Stephen King’s Subtle, Subversive Slasher
Warning: Spoilers!
Within Stephen King’s massive oeuvre, we can find virtually all types of horror: Lovecraftian (The Mist), supernatural (Pet Sematary, among many others), psychical (Carrie), apocalyptic (The Stand), and sci-fi (The Tommyknockers), to say nothing of his subgenre blends. Conspicuously absent, however, is the slasher. Sure, The Shining comes to mind, but that novel is really more of a psychological and supernatural horror experience, Jack Torrance’s ax-wielding amounting to little more than some passing slasher imagery. But hidden within King’s corpus of novels, there is a slasher to be found, and it’s not one of his better-known works. That novel is Gerald’s Game. Sure, no one dies in the novel save for the titular character, who perishes not on account of a knife, ax, or chainsaw, but rather a heart attack. And yet, even without a body count, King manages to hit critical slasher notes in innovative ways throughout Gerald’s Game, thereby creating a distinct and refreshing take on the subgenre.
A Malevolent Moment
One staple of slashers, especially slasher films, is that they take place at an interval of sinister significance (to borrow a phrase from film critic Vera Dika). The obvious examples here are Friday the 13th and Halloween, each of which chronicles a series of murders happening on a particular calendrical date or holiday, and then recurring on that occasion. The Prowler (1981), similarly, sees murders happening 35 years to the day after an unsolved revenge killing took place.
King subtly follows this pattern in Gerald’s Game, but on a grander scale, by affording deep psychological significance to an astronomical event, namely the total eclipse of the sun witnessed in western Maine on July 20th, 1963. On this day, the main character, Jessie Burlingame, was sexually assaulted by her father at Dark Score Lake while the solar eclipse was taking place. This time and place have immediate significance in Gerald’s Game’s present-day. Gerald has convinced Jessie, his wife, to go to their cabin at a different lake in western Maine, Lake Kashwakamak, so they can spice up their sex-life with some rough play — specifically the use of handcuffs. But when things get too rough, Jessie kicks her overexcited husband and Gerald suffers a coronary event, falling to the floor dead. Now, as she lies handcuffed to the headboard of her marital bed, Jessie slowly and agonizingly begins to work through her trauma at Dark Score Lake back in 1963.
In essence, King takes the familiar slasher trope of a date associated with physical violence involving multiple victims and subverts it by telling a story of psychological violence tormenting one person — that is, Jessie’s sexual abuse, which comes back by way of further sexual trauma 29 years later. And instead of choosing a recurrent date, King makes the triggering interval a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical occurrence that Jessie’s psyche has fused with the earlier traumatic event. Over the course of the novel, we learn that Jessie has effectively lived with unresolved trauma ever since the initial event at Dark Score Lake. The violence, then, recurs not calendrically through physical carnage, as in predictable slashers, but rather perpetually through psychological trauma that the protagonist has been experiencing without surcease on an unconscious level.
A Misshapen Malefactor
Gerald’s Game feels even more like a slasher when we encounter its villain. About a third of the way through the book, as Jessie begins to experience the deleterious effects of her bondage with full force, she comes to believe that there is someone else in the bedroom with her. She is never entirely convinced, however, and this ambiguity feeds her terror. She gives the visitor various names, such as the “space cowboy” and the “gangster of love,” as per Steve Miller’s song “The Joker.” She even addresses him as her father, on occasion.
Whatever the moniker, the visitor amounts to a man with a skull-like face and limbs that are inhumanly long, though he may be no more than the play of shadow and moonlight in the trees. Accordingly, he’s akin to the monsters that children imagine when the lights go out in their bedrooms, and, fittingly, Jessie refers to him as “the boogeyman” several times. In this sense, the visitor aligns with Michael Myers of the Halloween films, who is also famously referred to as “boogeyman.”
But Jessie’s visitor turns out to be more than just an inert shadow. In due time, Jessie has a vision of him with a chainsaw resting at his feet, pairing the shadowy image with the screech of a chainsaw she’d heard across the lake earlier that day. Soon, she sees the visitor lifting this object off of the floor, and she perceives it to be a basket full of jewelry and small human bones. Here King is obviously drawing from Leatherface, preeminent villain of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, who not only carries the titular implement but also helps his family members collect body parts of their victims. King goes further with the Texas Chain Saw references when, in the novel’s denouement, it becomes clearer what — that is to say, who — Jessie’s visitor is. It seems that this part of Western Maine in which Lake Kashwakamak is situated has seen a rash of graveyard desecrations in recent years. This is not unlike the kind depicted in the first sustained shot of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), in which we see two corpses mounted on a gravestone in a sodomic position. The desecrations in western Maine, not to mention acts of necrophilia and murder, get tied to one Raymond Andrew Joubert. In detailing Joubert’s criminal history, King even includes a report that he wore someone’s face like a mask, the practice from which Leatherface gets his name.
