Special Issue #2

their deaths can create a real sense of mourning and disruption for fans. As a popular
tweet states:

“Don’t let people make you feel bad for mourning a fictional character. I studied
neuroscience in undergrad and your brain can’t tell the difference between
feelings for fiction and feelings for reality. All it knows is that you’re feeling really
strongly. So if you lose something that’s fictional, like a character, your brain
perceives it as a real loss and something that needs to be mourned. So cry it out,
scream it out, talk it out. Do whatever you need to do to deal with it and process
it.”[3]

Whether or not the brain perceives the death of fictional characters in precisely the
same way as a real death, fans clearly feel the need to have a mourning process for
fictional characters and seek validation for those feelings. Many people dismiss these
emotions as unreal because they involve a parasocial relationship, one that can never
be reciprocated, but it is clear that many people seek validation in their feelings of loss
when it comes to fictional characters, and that increasingly it is becoming recognized as
a real form of loss.[4] It is interesting that, despite the circumstances, Paul doesn’t
dismiss Annie’s grief in the scene in which she laments Misery’s death. He’s obviously
trying to de-escalate the situation to prevent further violence, but it is important that he
recognizes that the most effective way of doing that is to acknowledge Misery as a
genuine loss for Annie. He does speak of her as if she were a real person in a real
context. “In 1871, women died in childbirth all the time,” Paul tries to reason with Annie.
“She died; she just slipped away.” Instead of telling Annie that Misery isn’t real, he tells
her it’s her spirit that’s important, and that will carry on. He does not dismiss her but
tries to argue that Misery’s death fits within his narrative. Paul acknowledges, in short,
that Annie’s connection and her emotions are real. She is clearly beginning an authentic
grief process, though she does linger in the denial-anger stages of the Kubler-Ross
model, not quite making it to the critical “acceptance” stage.

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Many fans also feel the anger that Annie displays when their favorite characters come
to an undeserving end. In Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity, and Self-
Narrative, Rebecca Williams studied fan responses to character death through surveys
taken before and after the final episode featuring Cordelia Chase on the Buffy the
Vampire Slayer spin-off Angel. She found that fans “displayed ‘frustration and
antagonism’ with those responsible for writing Cordelia out of the series.”[5] Williams
compares this desire for satisfying, deserved deaths with the ars moriendi. The “ars
moriendi” – “the art of dying” – were 15th-century instructive pamphlets on the art of
dying well.[6] Williams argues that fans demand a befitting end to beloved characters
that fits in with the series’s emotional continuity, one that does the character justice. A
poor narrative end leaves fans bitter and angry.

On the other hand, denial is a very productive phase of the mourning process for fans,
particularly in ongoing works where character death can be rectified. As we saw with
Sherlock Holmes, authors can be pressured to bring back fan faves. Sustained petitions
have saved other characters that were given the ax. Marvel fans refused to accept the
death of Phil Coulson in 2012’s Avengers, using the tag #CoulsonLives to express their
denial. They created stickers and t-shirts with the slogan until the studio agreed to bring
him back in the TV series Agents of SHIELD. Fans even showed up in person at the
studio in Vancouver to protest the killing off of Stargate: Atlantic character Carson
Beckett.[7] Resurrections work best in shows rooted in sci-fi and fantasy, where authors
can come up with creative means to bring back dead characters through clones,
alternative timelines, or other magical or otherworldly tropes. Coulson was brought back
to life in an ultra-secret resurrection program called “Project Tahiti”: Beckett returned as
a clone.

Unfortunately, authors working in more realistic fictional worlds, like Paul Sheldon, have
a bigger challenge ahead of them. As Williams invoked the “ars moriendi,” the art
of dying, I propose that for fans like Annie, there is also an “ars resurrectionem” – the art

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of resurrecting well. Annie rejects Paul’s initial attempt at continuing the Misery series
because it doesn’t follow appropriately from the end of the latest “canonical” text. He left
Misery in the grave at the end of the last book; he has to start there for the next one,
although this isn’t always as much of a problem for fans as it is for Annie. And in fact, it
can even turn into something of a fandom joke, depending on the frequency. It’s so
common in some genres, soap operas and comic books in particular, that it would be
more surprising if characters actually stayed dead, and probably less outlandish than
other things that have happened. But there is a sense of frustration when deaths and
resurrections don’t fit well within the represented world.[8] If the death or resurrection
doesn’t conform to the narrative’s emotional reality, fans won’t hesitate to express
frustration with resurrections that cheapen character arcs and challenge the logical
underpinnings of the fictional world, just as Annie does.

An important aspect that Annie is missing out on is the collective nature of fandom
experience. Isolation is a common theme in Stephen King’s writings–Paul’s isolation
being the most obvious in Misery. But Annie is isolated as well. Fans mourning their
favorite characters typically do so collectively, and grief counselors discussing fictional
loss emphasize keeping up social networks as a vital part of the grieving
process.[9] There were fan communities in the late 1980s (the film was released in 1990,
and the book in 1987, so we can presume that they are taking place in the late 1980s),
but they were not as widespread or accessible as they are now. Today, with the internet
and massive platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Livejournal bringing fans together, fans
have a community that can help them find acceptance for fictional loss. But Annie is
isolated in her Misery experience. She doesn’t discuss accessing a wider fandom of
others who can share in her grief. Of course, her isolation is mostly self-inflicted, given
her propensity for cold-blooded murder and the likely social rejection suffered after she
was accused of murdering infants while working as a nurse. But no matter the origin of
the isolation, she is missing out on a vital social resource that may have helped her
come to terms with Misery’s death.

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Modern fandom has also presented us with another tool for dealing with character
death. While fanfiction has, depending on the definition, been around as long as the
written word (an oft-cited example is Dante’s self-insert Aeneid fanfiction The Inferno),
in the past several decades, the modern form has gone from an illegal, shunned
practice to one gaining in respectability with each passing year.[10] The Organization for
Transformative Works was founded in 2007 to protect and archive fan works, and to
argue that fanfiction and other transformative works are a legal practice under the Fair
Use doctrine.[11] It’s recently been playfully lambasted in shows like Brooklyn-99, Parks
and Recreation, and Supernatural. There have been several notable works recently that
openly started as fanfiction, the most famous example being Fifty Shades of Grey, a
multimillion-dollar book and film franchise in its own right, which was initially written as
a Twilight fanfiction posted online called “Master of the Universe.” This process, of
turning fanfiction into original fiction, is known as “filing off the serial numbers.”[12] Writer
Mike Flanagan said he thought of his critically acclaimed adaptation of Shirley
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House “as fanfic for a while.”[13] Clearly, the respectability
and prestige of fanfiction has dramatically increased in the last several years, but how
has that affected fans’ response to character death?

Fanfiction can offer fans a refuge from accepting the character’s death at all. With
fanfiction, fans can craft “Alternative Universes” in which characters never die at all–for
instance, the resurrection of the character Phil Coulson between 2012’s Avengers and
the 2013 series Agents of SHIELD. There are 287 works tagged on Archive of Our Own
with both the character tag “Phil Coulson” and “Fix-it” between Avengers‘ premiere
date, when audiences learned of his fate, and the official announcement of his return at
San Diego Comic-Con in October 2012.[14] There are 630 works using the dedicated tag
#CoulsonLives. Fanfiction can give fans “a powerful sense of participatory equality” in
the creation process.[15] Fans are increasingly empowered to “fix” narratives they find
unsatisfactory and to share that work with a community to offer an alternative to the
disappointing or heartbreaking source material.

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This isn’t to say that fanfiction has entirely replaced fan petitions; rather, it’s given fans a
new tool for narrative satisfaction while they wait for the fruits of their labors. “Canon” is
still the ideal. While fanfiction can offer an alternative for disappointed and grieving fans,

it often exists
alongside the desire
to see characters
brought back in the
“reality” of the
fictional universe, if
the series is
ongoing and such a
resurrection would
fit into the logic of
the world. Marvel
fans also continued
to campaign for
Coulson’s return. They used the “Coulson Lives” hashtag both as a genre of fanfiction
and a call for the canon creators to bring him back, and they were ultimately rewarded
when their campaigns worked. They don’t always. There can be many factors that
preclude a resurrection, and fans turn to their communities to mourn and be empowered
to fix things themselves. “There’s always fanfiction” has in recent years become
something of a humorous refrain in the face of disappointing narratives. Perhaps under
a different set of circumstances, Annie would not have been so isolated. Only a few
years later, she could have had a community of people to reach out to collectively
grieve for Misery’s untimely demise. They may have given her alternative narratives in
which to take refuge. Alternatively, perhaps they would have encouraged her to pick up
Paul’s narrative herself and write a better future for Misery.

