Week of Review - The Dark Half (1993)

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Let’s talk for a minute about George Romero.  Romero is one of the all-time giants of the horror genre, a skilled and storied director most famed for introducing the world to the streamlined vision of zombies that was the “of the Dead” film series.  However, as excellent as that series is (the first four films and the Romero directed remake anyway) the man did a lot of other high-quality work that’s gone unfairly under-appreciated by the public at large such as Monkey Shines or Knight Riders.  

In 1993, Romero decided to dip his toes into the Stephen King pond and turned in one of the best King adaptations of the decade: The Dark Half.  Starring Timothy Hutton and Michael Rooker, The Dark Half is quintessential King viewing, hitting on a number of his favorite tropes and ideas while still realizing them in their best way.  The film also marks the first entry in this retrospective to tie into the Stephen King shared universe of stories, connecting as it does to the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine.  So, continuity, quality, and a number of name actors and creators who’ve become beloved in their own right- let’s talk about The Dark Half.

Set in the town of Ludlow the film revolves around Timothy Hutton’s character Thad Beaumont.  Thad is a writer, in true Stephen King style, though a bit of a peculiar one.  Thad tried his hand at writing highbrow novels but couldn’t find any traction so he switched gears to start writing pulpy, ultra-violent, salacious crime thrillers.  

However, Thad wasn’t too keen to have his name attached to these dime store paperbacks so he came up with the pen name ‘George Stark.’  Unfortunately for Thad, this happy status quo is threatened when a nogoodnik from New York figures out his ruse and threatens to expose him.  With another choice, Thad decides to make the story public himself and kill off George Stark, only for George Stark to come to life and start killing off the people looking to kill him. 

Much like The Mangler, this set-up is absolutely in King’s classic wheelhouse.  The tortured writer with a history of substance abuse is such a stock character for King it’s almost a surprise when they aren’t part of a story at this point, though I think that’s pretty forgivable given King’s real-life struggles with drugs and alcohol.  What’s more, the idea of fictional stories coming to terrifying, even unintentional life is another common King-ism, most notably found in the similar but not as good Secret Window. 

Where The Dark Half sets itself apart is in the execution and the subtle details that make this story unique.  Firstly, it helps that George Stark’s manifestation is never really explained.  It’s all very dream-like and runs on magical thinking; George Stark comes to life because Thad Beaumont is unwilling to let him die.  I know some critics were turned off by this approach but personally, I really love it.  Horror has always been a genre that stretched the audience-art unspoken contract as far as it would go, specifically along the ideas that awareness of a thing is enough to summon it. 

In this case, Stark’s existence doesn’t need to be explained any more than the universe just making it happen.  There is one neat wrinkle of explanation to George Stark, though, which is that he’s wearing the form of Thad’s parasitic twin.  This is probably the movie’s most out there central idea but it’s established early on that as a boy Thad had a brain tumor only when the doctors went to operate it turned out it was the growing remnants of a twin he’d absorbed in the womb.  

They find a full-on eyeball and a few teeth growing inside his brain in one of the movie’s most messed up sequences.  The Stark manifestation ends up wearing the remnants of this tumor like a human skin suit, which means that Timothy Hutton gets the job of playing mild-mannered Thad Beaumont and the hard-drinking, hard-killing, southern bastard that is George Stark. 

This basically makes the movie a doppelganger film with actually quite a bit in common with 2019’s breakout horror hit Us, only a bit more esoteric.  In The Dark Half, Stark may be out for revenge against Thad’s acquaintances who helped kill him off but he’s also desperately trying to hold onto his place, in reality, Thad’s growing disdain and resentment for his creation slowly eating away at him to the point he becomes this rotting corpse of a man by the end.  It’s a great use of make-up and Timothy Hutton absolutely shines in both parts, projecting menace and glee as Stark vs. Thad’s more sincere and pragmatic everyman role. 

What’s more, you absolutely do get the sense both men are two sides of the same coin, that George Stark became this vessel that Thad poured his darkest impulses and worst aspects into until he eventually gave it terrifying life and power over him.  You can see a lot of Jack Torrance in Thad’s personification here, specifically the Jack Torrance of the book who was meant more as a take on alcoholism than the movie’s searing critique of the lie of the American family structure. 

Aside from Timothy Hutton in the lead we also get Michael Rooker as Alan Pangborn, a reoccurring King character and sheriff of Castle Rock.  Rooker’s a great actor and one we definitely didn’t appreciate enough prior to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and The Walking Dead and he does a fine job playing Pangborn as a by the book cop suddenly caught up in a case that’s much weirder than he’s ever experienced.  We also get Amy Madigan as Thad’s wife Liz Beaumont, who unfortunately doesn’t have all that much to do in the movie aside from getting kidnapped by George Stark eventually. 

There’s also a lot of really cool and dreamlike imagery done with sparrows in the film.  This cuts to the weird mysticism of the movie and the way things only half make sense, which is again something I valued about it.  Throughout the movie, Thad is haunted by phantom sparrows, which slowly slip into reality until they blot out the sky by the end in some of the most memorable parts of the movie you’ll ever see.  It’s a great concept and ties into the idea of sparrows as animals that ferry souls back and forth from the land of the living to the land of the dead. 

That kind of weird magic combined with the whole idea of Stark as a sort of thought form willed into existence by Thad’s unconscious make-up the best explanation we’re given for the film’s plot overall, which basically puts about on par with a really good Twilight Zone episode.  That’s actually probably the best description of the film on balance, a really good 2-hour Twilight Zone episode, which is not a bad thing to be. 

The Dark Half was not a major success for its time though it did win several well-deserved Saturn awards.  It was the second to last Romero film to foray into other styles before he returned to the safety of the zombie genre with Land of the Dead in 2005.  I’m not sure the movie has ever developed the cult following it absolutely deserves as it really is one of the most enjoyable King watches I’ve yet seen.  

Timothy Hutton’s commanding humanity and cruelty are a great showcase and Romero’s visual aesthetic fits the spooky rural Maine countryside perfectly.  It’s a weird movie that runs on dream-like logic that puts the black magic in magical thinking, cut from the same cloth as Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Shocker, Candyman, and Us.  What’s more, its ties to the King shared-universe set-up a quasi-sequel/spin-off for one of its main characters that also stands up as a great King adaptation and we’ll talk about that one tomorrow.   

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