【英文专访】恐怖大师史蒂芬金最怕什么？

TRANSCRIPT 

GROSS: When you were in your formative years, what were your supernatural fears? And did you always wish you had some of the supernatural powers that you've given some of your characters?

KING: I think it's built in. I think it's just part of human nature. I've been queried a lot about where I get my ideas or how I got interested in this stuff. And at some point, a lot of interviewers just turn into Dr. Freud and put me on the couch and say, what was your childhood like? And I say various things, and I confabulate a little bit and kind of dance around the question as best as I can. But bottom line, my childhood was pretty ordinary, except, from a very early age, I wanted to be scared. I just did. I was scared. Afterwards, I wanted a light on because I was afraid that there was something in the closet.

My imagination was very active, even at a young age. For instance, there was a radio program at that time called "Dimension X," and my mother didn't really want me to listen to that because she felt it was too scary for me. So I would creep out of bed and go to the bedroom door and crack it open. And she loved it, so apparently I got it from her. But I would listen at the door, and then when the program was over (laughter) I'd go back to bed and quake.

GROSS: So you wanted to be scared or, I mean, did you have an avoidance thing with being scared, or did you just want to be scared?

KING: Terry, I loved it. It was a classic attraction-repulsion thing. I wanted to be scared. I wanted that reaction.

GROSS: Are there things that scare you as an adult that you were not aware enough of or smart enough for when you were a kid to understand that these were frightening things?

KING: Well, you grow up, and you become frightened of different things. And they have a tendency to be real-world things.

GROSS: Yeah.

KING: It's been quite a while since I was really afraid that there was a boogeyman in my closet. Although I am still very careful to keep my feet under the covers when I go to sleep because the covers are magic, and if your feet are covered, it's like boogeyman kryptonite. So I'm not as afraid of that as I used to be. The supernatural stuff doesn't get to me anymore. But here's the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years. The movie opens with a woman in late middle age, sitting at a table and writing a story. And the story goes something like, then the branches creaked in the - and she stops and she says to her husband, what are those things? I can't think of them. They're in the backyard, and they're very tall and birds land on the branches. And he says, why, Iris, those are trees. And she says, yes. How silly of me. And she writes the word and the movie starts. That's Iris Murdoch. And she's suffering the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

GROSS: Yeah.

KING: That's the boogeyman in the closet now.

GROSS: Why is that the thing you're most afraid of?

KING: I'm afraid of losing my mind.

GROSS: Losing your memory.

KING: Well, you don't just lose your memory. You lose your mind. Basically, you lose your identity, your sense of who you are. Here's what I'm saying - as we get older, our fears in some way sharpen and become more personal because we can no longer, let's say, take a book like "It" or maybe "Christine" and say these are make-believe fears. Instead, we have more of a tendency to focus on things that we know are out there. We fear for our families. We fear for our mental abilities. We fear for diseases. These are very real fears. So when you ask me what I'm afraid of, I'd say I still go to see ghost movies when I get a chance or some sort of supernatural being, that kind of thing. But it doesn't scare me as it scared me when I was a child. But on the other hand, if I see a wonderful writer like Iris Murdoch losing her mind, I have more of a tendency to focus on that than how loving her husband was, which is supposed to be the uplifting part of that film.

BIANCULLI: Stephen King, recorded in 2013.