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But perhaps not. In fact, the thought that she could take Misery’s fate into her own
hands did enter Annie’s head. When the sheriff grows suspicious of her and arrives at
her home to question Annie about Paul’s disappearance, she concocts this very
scenario to cover the presence of the typewriter and the manuscript. She tells the sheriff
that God told her that she would be the missing and presumed dead Paul’s
replacement, to write new Misery stories just as he did. It’s the very feeling many fanfic
writers over the years have had, to seize a character’s fates from the hands of the
author and work out a happier ending for themselves. (Though I don’t know many fic
writers who would claim to be divinely ordained in their hobby.) Of course, instead,
Annie holds the author hostage until he resurrects Misery for her. After all, Annie Wilkes
is a serial killer with a long history of not being afraid to kill to get what she wants, and
Paul falls right into her clutches.

The convenience of Paul’s proximity and vulnerability and Annie’s history of using
violence to get her way may have won over accepting an “alternative universe” in which
fans brought Misery back to life. It is what makes Annie Wilkes the great villainous fan,
a symbol of toxic idealization and the worst of fan culture. While Annie’s grief and her
desire for Misery’s resurrection are relatable emotions for many modern fans, her
methods are not. Most fans prefer to turn to less violent actions like petitions or letter-
writing campaigns to get their favorite characters back–and when that fails, they turn to
sites like Archive of Our Own or fanfiction.net to take matters into their own hands. Or at
least, one hopes so.

Notes:
[1] Valiunas, “The Man Who Hated Sherlock Holmes.”
[2] Armstrong, “How Sherlock Holmes Changed the World.”
[3] @byronicben.
[4] Cummings, “Mourning a Fictional Character.”
[5] Williams, 52.
[6] Ariès, 107.

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[7] Hobbs, “What It Feels Like.”
[8] Williams, 50.
[9] Cummins, “Mourning a Fictional Character.”
[10] Burt, “Promise and Potential of Fan-Fiction.”
[11] Organization for Transformative Works.
[12] Cuccinello, “Fifty Shades of Green.”
[13] Stack, “The Haunting of Hill House.”
[14] Sunu, ”NYCC.”
[15] Burt, “Promise and Potential of Fan-fiction.”

Works Cited:
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes

Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years. Trans. Helen Weaver.
Vintage Books, 1981.
Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin. “How Sherlock Holmes Changed the World.” BBC. 6
January 2016. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160106-how-sherlock-
holmes-changed-the-world
Burt, Stephanie. “The Promise and Potential of Fan-Fiction.” The New Yorker. 23
August 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-promise-and-
potential-of-fan-fiction
@byronicben. Twitter Post. 18 Dec. 2020, 12:22
AM. https://twitter.com/byronicben/status/1207169191301640192
Cuccinello, Hayley C. “Fifty Shades of Green: How Fanfiction Went From Dirty Little
Secret to Money Machine.” Forbes. 10 Feb.
2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2017/02/10/fifty-shades-of-
green-how-fanfiction-went-from-dirty-little-secret-to-money-machine
Cummings, Eleanor. “Mourning a Fictional Character is Perfectly Valid.” Popular
Science. 29 April 2019. https://www.popsci.com/mourning-fictional-characters/

106

Hobbs, Thomas. “What It Feels Like to Have an Army of Superfans.” Vice. 28 Oct.
2015. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/vdxqqy/the-night-i-met-an-intergalactic-
space-doctor-at-a-bar-in-prague

Organization for Transformative Works. “What We Believe,” transformativeworks.org,
Accessed 28 Aug. 2020. https://www.transformativeworks.org/what_we_believe/

Stack, Tim. “The Haunting of Hill House Creator Mike Flanagan on Hidden Clues, Major
Scares, and a Season 2.” Entertainment Weekly. 23 Oct.
2018. https://ew.com/tv/2018/10/23/the-haunting-of-hill-house-mike-flanagan-
post-mortem/

Sunu, Steve.”NYCC: Coulson Lives in Whedon’s ‘SHIELD’. Comic Book Resources.
Archived 14 Oct.
2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20121014153558/http://www.comicbookresour
ces.com/?page=article&id=41

Valiunas, Algis. “The Man Who Hated Sherlock Holmes.” The Washington Examiner. 29
Aug. 1999. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-man-who-
hated-sherlock-holmes

Williams, Rebecca. Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identify, and Self-
Narrative. Bloomsbury, 2015.

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GENDER-FLIPPED TOXIC FAN
CULTURE IN MISERY

Sezín Koehler

The once innocuous phrase “I’m your number one fan” took a sharp turn
toward the menacing after Kathy Bates uttered it in Rob Reiner’s 1990
adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. Said by Annie Wilkes after rescuing her
favorite romance novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan), who almost died in a
snowstorm car accident, the phrase initially explains why Annie happened to
be in the right place at just the moment her beloved author’s car crashed. But
once it is clear that Annie has no intention of ever letting Paul go from her
isolated Colorado farm, even after his broken legs and collarbone have healed,
the next question is: how far will this uberfan go to keep him in her mercurial
graces? The answer is pretty damn far down the road of extreme violence and
mutilation.

When Misery first hit cinemas in 1990, incidents of major fan-based violence
were outlier behavior, exemplified by John Hinckley Jr.’s attempt to assassinate
President Ronald Reagan[1] in order to get the attention of Jodie Foster,
or Mark David
Chapman’s murder of
John Lennon[2] in
front of his Chelsea
Hotel home. Kathy
Bates’ Oscar-winning
turn as Annie Wilkes
embodied one of the
first psycho stalkers
on-screen to target a

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celebrity, her favorite author Paul Sheldon. The downward spiral
in Misery properly begins after Annie kidnaps Paul and reads his new novel, a
gritty departure from the romance genre and a book he hopes will bring him
some real literary credibility. When Annie forces him to burn his manuscript,
already knowing that Paul’s writing ritual involves keeping only one copy of
his final draft, the audience realizes that Annie is a bit too invested in Paul’s
work.

Things continue to escalate when Annie finally reads the newest installment of
the Misery Chastain romance books and discovers that Paul has killed Annie’s
beloved heroine. In a rage, Annie terrorizes Paul into writing a new Misery
novel that brings back her imaginary best friend. And whenever Paul makes
any steps towards healing, Annie thwarts his recovery by reinjuring him in
brutal ways, including hobbling both of his feet with a mallet once she learns
he has been sneaking out of the bedroom that serves as his de-facto prison.

This year is Misery’s 30th birthday, and it is truly remarkable how the movie
(and the book) essentially predicted toxic fan culture, except in gender-flipped
form, long before we had the internet and social media. The real-life Annie
Wilkeses, who stalk, threaten, and assault tend to be men, and it is often
female creatives who are their targets. Sandra Bullock’s number one
fan[3] regularly and secretly broke into her home, watching while she and her
kids were there, and eventually killing himself in a police standoff. Selena
Gomez’s number one fan[4] tried to get a restraining order against himself
because voices were telling him to mutilate and kill her. These incidents are
telling, as are some of the more extreme cases, including The Voice’s Christina
Grimmie,[5] who was murdered in public by a male fan who then died by
suicide. While cases do exist of fan violence perpetuated by women, such as
when Chicana singer Selena was killed by the president of her fan
club,[6] these incidents are rare.

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In the three decades since Misery, and no doubt thanks to the internet and
social media giving fans more access to the celebrities they love, incidents of
violence, stalking, and even sexual assault have increased in frequency. Iggy
Azalea talked about having to wear several pairs of underwear to crowd surf in
a skirt because fans would try to sexually assault and penetrate her without
her consent.[7] She eventually stopped jumping into the crowd because even
the multiple-underwear hack didn’t solve the problem. Amanda Palmer, who
often does after-show signings and meet-and-greets in very little clothing as a
signal of trust, tells a story in her memoir, The Art of Asking, about two
superfans who sexually assaulted her as their photo was being taken.[8]
In yet another page out of Annie Wilkes’ cracked playbook, we are even at a
point where super fans start petitions for creators to completely redo a movie
or television show season that did not meet their expectations, such as in the
final season of Game of Thrones [9] and in new installments of the more
inclusive Star Wars.[10] This incredible sense of fan entitlement in response to
creators’ outputs leads right back to the original “number one fan” Annie
Wilkes and often thinly-veiled misogyny and intersections to other forms of
bigotry like racism.

110

Extending Misery’s narrative base, Castle Rock’s second season[11] returns to
find Annie Wilkes in a slightly altered state and offers us more about her
history and compelling backstory. We learn the reason she loves reading so
much is that she struggled to read for years, and conquering that problem was
a huge point of pride for Annie. But in Castle Rock, we also see the various
psychoses that live in Annie emerge one by one and we recognize the origins
of isolation and delusion that will define her in Misery.