When Jessie sees a picture of Joubert’s actual face, with his narrow nose, “pooched” lips, and long limbs, she becomes certain it is the visitor who was in the bedroom with her when she was handcuffed, and her realization makes for one of the most chilling moments in the novel. As King would have it, Joubert’s monstrous appearance stems from acromegaly, a chronic disease that results in enlargements of the head, feet, and hands due to an overproduction of growth hormones in the pituitary gland. In this way, Joubert reminds the reader of Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees, who also has a monstrous appearance thanks to a (superficial) link to a disease. According to effects designer Tom Savini, Jason suffers from hydrocephalus, an accumulation of serous fluid in the cranium that causes enlargement of the head. Thus, the antagonist in Gerald’s Game combines elements of Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, and Michael Myers, three of the most iconic slasher villains.
The Final Girl
A slasher would hardly be complete without a Final Girl, and Jessie takes a tortuous, torturous route toward inheriting this role. “Final Girl” refers to the female character who remains at the end of practically every slasher film to confront the antagonist. The Final Girl outlasts the other characters by virtue of her resourcefulness and resolve, as it is these traits that allow her to escape or eviscerate the killer. Perhaps it is no great intellectual feat to argue that Jessie fits this role, given that she’s the only female in Gerald’s Game; but, with that said, she nonetheless goes through a character transformation that is more than sufficient to qualify her as a bona fide Final Girl.
Though Jessie starts off in panic, getting consumed by the barrage of voices in her head and repeatedly becoming convinced that she will die, she persists in searching for ways to keep herself alive and to find a way out of her predicament. Identifying a glass of water her husband had left on the shelf running parallel with the headboard, she very deftly tilts the board and slides the glass into her hand. When she discovers that her handcuffs will not permit her to put the glass to her lips, she snatches up a subscription insert from one of Gerald’s magazines and curls it into a makeshift straw. In this way, she manages to stay hydrated. Later, as cramps set in due to her restrained, near-cruciform posture, Jessie pedals her legs to afford herself a form of exercise. As she grows more desperate, she tries to slide a lubricant off the shelf. When this fails, she does not give up, as much as she may want to.
Instead, she realizes she has a better lubricant running through her veins. Channeling all her resolve and a very bleak resourcefulness, she smashes the water glass and cuts her wrist. As Jessie slices through her flesh and veins and starts to bleed, King goes ahead and makes the obvious association, writing “She had begun to feel like a victim in a slasher movie” (p. 240). In a commendable twist, King has arranged it so that the prospective Final Girl must wield the knife to make herself the victim in order to survive. The gouts of blood prove sufficient for sliding Jessie’s wrist out of the handcuff, but not before she nearly pulls off the skin covering her hand in the process. That she endures this near-flaying only provides further testament to Jessie’s willpower.
Then, with her hand physically mangled, Jessie faces one more psychological test on her way out of the cabin. Hearing inexplicable sounds and sensing a presence again as she makes her way past the door of Gerald’s study, she turns to see her visitor — that is, the space cowboy, the boogeyman, and, ultimately, Raymond Andrew Joubert — lurking there with his basket of bones. But Jessie does not break, at least not in full, and hurries to the car to escape, believing that she is being pursued all the while. Like many a slasher-movie Final Girl, she ends up completely traumatized and covered in blood . . . but alive.
In the denouement, Jessie manages to confront the killer as per her Final Girl sisters, though not in a traditional fashion. The confrontation in Gerald’s Game takes place in a courtroom where Joubert is standing trial for his crimes. Jessie approaches the unwitting murderer and gets his attention by verbally accosting him. At this point, Joubert looks up and Jessie exchanges one final, terrible moment of mutual recognition with her boogeyman.
Sole female though she may be, Jessie’s survival is not guaranteed, and she pulls herself together and holds herself together to get herself out of a bad situation, both in the bed and in her head. She is not the victim of the slasher movie, as she may have felt herself to be as she cut into her wrists, but rather the survivor of a slasher novel.
Conclusion
With Gerald’s Game, Stephen King has written a veritable slasher novel, injecting a torrent of innovation into a typically stagnant and predictable subgenre. Laudably, the established gore-monger King manages to pen a slasher in which no one is killed with an edged weapon. This is a feat for the slasher genre and for the kill-happy King.
That the antagonist Joubert kills no one (at least not in the narrative proper) only adds to his haunting presence, his ambiguity, and the frisson he evokes. Jason, Michael, and Leatherface all resort to carnage over and over again, but Joubert’s violent desire remains a note that King leaves unplayed. The most terrifying monster is the one that never shows itself, and while we do see Joubert, we never see the violence he’s capable of in Gerald’s Game. This makes him all the more unsettling.
And, for a genre all too happy to kill off the sexually active, King allows a female character who’s (a) wearing nothing but panties for two-thirds of the novel and (b) literally engaged in a sex act in chapter one to become the Final Girl. This marks another praiseworthy subversion among many. Rather than suffering trauma from being sexual on a star-crossed date, King’s slasher allows a female character to work through recurrent sexual trauma tied to a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event.
With Gerald’s Game, then, Stephen King has effectively turned the slasher subgenre inside out, much like the skin on Jessie’s hands as she pulls free from the handcuffs. Thanks to some uncharacteristic subtlety and subversion, King makes something eminently readable out of the slasher genre. This is no small accomplishment, and, as such, Gerald’s Game deserves far more attention than it has received relative to other King works, as it is one of his most sophisticated and most legitimately disturbing novels.
References
King, Stephen. 1992. Gerald’s Game. New York: Viking.
