baby, can you dig your stephen king addiction?

The Shining (1980) dir. Stanley Kubrick.

me every time: oh my god part of this character’s arc is them learning how to be loved and cared for

Arnie Cunningham buys a 1958 Plymouth Fury, which he calls Christine. He then develops an unhealthy obsession with the car, much to the dismay of his athlete friend, Dennis Guilder. After the bully Buddy Repperton disfigures Christine, the car is perfectly restored and begins to kill Buddy and his friends. Determined to end the deaths, Dennis and Arnie’s girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, decide to destroy Christine.

I want to run towards something, not away.

And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.

Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.

Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It's about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It's about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.