However, when King wrote Misery, it was meant to be a parable about
addiction, with the story’s celebrity obsession serving as a metaphor for King’s
cocaine habit. “Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She
was my number-one fan,” King told Rolling Stone.[12] And in many ways, this
still tracks today. Why else would people become so enamored of a famous
person they might never meet or, if they have, likely only had at most a
superficial encounter? In another reversal of King’s addiction metaphor,
celebrities and the characters they inhabit become the drug and fans become
the users. We relate to them from a distance because we feel they would
understand us if they had a chance to get to know us. And in the case of many
of the terrifying celebrity stalker men, this obsession has often turned sexual
coupled with a misplaced sense of entitlement to the person. I’ve seen your
movie a hundred times. I’ve memorized your book. Your television show
changed my life. Your album saved me.

As fan culture has gotten more and more toxic over the years, we can now
actually take Misery at face value as a substance abuse parable wrapped in a
horror story. Watching Misery back in the 1990s, it felt like such a far-fetched
scenario that someone, anyone at all, would go to such lengths and depths of
depravity just to be close to a celebrity they love. Watching Misery in 2020
encapsulates the kind of toxic fan culture we see every day playing out on

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social media, as followers demand celebrities’ attention. It’s disappointing that
thirty years later, the norm of fan culture is the borderline psychotic behavior
of real-life Annie Wilkeses, who often make fandoms dangerous places, rather
than the spaces of silly distraction they ought to be.

But with the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and its shelter-in-place
requirements, the dynamic between fan and celebrity is being redefined yet
again. Thanks to social media, we have new glimpses into our favorite
celebrities’ lavish lives, some of which are showing precisely the enormous gap
between the rich and beautiful and the rest of us regular folks. While a few
celebrities like American Horror Story co-star Leslie Jordan[13] are making
weird little videos poking fun at themselves, the majority of famous folks
sharing their quarantine experience online have produced messaging that is
beyond inappropriate during a global crisis–for example, the embarrassing
“Imagine” video[14] featuring privileged celebrities singing verses of John
Lennon’s socialist anthem from their mansions as if this was supposed to
comfort those of us stuck in rented apartments we might not be able to pay
for in a month. While Ellen DeGeneres has been problematic for a while now,
her horrific comments about her lavish home being like a prison, including the
fact it’s “filled with gays”[15] were unconscionable. Madonna musing in her
enormous bathtub and bathroom the size of an average person’s apartment
about how COVID-19 will be the great social equalizer was the very pinnacle
of irony.[16]

Which makes me wonder: Will the pandemic create new number one fans
obsessed with stars now that they’ve virtually been inside their homes? Or will
our new disenchantment with our heroes and favorite artists end up dousing
some of the celebrity infatuations? In Annie’s case, she isn’t actually interested
in authentically knowing Paul. Instead, he is merely the space onto which she

112

projects her hopes and dreams for companionship. But for us, in the real
world, will glimpses into the real lives of our celebrity favorites make it harder
to project our own desires onto them?

Thirty years later, if Misery predicted the toxic fan culture we live in now, then
maybe the pandemic and its gaze into the lives of the super-wealthy celebs
might help dismantle this toxic dynamic and maybe even politicize wealth the

way it should be
politicized given
the vast disparities
we’ve seen online.
Even America’s
dad Tom Hanks
quipped on the
first socially
distanced episode
of Saturday Night Live about how much nicer his apartment is than those of
the SNL cast[17]—and these kinds of remarks are just not funny anymore. Not
when regular folks can’t get tested for the coronavirus even if they have
symptoms. Not when families are getting landed with huge medical bills they
cannot pay now that so many are out of work. Not when folks are getting
evicted thanks to the current economic depression. These dynamics get even
worse when you consider the fact that the entire reason so many celebrities
are rich and famous in the first place is because the vast majority already had
a privileged upbringing that gave them the safety net to break into creative
fields, including a family that paved their way into their own millions.[18]

In Misery, Annie Wilkes adored Paul Sheldon because she felt lesser than those
around her. Hero worship was an escape from her reality, and thanks to her
compassionate portrayal in Castle Rock, we learn that Annie’s low self-esteem

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reaches back to her father’s death and the emotional abandonment she
endured long before it. As a result, Annie believed herself to be unworthy of
kindness and decency, let alone love. A wall went up between her and the
world, distancing and isolating her from her peers thanks to a mental illness
(or many) that were never properly diagnosed. So, she did what any lonely
person does. She latched on to a safe place that was always constant: Paul
Sheldon and his novels.

It is incredibly likely that the root of the toxic fan culture embodied by the
fictional Annie Wilkes and her real life counterparts is also a result of social
isolation and a feeling that the only people who might understand us are
those who are only accessible through our imagination and our screens.
If Misery foreshadowed the kind of toxic fan culture and celebrity cult worship
we have come to take as expected, even when it turns violent, then maybe it’s
time to stop being scared of who we might be without the deflection of a
celebrity to distract us from looking into a mirror and coming to terms with
what might be reflected there. If Misery predicted these thirty years of peak
toxic fandom, then maybe now is finally the right moment to end it.

Notes:
[1] Wilbur.
[2] Grow.
[3] Puente.
[4] Associated Press.
[5] McLaughlin.
[6] Nicolaou.
[7] Sevilla.
[8] Palmer, 272-275.
[9] Deerwester.

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[10] Miller.
[11] Castle Rock Season 2.
[12] Greene.
[13] Respers France.
[14] Schwedel.
[15] Lee.
[16] Owoseje.
[17] Romero.
[18] Salmon.

Works cited:
Associated Press. “Selena Gomez Stalker Sentenced to Treatment.” Billboard,

21 June, 2014, https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-
shop/6128691/selena-gomez-stalker-sentenced-to-treatment.
Castle Rock Season 2. Created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason. Bad Robot
Productions, 2019.
Deerwester, Jayme. “’Game of Thrones’ star weighs in on petition to redo final
season: ‘That sucks.’” USA Today, 16 May, 2019,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2019/05/16/game-thrones-fans-
sign-petition-remake-season-8/3691075002/.
Greene, Andy. “Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone
Magazine, 31 October, 2014,
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/stephen-king-
the-rolling-stone-interview-191529/.
Grow, Kory. “John Lennon’s Killer: ‘I Know What Shame Is Now.’” Rolling Stone
Magazine, 15 November, 2018,
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/john-lennons-killer-
mark-david-chapman-shame-757134/.

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Lee, Alicia. “Ellen DeGeneres sparks backlash after joking that self-quarantine
is like ‘being in jail.’” CNN, 9 April, 2020,
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/entertainment/ellen-degeneres-
quarantine-jail-trnd/index.html.

McLaughlin, Elliot C. “Christina Grimmie’s killer was obsessed with her, police
say.” CNN, 22 June, 2016,
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/22/us/christina-grimmie-the-voice-
orlando-police-end-investigation/index.html.

Miller, Matt. “The Year Star Wars Fans Finally Ruined Star Wars.” Esquire, 13
December, 2018,
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a25560063/how-fans-
ruined-star-wars-the-last-jedi-2018/.

Nicolaou, Elena. “Whatever Happened to Yolanda Saldívar, Selena Quintanilla’s
Killer?” Oprah Magazine, 30 March, 2020,
https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/a31881895/yolanda-
saldivar-now/.

Owoseje, Towin. “‘Coronavirus is ‘the great equalizer,’ Madonna tells fans from
her bathtub.” CNN, 23 March, 2020,
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/entertainment/madonna-coronavirus-
video-intl-scli/index.html.

Palmer, Amanda. The Art of Asking. Grand Central Publishing, 2014.
Puente, Maria. “Sandra Bullock’s convicted stalker kills self after a standoff with

police.” USA Today, 3 May, 2018,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2018/05/03/sandra-bullocks-
convicted-stalker-kills-self-after-standoff-cops/577013002/.
Respers France, Lisa. “Quarantine and Instagram are making Leslie Jordan the
star he’s always been.” CNN, 11 April, 2020,
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/entertainment/leslie-jordan-
instagram/index.html.

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Romero, Dennis. “’SNL’ airs first show since coronavirus shutdowns with Tom
Hanks as host.” NBC News, 12 April, 2020.
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/live-their-bedrooms-it-s-snl-
n1182046

Salmon, Colin. “Nepotism in the movies: it’s time to call out the acting school
of mum and dad.” The Guardian, 24 July, 2019,
“https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jul/24/nepotism-in-the-
movies-its-time-to-call-out-the-acting-school-of-mum-and-dad.

Schwedel, Heather. “A Video of Celebrities Singing ‘Imagine’ So Bad It Can
Bring Us All Together in Hatred.” Slate, 19 March, 2020,
https://slate.com/culture/2020/03/celebrities-singing-imagine-video-
explained.html.

Sevilla, Kate. “Iggy Azalea Had To Stop Crowd Surfing Because People Kept
Touching Her Vagina.” Buzzfeed, 24 April, 2014,
https://www.buzzfeed.com/catesevilla/iggy-azalea-had-to-stop-crowd-
surfing-because-people-kept-to.

