project, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. According to CinemaBlend, he cut his viewing of the film short because it "had crossed his personal threshold of freaky."
As fans will remember, the film follows three film students, Heather, Josh, and Mike, who want to film a documentary about the Blair Witch legend. They hike into the Black Hills and interview residents of the area. Despite what everyone tells them, they proceed into the woods, and each night weirder and weirder things start to happen.
When Josh goes missing, havoc starts, and they hear his agonized cries echo throughout the woods. They follow his cries to an abandoned house. An unseen entity attacks Mike in the basement, but Heather enters screaming and captures Mike standing in the corner. The entity attacks Heather, her camera drops, and that's the end.
The film is done in the same kind of first-person perspective as Paranormal Activity to give fans the sense that these are real events. The whole movie keeps you in suspense and terror throughout, but we never imagined that a film that never actually shows you a monster would scare King as badly as it did.
During an appearance on the series Eli Roth’s History of Horror, King confessed The Blair Witch Project freaked him out. However, there is an interesting reason why.
"The first time I saw [The Blair Witch Project], I was in the hospital and I was doped up," King explained on the show. "My son brought a VHS tape of it, and he said, 'You gotta watch this.' Halfway through it, I said, 'Turn it off it’s too freaky.'"
So we'll hand it to King. Being in a hospital, doped up, is not the place or time to watch a film like The Blair Witch Project. King was in the hospital following a near-fatal accident after he was hit by a van while running. So he more than likely didn't want to be freaked out while he was in pain.
King eventually did proceed to finish the film later on but was still freak out by its realism. Eventually, out of the hospital, King wrote a freaky story of his own.
There Might Be Another Reason Why King Was Freaked Out
Kids being in danger is a popular theme in a lot of King's work. Danny Torrance has to fight off his possessed father while the kids of Derry Maine are subjected to the wrath of Pennywise every 27 years in It.
But one of the interesting things about King is that, even though he writes about it a lot, he's afraid of bad things happening to children. In The Blair Witch Project, one of the townsfolk tells the filmmakers that a group of children was murdered in pairs while one watched somewhere in the woods. One night Heather, Josh, and Mike actually hear children laughing. Maybe this is one reason the film unnerved him.
Among that fear, he's also afraid of small-town paranoia, being struck by a car, which he felt the effects of during his screening of The Blair Witch Project oddly enough, and isolation, two things present in the film.
So it's safe to say that we'll never get a Stephen King novel about children who are murdered in an isolated forest in a small town filmed in first-person. Or maybe we will; anything can happen in King's novel-to-cinematic universe these days.