Stephen King’s Most Memorable Movie Night Has a Wild Connection to the Soviet Union
The movie had quite a scary way of intertwining with reality back then.
Summary:
- Stephen King may remain one of few people who are most likely not afraid of anything anymore, but one visit to the cinema theater back in his childhood years hit the proclaimed author quite hard, and not because of the movie he was watching.
- In the 1950s, King caught Fred F. Sears’ Earth vs. the Flying Saucers still playing in the cinemas, though it had premiered some time ago from then, but the movie was eventually interrupted by a sinister announcement.
- King later on revealed that, due to all the circumstances of this movie-going experience, the film left him “terribly frightened and alone and depressed”.
Stephen King now is surely not scared of almost anything given his long-standing status of the King of horror, but back in the day seeing a movie in the theater was something really mind-boggling for him.
In the 1950s, while being a little boy, King discovered Fred F. Sears’ Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in the cinema, though the film had premiered sometime before that. The proclaimed author later on admitted that it was “a movie I’ll certainly never forget”, but such a compliment had nothing to do with the film’s storyline in particular.
In one of his interviews several years ago, Stephen King recalled that he had been lucky to catch Earth vs. the Flying Saucers still playing in the theaters after a year and a half after its initial release.
The movie itself seemingly didn’t impress King that much, as he himself called the film “pretty standard stuff, about an invasion of earth by this deadly race of aliens from a dying planet”, but what happened towards the end was something that the author would probably never be able to erase from his memory.
King then proceeded clarifying that the movie was reaching its best part threatening everyone with the apocalypse and “the final, cataclysmic interstellar battle about to be joined”, but then the screen suddenly got turned off.
As it turned out, the film’s run was interrupted by an announcement from the cinema’s manager saying that the Soviet Union had launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit around the Earth.
Somehow, young Stephen King still connected the dots in a way that left him “terribly frightened and alone and depressed”. According to the author, staying in that theater with the screen off and an official threat sent by Russians, he saw some kind of parallel between the movie’s storyline and the reality where something loaded with H-bombs could hit him or anyone nearby at any moment.
King then admitted that he’d sensed all that horror of a potential nuclear disaster coming up, and “a transition from fantasy to a real world suddenly became far more ominous and threatening”.
Source: Playboy