Wilbur, Del Quentin. “He once tried to kill President Reagan. Now John
Hinckley says he’s ‘happy as a clam.’” LA Times, 26 March, 2019,
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-hinckley-living-in-freedom-
20190326-story.html.

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M I S E R Y, H O S T E L A N D T O R T U R E
PORN

Eric J. Lawrence

The first full page of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery introduces the initial, muddled
thoughts of his severely injured protagonist, author Paul Sheldon:

The pain was somewhere below the sounds. The pain was east of the sun and south
of his ears. That was all he did know.

For some length of time that seemed very long (and so was, since the pain and the
stormy haze were the only two things which existed) those sounds were the only
outer reality. He had no idea who he was or where he was and he cared to know
neither. He wished he was dead, but through the pain-soaked haze that filled his
mind like a summer storm cloud, he did not know he wished it. [i]

Fans more familiar with Rob Reiner’s 1990 film adaptation of King’s novel might
recognize this moment when James Caan as Paul flits in and out of consciousness after
his accident; it occurs after a brief preamble that more formally introduces the character
and his profession and depicts the accident itself. Regular viewers of cinematic horror,
however, might find similarities between King’s description and those moments of
terrifying clarity experienced by particular victims in horror. Such a situation involves a
successful, urbane, attractive individual having undergone some sort of agonizing
experience, only to find themselves uncomfortably confined and menaced by some
(often rural) antagonist. It’s a scenario that plays out throughout horror cinema history,
from The Old Dark House (1963) to The Hills Have Eyes (1977). This popular trope has
been reimagined and amplified in the twenty-first century, thanks to the subgenre
known as “torture porn.”

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As its name suggests,

“torture porn” revolves

around characters

being tormented, both

psychologically and

physically, in grimly

inventive ways; they are

designed to captivate

the viewers’ gaze, even

if partially obscured by

Figure 1 Paul’s first return to consciousness, where he is bloodied as if tortured the fingers of the
squeamish. While

slasher films, with their sudden, violent, but usually quick kills, dominated horror cinema

for much of the end of the last century, examples with more drawn-out, psychologically

tormenting scenes of inflicted pain began to reemerge on movie screens in the early

2000s. Of course, torture has appeared as a cinematic plot device throughout the history

of the medium, from The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) to the elaborate death traps of the

James Bond films. Misery, however, plays an unexpected role in the evolution of torture

porn, bringing the combination of fear and pain to an appreciative mainstream

audience, in addition to approval from critics and the Academy alike—with Kathy Bates

winning the Best Actress Academy Award for her role as Annie Wilkes. Examining how it

compares with some of the key examples of the torture porn genre, specifically writer

and director Eli Roth’s Hostel films (2005 and 2007), suggests a closer kinship than its

critical acceptance (in contrast to torture porn’s revilement) might suggest.

The term “torture porn” was coined by critic David Edelstein in an influential essay
published in New York magazine in early 2006, fresh on the heels of the release of the
films that have come to represent the core of the genre: Saw (2004), Saw II,
and Hostel (both 2005). Edelstein’s negative response to these and other examples
revolves around the question of where complicity falls – whether on the filmmakers or

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the viewers – when it comes to the act of consuming such extreme and violent imagery
as entertainment. Edelstein closes his essay by admitting, “I am complicit in one sense,
though. I’ve described all this freak-show sensationalism with relish, enjoying – like
these filmmakers – the prospect of titillating and shocking. Was it good for you, too?”
His argument, unfortunately, fails to expand upon the long-standing accusation of the
corrupting power of popular culture; while one could make the case, as Edelstein does,
that some of these films can only manage to portray a “viciously nihilistic” world, their
potential perniciousness in affecting the behavior of viewers is mitigated by the failure
of similar complaints leveled at comic books in the 1950s, heavy metal music in the
1970s, violent video games in the 1990s, etc. to demonstrate any widespread negative
effects.

In fact, as L. Andrew Cooper argues, it is precisely political more than artistic forces that
brought about the burst of similarly-themed films that make up the torture porn
genre.[ii] The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent scandal regarding human rights abuses
at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 put a spotlight on the US government’s “enhanced
interrogation techniques.” Some critics perceive this connection to films like Hostel as
giving Americans the opportunity to be represented as victims (not just perpetrators), as
American travelers are tormented in their journeys abroad by shadowy, amoral,
commercial organizations. In the case of Hostel, it is a company that caters to wealthy
individuals seeking to inflict torture and, ultimately, death on a random victim with no
consequences (echoing The Most Dangerous Game [1932], from a century earlier). The
fee for acquiring this service is based on the nationality of said victim, with Americans
being the most expensive.

Some find these storylines disingenuous. Catherine Zimmer writes of torture porn films
that they “present teenagers or young adults as victims of kidnap and torture during
those first youthful escapades abroad that are now a tradition of upper-middle-class
Americans. The emergence of these narratives of American youth, frequently men, going

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abroad and finding themselves immersed in what often amounts to an economy of
torture must be read as a tremendously projective fantasy – a fantasy in which American
youth are figured as the victims rather than as perpetrators of this kind of organized
violence.”[iii] Yet, the opposite conclusion about the message of these films can equally
apply: Aaron Michael Kerner argues that the myth of American exceptionalism
emboldens these tourists to seek cheap, often exploitative thrills in economically
disadvantaged locations, expecting to be treated as welcome visitors, only to find
themselves righteously (albeit disproportionately) punished for their arrogance.[iv] It
should also be noted that the 2005 Australian thriller, Wolf Creek, which Edelstein cites
in his piece as a particularly nasty example of torture porn, features British tourists
confronted by a murderous resident of the former colony’s rural outback, so Americans
are hardly the only victims portrayed in such films. More than a question of nationality,
the key element of these films is egotism.

The allegory of misguided American exceptionalism has certainly been made more
literal in this batch of post 9/11 cinematic horror stories, but its roots are evident in
purely domestic antecedents as well, as Hilary Neroni notes: “All torture porn films take
torture out of the realm of immediate national need and place it in a more individual
and personal level. These films ask, if torture can produce military secrets, why can’t it
produce personal secrets, or why can’t it demand personal change?”[v] The cautionary
tale of the city-dwelling “tourist” wandering into the more rural parts of the country
serves as the lesson in earlier scarefests such as Psycho (1960) and The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre (1974).

In related fashion, I argue, Misery sets up exactly such an opposition between Paul as a
coastal elite and Annie as a small-town farmer from middle America. Paul retreats to the
Silver Creek Lodge in Colorado to finish his novels, after which he celebrates in his
traditional fashion with a glass of champagne and a single cigarette. Annie, on the other
hand, doesn’t even know the correct pronunciation of Dom Pérignon. Annie’s idea of

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cuisine consists of “scrambled eggs à la Wilkes” and a personal brand of meatloaf the

secret ingredients of which are a contradictory mix of fresh tomatoes, Spam, and ground

beef, to which Paul remarks with not-so subtle sarcasm, “Can’t get this in a restaurant in

New York.” In the end, Annie herself realizes that she and Paul could never truly be

compatible; her attempts to be a productive member of society – working as a nurse in

the big city – had already been undone by her murderous psychosis. And as she grasps

that he cannot respect her as a noble person, especially after admitting that she lied to

him about calling for outside help, she also understands that neither can she be viewed

as an object of desire, as she confesses to Paul, “I know you don’t love me. Don’t say

you do. You’re beautiful, brilliant, a famous man of the world. And I’m not a movie star

type.” Her only solution is to confine him, like a book on the shelf of her shrine of Paul’s

Misery novels, even if she must resort to violence, and, ultimately, death to insure the

permanence of that arrangement.

While King and, thus,

Reiner, subvert the

usual depiction of the

place of confinement

with a dollhouse-like

spare bedroom, there is

still a subtle, yet

striking resemblance

between Misery and

Figure 2 Our first image of Annie features a crowbar, resembling one of Hostel’s tools of Roth’s films in terms of
torture visual imagery. The tools

made available to clients of the torture chambers in Hostel seem foreshadowed

in Misery. Our first glimpse of Annie comes when she is prying Paul from the wreckage

of his car, crowbar in hand. We later see her with needles, razors, lighter fluid, metal

pails, dirty eating utensils, and, as she approaches the final assertion of her power over

her captive, a revolver, a shotgun, and the iconic hobbling sledgehammer, which,

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despite the bloodless nature of its violence, manages to evoke just as visceral a reaction
in the viewer as any of the more gory moments in the Hostel films. While the room
where Paul is confined is by no means as grimy as the former Slovakian torture factory
in Hostel, it is nonetheless presented as dingy and colorless, decorated in earthen tones,
with Paul often framed by the bed’s metal headboard or the grey hospital-grade
wheelchair. And the brief glimpse of Paul’s bruised, shattered legs resembles the
disembodied limbs that litter Hostel’s lurid dungeons.

