Deadly Pleasures: THE DARK HALF

In the vast pantheon of Stephen King movie adaptations, there tends to be a pretty clear demarcation between those films widely accepted as “good” and the rest, which are either dismissed as being bad or else forgotten altogether. The accepted wisdom is that George A. Romero’s 1993 adaptation of The Dark Half falls into that latter camp. That’s a mistake.

Despite being one of the greatest horror filmmakers of all time, Romero has never had an easy career. He redefined horror several times over with his first two Living Dead films but was cheated out of the royalties for directing one of the most successful independent films ever made. He had big commercial success working with a major studio on Creepshow, but he couldn’t get his next movie financed the way he wanted to make it. The late ’80s–’90s were particularly tough for Romero, with two difficult experiences making movies for the failing Orion Pictures and project after project falling through. The Dark Half is the second of a pair of films Romero made for Orion, shot in 1991 but shelved for two years as a result of the studio’s financial woes. Is this what unfairly put the stink of failure on the film? Or were Stephen King adaptations simply out of vogue by the early ’90s?

Whatever the case, The Dark Half has never gotten a fair shake despite being one of Romero’s classiest and most commercial pictures. He captures the overcast autumnal skies of King’s New England better than most who came before him and gives the film a very literary feel—fitting, as it’s a movie entirely about the writing process, showing who an author sometimes becomes in the process of creating immersive fiction. Timothy Hutton plays against type as both nice guy author Thad Beaumont and his “dark half,” George Stark—a former pseudonym turned corporeal being looking to survive by forcing Beaumont to take up his pen name again. The novel on which Romero’s screenplay is based was one of King’s most autobiographical, as he had published a handful of books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

As an adaptation of King’s novel, The Dark Half is among the most literal of films made from the author’s work. There are a handful of minor changes—the gender of Thad’s colleague is switched, a character who survives the novel is killed onscreen, and George Stark’s appearance has been altered to accommodate the double casting of Hutton—but they’re mostly cosmetic; it remains, for the most part, entirely faithful. That means there’s less of Romero on display than in most of his films. The angry social commentary is absent, as is Romero’s wicked sense of humor. It’s a well-directed film—moody, atmospheric, and downright classical—demonstrating that Romero had the stuff to make it as a mainstream studio filmmaker. He just didn’t want that for himself.

Though he won an Oscar for the first film in which he ever appeared (1980’s Ordinary People), Timothy Hutton has always been underrated as an actor. His work in The Dark Half is among his best. It’s not because he plays a dual role, either. Though Hutton’s portrayal of Stark is colorful and threatening, the character is mostly obvious as a villain. It’s instead Hutton’s work as Beaumont that impresses the most: he’s likable but increasingly desperate, decent with enough of an edge to be capable of conjuring up the kind of darkness to create a George Stark. The stunt of Hutton’s double casting works well, too; though written by King to be different types, Romero understood that for the conceit to be effective visually, we needed to see them as two sides of the same coin.

Visually, The Dark Half may look like atypical Romero due to its slick studio polish, but it’s a Romero film through and through. His work has primarily examined the dark side of human nature, and The Dark Half takes that idea and makes it literal. It’s rough in spots—Romero himself has expressed dissatisfaction with the effects added to the climax after an early test screening—but it remains an exceptionally well-crafted film that faithfully brings King’s prose to life in a way so many adaptations of his work fail to do. As we get further away from the 1990s—a decade notoriously difficult for horror—there’s hope that The Dark Half starts to be recognized as both one of the better Stephen King adaptations and one of George Romero’s most overlooked films—maybe even his most.