Fun Facts

• Jack Nicholson’s roommate at University of Colorado in 1956 was my father.
• Kubrick’s version is scarier than King’s.
• Stephen King based the story on Robert Marasco’s novel, Burnt Offerings (1973).

Personal Notes

• We only went out to movies once or twice a year when I was 10 but we saw this the first week it came out because of my dad’s relationship with Nicholson.
• It seemed like I was only slightly scared in the theater. But there was a tone—the lighting? The weather? The normalcy of it all? The spaciousness of the house (for a small child)? The idea of being trapped there with the Nicholson flavor of Sinister Father?
•  The only scenes that produced fear with self-consciousness were (1) the scene in the bathroom with Grady, and (2) the butler getting the blowjob from the boar.
• The scariest thing about the movie was the fact that I could see my dad actually doing this. The fact that they were roommates in college made this even more plausible.
• But after it ended, while walking through the parking lot, it hit me. I realized that what I had seen was a possible future, or an actual present in a possible world. The lighting. The closeness of the faces. The joy that the sadistic feather feels when he’s gone into a violence ecstasy while beating his child. It’s a real possibility that does occur, in this world.