Figure 3 Paul’s shattered legs, which resemble the gruesome body parts of Hostel

The origins of Misery come, in part, from Stephen King’s own position as a writer who
felt trapped by his success, whose hardcore fans revolted at any of his attempts to be
something other than an author of horror fiction. Consequently, like King himself, Paul
Sheldon’s torture is, at least initially, psychological, being confined by his “number one
fan,” who insists that he return to the genre that, in the words of his agent Marcia
(played by Lauren Bacall), “put braces on your daughter’s teeth.” But Misery also
presents Annie as a privileged American consumer. Being an uber-fan, she claims certain
rights to the content of Paul’s work, having bought and voraciously read all of his
previous books. Her critiques of his writing are initially given only sheepishly, as she

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doubts her opinions could be worthy of the brilliance of her idol’s imagination. But as
she becomes more comfortable in her new position of authority, she begins to demand
more of her captive, eventually leading to his torture, maiming, and planned disposal,
leaving only the legacy of a final work. Her motivations are neither profit-driven (as
some torturers are, seeking the location of buried treasure, etc.), nor purely sadistic. She
seeks to justify her existence, to defend her exceptional role, by performing what she
views as a legitimate service to the world: bringing Misery back to life.

Figure 4 While Paul is trapped in what appears to be a comfortable spare bedroom, its dingy, muted color scheme gives the
impression of a dungeon – at least for someone of Paul’s imagination

Roth’s villains have similar reputational goals in the Hostel films. The shadowy
organization that sets up the kidnappings is run as a commercial enterprise, but the
individuals who conduct the actual torture do not do so for financial gain; instead, quite
literally, they have to pay for it. Through their acts of torture, like Annie, they seek to be
recognized as somehow contributing to society. In the first film, the Dutch businessman
who tortures to death one of the young American tourists (Josh) does so as a way of
playing surgeon, which the legitimate medical authorities have banned him from
actually practicing, mirroring Annie’s own forced estrangement from her desired

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profession. And in the 2007 sequel, Todd and Stuart, the American businessmen who
have won the auction to participate in the consequence-free killing of random young
women, discuss the benefits to their confidence to come from this murderous activity.
As Todd says, “What we do today is going to pay off every day for the rest of our
fucking lives!” For them, engaging in such a savage enterprise is a resume builder, as if it
were merely a bloodier version of a Tony Robbins self-help seminar. Annie, too, seeks to
achieve top dog status among all other claimants to the title of Misery’s “Number One
Fan,” so if she can return her beloved character to literary life, by any means necessary, it
justifies the cost. Of course, all of these characters’ motivations are completely saturated
with an utterly perverse madness, elevating their stories to true horror status. But while
Roth offers fascinatingly brutal slices of motivations in his films, Reiner, with the
essential assistance of King’s text and Bates’s award-winning performance, presents a
richly complex villain who stands tall among the ranks of cinema’s most frightening
monsters.

Director John Schlesinger’s 1976 film Marathon Man features one of the most
memorable examples of torture in non-horror Hollywood cinema prior to Misery.
Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-nominated role of a former Nazi war criminal who tortures
Dustin Hoffman’s innocent victim of circumstance connects with the later antagonists
of Misery and Hostel in that he too comes from a medical tradition. He is a former
dentist, and he uses his knowledge of dental pain to achieve his nefarious, but in
comparison, more prosaic goals: financial security. While Marathon Man’s ‘70s thriller
plot eventually evolves into the more explicit twenty-first-century horrors of Hostel,
Misery works as an intermediary step in this evolution. Reiner’s film surely aims to follow
in the thriller tradition of its predecessor, even using the same screenwriter, William
Goldman. But Schlesinger himself recognized how thrillers like his were close to more
horrific brands of cinema. As he explains: “It’s a film that’s largely about fear, and it’s
about pain and the infliction of pain because of fear.”[vi] While the torture porn genre
fully embraces the relationship between pain and fear, Misery offers a more subtle

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exploration of that relationship, but one that nonetheless offers intense examples of the
infliction of pain to make its point, in a way that younger directors like Roth
undoubtedly took note of and to which they brought their own unique spin.

Notes:
[i] King, 3.
[ii] Cooper, 200-201.
[iii] Zimmer, 34.
[iv] Kerner, 107-110.
[v] Neroni, 91.
[vi] “Making of Marathon Man.”

Works Cited:
Cooper, L. Andrew. Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture.

McFarland, 2010.
Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York, 26 Jan.

2006, https://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/. Accessed 7 July 2020.
Hostel. Directed by Eli Roth, Lionsgate, 2005.
Hostel: Part II. Directed by Eli Roth, Lionsgate, 2007.
Kerner, Aaron Michael. Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the

Cinema of Sensation. Rutgers University Press, 2015.
King, Stephen. Misery. Viking, 1987.
“Making of Marathon Man.” Marathon Man DVD. Directed by John Schlesinger,

Paramount Pictures, 1976.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
Neroni, Hilary. The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis & Biopolitics in Television & Film.

Columbia UP, 2015.
Zimmer, Catherine. Surveillance Cinema. New York UP, 2015.

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FROM MISERY TO SYMPATHY:
REDEEMING ANNIE WILKES IN

CASTLE ROCK

Kristen A. Leer and Cody Parish

Introduction
At the time of its release, Misery (1990) was one of only a few horror films that depicted
female psychosis, with actress Kathy Bates receiving critical acclaim and an Oscar for
Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of former nurse and obsessed fan Annie
Wilkes. Nearly thirty years
later, Annie Wilkes has
returned for a new generation
of viewers in the Hulu Original
series Castle Rock (2018 –
present). This television series
is a psychological horror
anthology set in a Stephen
King multiverse inspired by the author’s characters, settings, and themes. Annie’s
character takes center stage in season two, offering viewers a non-canonical prequel to
the events of Misery. The revival of Annie Wilkes’ character joins the recent and growing
remake cycle of King’s most popular film adaptations; however, Annie’s revival in Castle
Rock attempts to update and align her representation, especially regarding her mental
illness and gendered performance of care, with current cultural attitudes. This essay
demonstrates how Annie’s character has been problematically framed as a monster in
Reiner’s Misery and subsequently redeemed in the Castle Rock series.

Misery
For decades, mental illness has been weaponized within the horror genre to reflect the
broader societal fears of difference and the unknown.[1] In Misery, Annie Wilkes’

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disturbed mind renders her unpredictable, situating her as its indisputable antagonist.
Her depiction as a monster based on her mental illness evokes the controversial history
within the horror genre of vilifying characters who exhibit neurotic abnormality, leaving
little room for the viewer to feel any sympathy or advocacy for Annie.

Annie’s mental instability manifests foremost through her delusion of herself as the

merciful savior of Paul Sheldon, the bestselling author with whom she is obsessed.

Equipped with her background as a nurse, she becomes Paul’s sole caretaker after a car

crash leaves him severely injured and helpless. Annie’s “care” for Paul includes various

physical and psychological abuses: drugging him, isolating him, binding him to the bed,

forcing him to burn his manuscript, and infamously hobbling his feet to keep him

bedridden, unable to escape or recover. Through her failure to fulfill the nurturing role

in which she has cast herself, Annie exemplifies what Barbara Creed calls the “monstrous

feminine,” a terrifying woman whose monstrosity derives from her renunciation of

traditional femininity. Creed argues that “when [a] woman is represented as monstrous it

is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions,”[2] and this is

true of Annie. The film’s gradual unveiling of Annie’s troubled background only cements

her monstrosity further

and moves her beyond

the realm of deserving

sympathy or

redemption. It is

revealed that Annie’s

twisted idea of care

previously manifested

with her killing infants as

a maternity nurse, and

before that originated

Figure 1 Annie (right) and Paul (left) in Rob Reiner’s Misery with the “accidental”

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deaths of her father and roommate. Through her violence, Annie violates the
expectations placed upon her as a woman and caretaker, a transgression ultimately
blamed on the instability of her mind.

The vast variety of mental disturbances and perturbing thoughts that Annie exhibits
ostracize her from the audience and further solidify her villainy. Annie’s mood toward
Paul fluctuates spontaneously between excessive adoration and explosive rage.
Although Annie is extremely observant and perceptive, she is incapable of making
logical connections between herself and the reality of her surroundings. Annie exists
within the comforts of her own delusion – a delusion in which Misery Chastain is alive
and Paul Sheldon depends on her alone for his salvation from the perversion of the
outside world. Beyond Annie’s mention of her periods of depression and suicidal
thoughts, the film never diagnoses the particular mental disorder(s) from which Annie
suffers. This prompted forensic psychologist, Reid Meloy, to supply a psychiatric
evaluation of Annie, which is featured on the 2007 collector’s edition DVD
of Misery.[3] Basing his conclusions on Annie’s portrayal in both the original Stephen
King novel and the film adaptation, Meloy diagnoses Annie with bipolar disorder that
includes possible schizotypal and obsessive-compulsive features. Meloy cites Annie’s
long-term depressive states and her obsession with a fictional series and characters as
his rationale.

