Stephen King Made Winter the Scariest Time of the Year

The Dead Zone

In the case of this King masterpiece, the passage of time and the change of seasons is an important part of the story’s background, but the 1983 David Cronenberg film based on the novel puts the wintry atmosphere right in the heart of the action, creating a melancholy, gray, overcast mood in the film that is suited to the tragic tale of Johnny Smith and the power he awakens with after a five-year coma, which proves to be both a blessing and a curse.

Cronenberg shot the movie in Ontario, Canada in January ’83, with conditions so cold thanks to lingering frigid temperatures that the cast and crew almost couldn’t stand it at times. But there’s no question that the icy locations, the snow-packed gazebo sequence (in which Johnny uses his powers to catch a serial killer), and the ever-present chill in the air—all foreshadowing Johnny’s eventual self-sacrifice to stop a psychopathic politician—provide a distinct atmosphere that contributes to this being one of the very best King adaptations.

The Breathing Method

The only one of the four novellas in King’s seminal 1983 collection Different Seasons not to be filmed—the other three are Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (filmed as The Shawshank Redemption), The Body (filmed as Stand by Me), and Apt Pupil—this truly odd tale within a tale begins with a framing story that’s set on the Thursday before Christmas. It’s on this day that the members of a very unusual men’s club (where someone can get lost in the rooms upstairs) hear a story told by an elderly doctor about the strangest childbirth he ever saw.

Although director Scott Derrickson (The Black Phone) has been attached to a film version of the story for a decade (via Deadline), to be honest, The Breathing Method just doesn’t seem like strong material for a film. The main story—about a woman determined to give birth to her illegitimate child no matter what—is fairly thin, with a horrific, macabre punchline, and much of the the mood is set at that vividly described men’s club on that late December day. It’s even subtitled, “A Winter’s Tale,” and King depicts a snowy, slushy, frosty New York City to perfection.

“One for the Road”

Stephen King never wrote a full-fledged, novel-length sequel to his landmark novel ‘Salem’s Lot (although he reportedly toyed with the idea on and off for years), but this 1977 short story, first published in a local Maine magazine and later reprinted in his 1978 Night Shift collection, is probably as close as we’ll ever get (not counting the Father Callahan character from the novel showing up in a couple of the later entries in The Dark Tower cycle).

In the story, set three years after the events of ‘Salem’s Lot, two men are sitting in a bar during a heavy Maine blizzard when a third man bursts in, saying his car is stranded in the snow with his wife and daughter still inside. When he tells the men where the car is trapped, just inside the burned out remains of the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, they quickly realize that a fate worse than freezing to death may already have embraced the man’s family. The drifting snow, the howling wind, and the dark, treacherous road leading into the Lot all play an integral role in this chilling (in all sense of the word) tale, which serves as a bracing reminder that ‘Salem’s Lot is no place to trifle with.