Annie’s erratic inclinations toward violence, with no discernible redemptive qualities to
counterbalance, makes it hard for audiences to sympathize with her. The conflict
between the two characters is framed as an absolute battle between good (Paul) and
evil (Annie) with no space to consider otherwise. In his novel, King never provides any
subtexts to allude to a past that might make the reader consider Annie in a sympathetic
light. However, this is exactly what Hulu’s original series Castle Rock does. In Misery, the
sympathy lies solely with Paul as Annie’s victim. With Annie as the focal character
of Castle Rock’s season two, her canonical representation is revised to elicit sympathy –
a direct subversion of her portrayal in Misery.

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Castle Rock
With Castle Rock, the character of Annie Wilkes finds an opportunity for redemption and
understanding, even as the self-contained narrative of the second season concludes
with Annie’s descent into the madness that viewers recognize from Misery. Castle
Rock reintroduces the viewers to Annie, a young woman traveling from small town to
small-town working brief stints for hospitals and clinics long enough to steal psychiatric
medication for her mental illness before skipping out of town. The biggest surprise for
the viewers is that Annie has a teenage daughter named Joy, a character that does not
appear in King’s novel or Reiner’s film adaptation. Joy is quiet and observant, having
been homeschooled by Annie and taught that their nomadic lifestyle keeps Joy safe
from a bad world–which, in Castle Rock, is exasperated with a level of supernatural
influence that bends Annie’s perception of reality. After a midnight accident just outside
of town, Annie and Joy find themselves stuck in Castle Rock, where they encounter a
supernatural cult and other external chaos that further distorts Annie’s perception of
reality.

Castle Rock attempts to redeem Annie by restructuring her image to garner sympathy
despite the violent actions she still exhibits within the series. In doing so, Castle
Rock gives Annie a voice and a space where her story can be told. Her revised portrayal
is an example of lending an iconic female villain a voice to dismantle harmful tropes
within horror regarding mental illness and the monstrous-feminine.
The Annie Wilkes viewers know and fear from Misery terrifies largely as a result of
her excess of mental instability. Annie is not only delusional, but paranoid, punitive, and
sadistic. Her behavior is primarily enabled by her self-isolation and her decision not to
seek psychiatric treatment or medication. The same cannot be said of Annie in Castle
Rock. In the first episode, the series filmmakers make clear that Annie not only wants to
control her mental illness but that she will go to extreme lengths to obtain psychiatric
medication for her disorder(s). Whereas this motive is absent in Misery because Joy is

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nonexistent, Annie manages her mental illness so that she can be a functioning mother
to Joy.

Annie’s management of her mental illness includes self-diagnosis (keeping online
records of therapy and treatment options for bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety)
and stealing a combination of medications from her employers to keep her
hallucinations at bay. When Dr. Nadia Howlwadaag catches Annie lifting medications
from the Castle Rock hospital where Annie has been hired as a nurse, Dr. Howlwadaag
gives Annie a chance to explain herself rather than immediately calling for her arrest.
Annie confesses that she steals medication because she would be barred from working
as a nurse if her history of mental illness was formally documented. And not being able
to work and obtain her medication would jeopardize her ability to be a good mother to
Joy. This confession directly highlights the social stigmatization of mental illness that is
so problematically reinforced in Misery. Here Castle Rock comments on how people with
mental illness are excluded from the potential to live a normal life. Dr. Howlwadaag
sympathizes with Annie’s struggles as a mother with mental illness, leading her to
prescribe Annie medication and keep her on staff as a nurse. Dr. Howlwadaag’s reaction
is a pointed example of how to accommodate rather than vilify individuals who are
mentally ill, like Annie.

That Annie seeks medication to control her mental disorder(s) in Castle Rock vastly
contrasts with the unbridled mental instability her character displays in Misery. Viewers
can sympathize with Annie’s struggle as someone trying to overcome personal
afflictions, even by illicit means, to make a life for herself and her daughter. If it is not
immediately apparent, sympathy for Annie only grows when viewers realize her
motivations to procure medication are largely borne from her commitment to caring for
Joy. Annie knows that if she cannot continue medication, she will become actively
psychotic, unable to keep her job, and thus incapable of caring for her daughter.
Reframed as a nurturing mother figure—a role made possible by managing rather than

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unleashing her mental illness—Annie can begin to shed her monstrous-feminine
reputation.

Figure 2 Annie (right) with her daughter Joy (left) in season two of Castle Rock

Annie’s new identity as a caring mother is reinforced in the series by her protective
behavior. In one instance, after Joy sees their new landlord preparing Molotov cocktails,
he threatens Joy’s life in front of Annie in order to keep them quiet. At this provocation,
Annie jams an ice cream scooper down his throat and repeatedly strikes it until it severs
his spinal cord. Despite the brutality of the scene, viewers are unlikely to lose sympathy
for Annie because, in this moment, she is positioned as a victim who killed out of self-
defense rather than as a sadistic assailant. Annie’s violent reaction to this threat against
Joy not only establishes the lengths to which she will go to protect her but also reveals a
deeper inclination toward violence linked to her mental illness. This suggests once again
that Annie’s performance of maternal care and protection is inextricably intertwined
with her mental illness.
Unlike in Misery, Annie is given a full backstory in Castle Rock that explores the depths of
her history with mental illness, broaching the theme of nature versus nurture. Was Annie
born a monster (as implied in Misery), or was she shaped into one by her environment
(which is what Castle Rock suggests)? This exploration allows audiences to sympathize
with Annie even if her actions fall outside the realm of socially-acceptable behavior. As

132

an extended flashback reveals, Annie was bullied in elementary school and already
exhibited signs of neurological deficits like dyslexia and a lack of emotional awareness.
Yet, it was not until she was provoked that Annie displayed violent inclinations. For
example, after a day of being ruthlessly teased at elementary school for her lagging
reading skills, Annie slams her lunchbox against a young girl who continues to tease
Annie on the school bus, all while displaying no emotional awareness of her actions.
Following this incident, both of Annie’s parents are called by her teacher to talk about
her behavior, and school authorities strongly recommend that Annie receive psychiatric
help. Her parents disagree, at which point Annie’s father decides to take her wellbeing
into his own hands.

The relationship between Annie and her father, fraught with tension, sets up narrative
continuities with the events of Misery. Her father, a writer, called Annie his “number one
fan” as she diligently helped him transcribe his book from pen and paper to digital,
which was supposed to help Annie’s ability to read. Being unsuccessful in caring for
Annie’s education and mental stability into her teenage years, her mother hired a tutor,
Rita Green. Although Rita first experienced difficulties with Annie, she ultimately
provided the care that Annie had lacked, and Annie’s behavior improved. Despite
gaining Annie’s trust, Rita betrayed her by having an affair with Annie’s father. During
this extended flashback, as young Annie becomes more aware of her father’s infidelity,
evidence mounts that her mental illness is partially hereditary. During an off-hand
conversation with Rita, Annie’s father says he does not want Annie on drugs because
they never worked for him. Following her parents’ divorce due to the affair, Annie’s
mom falls into a severe depressive state and attempts to drown both herself and Annie
by driving them into a lake. Annie’s mental instability worsens, turning violent when her
father replaces Annie—his number one fan—with Rita and their newborn daughter, who
was born out of the affair. All these events pile on top of Annie, the stress threatening
her sanity. Thus, the series depicts Annie as a product of an intolerant society and
abusive family. Had she received proper mental healthcare along with support from her

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guardians and peers, the series suggests she may not have transformed into the
infamous monster of pop culture lore. Castle Rock demonstrates that, contrary to what
horror has too often indicated, to be mentally ill does not make one innately monstrous.
Yet, even when Annie reaches her mental breaking point, she can still recognize the
value of humanity in the innocent, and it is in this recognition that she finds her
redemption. During arguably the most significant scene of the season, Annie descends
into a psychotic episode after seeing her father dedicate his book to Rita and not to her.
Annie’s father attempts to comfort her, but she pushes him away, and he falls down the
basement stairs, impaling himself on one of the wooden posts. Rita believes Annie
intentionally killed her father and runs to defend their infant daughter. Enraged, Annie
attempts to murder Rita and then takes the newborn baby to a river nearby to drown
them both just as Annie’s mother attempted to do. As Annie begins to submerge the
newborn, the baby laughs, stunning Annie with her display of innocence—of humanity.
Annie decides to adopt the baby, who viewers discover is Joy, and, in so doing, Joy
becomes Annie’s salvation.

From a nurse who

committed infanticide

to a young woman who

saved an infant, from a

mentally unhinged killer

to a woman desperately

struggling to keep her

Figure 3 Young Annie holding baby Joy in preparation to drown her illness contained, or,
more simply, from a

monster to a hero: Annie’s character develops into its own antithesis. By managing her

mental health, Annie can be a good mother to Joy, and in acting as a good mother,

Annie finds motivation to take the management of her mental illness seriously. Only

when the connection between the two is broken does Annie’s monstrosity consume her.

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Throughout Castle Rock, Annie tries to fulfill her maternal obligations through self-
sacrifice and commitment, deriving motivation from Joy despite her mental illness
complicating matters. However, Castle Rock’s Annie is trapped by the imminent
monstrosity of Misery’s Annie. She thus becomes the latter, the monster audiences are
more familiar with, when, in the end, she kills Joy, believing her to be possessed by the
supernatural cult that attempts to take over Castle Rock. Yet again, the culpability for
Annie’s actions doesn’t fall on her shoulders: Castle Rock puts Joy’s death on the
supernatural cult, even though it is Annie’s hands which are covered in her daughter’s
blood. Nonetheless, the culpability of the cult preserves Annie’s status as a victim rather
than a monster in this series.

Conclusion
Castle Rock demonstrates that Annie’s descent into homicidal psychosis is driven by a
deeply traumatic childhood experience rather than natural tendencies. The series
restructures Annie as a victim rather than a perpetrator, leading viewers to sympathize
with her struggles. Annie’s depiction in Castle Rock illustrates what Jessie M. Quintero
Johnson and Bonnie Miller note is a broader reluctance in contemporary film and
television to frame female perpetrators’ acts of violence as “a function of extreme
psychopathology.”[4] Moreover, Castle Rock upholds another trend that these scholars
identify as sympathetic psychopathology, where a woman’s violence is provoked by
“burdensome social and personal circumstances beyond [her] control.”[5] In other
words, Johnson and Miller argue that violence perpetrated by women in media today
exists almost exclusively as a reaction to abuse and violation, eliciting sympathy from
audiences rather than condemnation. With iconic female villains like Annie Wilkes and,
most recently, Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman, 1975)
receiving revivals in 21st-century television,[6] it is more important now than ever before
to continue examining how the characters are being revisited and reframed
sympathetically for new audiences with more nuanced expectations for media
representation. Although these origin stories are valid in furthering the understanding of

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these monstrous women of the past, there should be consideration of the different
challenges that come with revision. Castle Rock lends Annie’s violence credence and a
sympathy that dismantles her monstrosity. However, this creative license also negates
the possibility that female characters might actually purposefully commit monstrous acts
and diminishes sympathy for their victims. If filmmakers want to present positive
portrayals of empowered women within horror, they must acknowledge the capacity for
women to be monstrous as well.

Notes:
[1] We would like to thank Kalli Root for assisting us with organizing our ideas for this
section of our essay. Her advice was much appreciated.
[2] Creed, 7.
[3] Misery: Diagnosing Annie Wilkes.
[4] Johnson and Miller, 223.
[5] Ibid, 212.
[6] Netflix Original television series Ratched is an origin story for the nurse Mildred
Ratched and prequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Works Cited:
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. 1993.

Routledge, 2007.
Castle Rock, Season Two, Hulu television series, October – December 2019.
Johnson, Jessie M. Quintero, and Bonnie Miller. “When Women ‘Snap’: The Use of

Mental Illness to Contextualize Women’s Acts of Violence in Contemporary
Popular Media.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 211–
27. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2016.1172530.

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Misery: Diagnosing Annie Wilkes. Writer Sarah Elbert, performances by Kathy Bates and
Reid Meloy, Blue Collar Production, 2007. Misery, collectors ed. DVD, 2007.

Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Directed by Milos Forman, United Artists, 1975. Special

ed., widescreen version, Warner Home Video, 2002.

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MISERY’S INFLUENCE: RACE
AND BLUMHOUSE’S DELIVERED

(2020)

Dawn Keetley

The high-profile, mainstream horror films of the 1990s were almost aggressively
white: Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Single White Female (Barbet
Schroeder, 1992), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1992), Scream
(Wes Craven 1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), The
Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) and The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo
Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999)—to name some notable examples. The decade did
see a countervailing strand of Black horror, featuring central Black characters,
including The People under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991), Candyman (Bernard Rose,
1992), and Tales from the Hood (1995), the latter helmed by a Black director, Rusty
Cundieff. Black horror in the 1990s, as Robin Means Coleman has pointed out, was
starkly different from mainstream white horror, which was set mostly in wealthy
suburban, exurban, or rural spaces. Black horror films were set in (and were
centrally about) cities.[i] Horror, in short, was racially divided. With its snowy mise-en-
scène and all-white cast, Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990) definitely exemplifies the racial
divide of 1990s horror.

Figure 1 Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes in a snowy landscape

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Misery’s Whiteness

The whiteness of Reiner’s Misery is amplified by the fact that it excises completely the
African subtext of King’s 1987 novel. King creates a rich imaginary world for Paul that
gets interwoven with the Misery Chastain novel he’s writing. The latter is set mostly in
Africa, where Misery spends much of her time in captivity. King is drawing explicitly on
the late Victorian imperialist adventure fiction of H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s
Mines [1885] and She [1887]).[ii] And as Misery is drawn into danger in strange lands
with powerful gods, so too is Paul, with King repeatedly stressing Paul’s identification
with his eponymous heroine.

As Paul maps his own experience onto the fictional African adventures of Misery, his
captor Annie Wilkes becomes a powerful African idol, a goddess. And in an intriguing
instance of racial crossing, Paul identifies not only with his white, English heroine but
also with the Africans who populate his novel, characters who are subjugated to their
gods as he is subjugated to Annie: “His need for [Annie] and his vulnerability to her
screamed at him to back off, to placate her while there was still time . . . as a tribe in
one of those Rider Haggard stories would have placated their goddess when she was
angry, by making sacrifices to her effigy.” [iii] Indeed, Paul comes to believe that Annie
is so powerful she can’t be killed. “You couldn’t kill the goddess,” he thinks at the end,
even after he has killed her.[iv] There’s even an enigmatic moment in the novel, after a
state trooper arrives at Annie’s house and Paul glimpses rescue, when Paul screams
“AFRICA!” to get his attention—repeating it “Africa! Africa! Help me!”[v] In this moment,
“Africa” looms large for Paul, a sign of both his captivity and his freedom. These
references to H. Rider Haggard and colonial Africa in King’s novel complicate Paul
status, rendering him ambiguously both white and black, colonizer and colonized, captor
and captive. All of this textured meaning, though, is erased in the film.

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Race and Difference in the Hobbling Scene
The single moment in Reiner’s adaptation of Misery that disrupts its seamless
whiteness is the hobbling scene. While the film changes what Anne does to Paul from
amputation to hobbling, the words she uses in the film to preface her action are virtually
identical to the novel:
“Do you know about the early days at the Kimberley diamond mines? Do you know what
they did to the native workers who stole diamonds? Don’t worry. They didn’t kill them.
That would be just like junking a Mercedes just because it had a broken spring. No, if
they caught them, they had to make sure they could go on working, but they also had to
make sure they could never run away. The operation was called ‘hobbling.’”[vi]
You can see the scene here:

What’s interesting about this scene is that there is no evidence of hobbling in histories
of the early days of mining in South Africa.[vii] There is, however, relatively recent
evidence of hobbling in Colorado’s long past—something neither King nor Reiner would

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have known about.[viii] But the fact that there was apparently slavery, torture, and
hobbling in the prehistoric past of the American southwest just makes it even more clear
that, in her speech to Paul about hobbling practices in South Africa, Annie is actively
displacing racial violence from the US present onto the South African past. In a very
white film, Annie Wilkes also engages in a whitewashing of American history.[ix]
Given Misery’s whiteness and its displacement of racial violence onto South Africa, it is
telling that a twenty-first-century film evokes Misery in order to tell a story that is all
about race, bringing what was buried to the surface. With all its repressions, Misery is
ripe for exploring issues of racialized power.
Emma Tammi’s Delivered Rewrites Misery

Released on May 8, 2020, Delivered is the Mother’s Day entry in Hulu’s ongoing Into
the Dark anthology horror series from the television branch of Blumhouse Productions.
It’s the eighth in the twelve-episode second season and is helmed by Emma Tammi,
director of The Wind (2018). Delivered has been compared, including by the director
herself, to both Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Misery (1990). Indeed, in more than one
interview, Tammi has said that these two films were “primary,”[x] and that she was
initially drawn to the screenplay specifically because it “structurally compared to

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‘Misery.’”[xi] She elaborates that, “Misery was a huge influence, and we were really
trying to tip our hat in the most respectful way to that film throughout the shoot. But also
try to find some unique spin on that story.”[xii] Interestingly, in none of her interviews
does Tammi highlight the role that racial difference plays in her film. The central
relationship of captor and captive in Misery—that between Annie Wilkes and Paul
Sheldon—is replicated in Delivered by Jenny (Tina Majorino) and Valerie (Natalie Paul).
Jenny is white and Valerie is Black. While this difference is not explicitly mentioned in
the film, it definitely matters.
Delivered follows a pregnant Valerie, a woman who is clearly ambivalent about her
pregnancy. She also seems less than happy with her husband, Tom (Michael Cassidy),
and it soon becomes clear that there is another man in her life, Riley (Micah Parker), to
whom she is currently refusing to talk. Valerie’s alienation from her life is effectively
expressed by Natalie Paul and by director Tammi. She appears to be uninvolved in her
life, detached from things and people around her, going through the motions of doctors’
appointments (which she doesn’t tell her husband about) and “Mamaste” childbirth
classes.

Figure 2 Jenny (Tina Majorino) tracks Val (Natalie Paul) down to a coffee shop.

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It is at “Mamaste” class that Valerie meets Jenny, also pregnant. Right after the class,
Valerie again “accidentally” meets Jenny at a local coffee shop (setting off warning bells
for the viewer at least). With lightning rapidity, Jenny is inviting Valerie and Tom out to
her farmhouse for dinner. It is at this dinner that things take a turn for the horrifying:
Jenny drugs Valerie and kills Tom, and then the film veers into a combination
of Misery and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

In its resonance with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle in particular, Delivered amplifies
its 90s horror roots, serving as an effective entry into what John Kenneth Muir called the
“interloper” horror subgenre—dominant in the 1990s and a fairly consistent staple of the
horror tradition ever since.[xiii] In, for example, Single White Female, The Hand That
Rocks the Cradle, Poison Ivy (Katt Shea, 1992), The Temp (Tom Holland, 1993),
and The Crush (Alan Shapiro, 1993), a disturbed white woman manipulates her way
into the white protagonist’s life and family—intent on taking it for her own and destroying
anyone who gets in her way. Although Muir does not discuss Misery as an “interloper”
film, Annie is an interloper of sorts, insinuating herself into Paul’s relationship with
Misery Chastain. Delivered’s Jenny fits perfectly within this horror lineage. She wants
Valerie’s baby. At first, she seems bent on raising it with Valerie, telling her, “It’s our
baby,” and, “Val, you’re the one.” But Jenny is also prepared to raise Val’s baby by
herself if the latter remain uncooperative. And Val does remain uncooperative, so Jenny
must resort to increasingly violent means to keep her from escaping.

Delivered is replete with direct references to Misery. Jenny’s farm, like Annie’s is “in the
middle of nowhere.” Although Jenny has kidnapped other women, she seems fixated on
Val: “Val, you’re the one,” she says. Just as Paul Sheldon finds Annie’s revelatory
scrapbook, in a brief period when Jenny is absent, Val discovers a box of newspaper
clippings and other documents that reveal Jenny’s history, specifically a history of
sustained violent sexual abuse by her parents whom she finally murdered. Her parents
took Jenny’s baby (the product of incest) in the most brutal way and left her

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pathologically needing another. (Significantly, what Val discovers about Jenny serves to
humanize a bit more than what Paul discovers abut Annie.) Both Paul and Val are
shackled to the bed, and, in their bids to escape, both threaten to destroy what their
captor most values (the final Misery novel and Val’s baby). After both victims escape,
they experience terrifying post-traumatic after-effects, convinced they still see their
captors even after they are dead.

Delivered and Race

With all of Delivered’s similarities to Misery, it differs profoundly from both Misery and
the 1990s interloper tradition in that Valerie is Black. Not only is this fact not mentioned
in the diegesis of the film itself, but it is also absent from most reviews of Delivered and
interviews with Emma Tammi herself. The film has been positioned as about
“motherhood” and fears of motherhood, hence Tammi’s centering not
only Misery but Rosemary’s Baby as the central influences on the film. She has said
that while Delivered is “structurally” like Misery, it incorporates the “twist” of a “fear of
motherhood.”[xiv]

I would argue, though, that race is actually crucial to what Delivered does with its
influences—with Misery and the 90s interloper film.[xv] Valerie is Black in an otherwise
almost entirely white diegetic world. She is a Black woman surrounded in everything
she does by white people. The mise-en-scène is gleamingly white, including the
people—and much of the filming is done in sunlight.[xvi] And yet there is never that
moment when race is flagged as central to the characters’ lives—that moment that
happens in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), for instance, when Chris (Daniel Kaluuya)
asks Rose (Allison Williams): “Do your parents know I’m black?”

And yet, despite its silence on race, Delivered does actually evoke Get Out as well
as Misery and 1990s interloper horror films. Like the Armitage family in Get Out, the

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very-white Jenny has no qualms about using the bodies of black people to get what she
wants. Indeed, the scene in which Val discovers a file box of photographs of prior
mothers-to-be whom Jenny has kidnapped and imprisoned evokes not only Misery but
also Get Out—specifically the moment when Chris discovers the photographs of his
girlfriend’s prior Black victims.

As the final scenes of Delivered play out, there are, also as in Get Out, unmistakable
undertones of slavery. In an old-fashioned, isolated farmhouse that definitely evokes a
plantation (even more so than the Armitages’ mansion in Get Out), Valerie is chained to
the bed, with a literal chain around her ankle. After she briefly escapes, Jenny hobbles
her. And Jenny is planning on stealing Val’s baby. The evocation of US slavery could
not be clearer.

Indeed, at the end of the film,
Val’s ambivalence about her
baby resolves in a way that
evokes one of the very worst of
slavery’s horrors. Val says to her
unborn baby: “One thing I do
know. I swear. She will not have
you.” And then Val seems to be
ensuring she miscarries. In this
moment Delivered evokes Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and
the stories of the many slave
women whom Morrison crystallized in Sethe—women who killed their own children
rather than allow them to grow up in slavery.

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Delivered not only evokes the history of literal slavery in the US, however. It also shows
Val trapped in an unremittingly white world, thus showing that her seeming dread of
motherhood is fundamentally bound up with being a Black mother in a white world.
Early in the film, Val gets up one morning to find Tom constructing a crib. This scene
demonstrates Val’s ambivalence about motherhood (and about Tom) while rooting both,
more covertly, in race. The camera focuses on the side of the box in which the crib
arrived. This shot tellingly repeats a shot from an earlier scene: both show a picture of a
happy mother and baby on the side of the crib box, a happy white mother
and white baby. Val stares at the picture on the box, and the camera pans up at her to
capture not just anxiety but what also seems like anger, hostility. And then Val snaps at
Tom, “I don’t like it. Put it back.”

Valerie (Natalie Paul) looks at the crib box

The box, like seemingly everything in Val’s life, emphasizes whiteness as the norm and
erases Blackness. As Peele showed so effectively in Get Out, racism pervades those
spaces where it goes unspoken—and, as Chris finds out in that film, not talking about it,
trying to avoid it, will blow up in your face.

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While Jenny is certainly pathologically damaged, enacting her very individual trauma
and abuse on the bodies of women of any and all races, Delivered insists there is more
going on than that. Delivered is about Jenny’s abduction of Val, a Black woman, and her
intent to steal Val’s Black baby, but her individual pathology serves also to stand for a
more collective and systemic pathology. Indeed, as Val resolves at all costs to save her
baby, it becomes clear that Val’s earlier ambivalence about pregnancy was almost
certainly connected to the white world she inhabited, in the relentless whiteness of what
motherhood looked like when she looked around her.

In the last scene, as Val is

in the hospital, we finally

see another African-

American character, a

nurse. But as Val looks at

her, she transforms into

Jenny. A white woman

replaces the only other

Black woman in the film.

Figure 3 Val is finally in a space with another black person This turns out to be a
nightmare, but it signals

that it’s the nightmare Val was living all along. This final scene mirrors the final scene

from Misery when Paul thinks he sees Annie long after she is dead.

But Delivered insists that its protagonist’s trauma is not just individual but collective: it is
the trauma of living as a Black woman, and raising a Black baby, in a white world.
I want to end by recommending a film that came out since Delivered—Spell (October
30, 2020), directed by Black director Mark Tonderai and with an all-Black cast.
Like Delivered, Spell rewrites Misery, infusing the narrative not only with racial
difference but also differences of class and region.

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Here’s the trailer:

The plot follows a wealthy urban man, Marquis Woods (Omari Hardwick) who flies on a
private plane with his family into the heart of Appalachia to attend his long-estranged
father’s funeral. The plane crashes and Marq wakes to find himself in the house of an
elderly woman Eloise (Loretta Devine), who appears to have saved him from the
wreckage of the crash–but who soon also appears to be holding him captive. The plot
unveils a rural cult, “old houdoo ghosts,” and a lot of references to class differences
between city folks and country folks. As Eloise drily notes at one point, “We don’t have
much in the way of Obamacare around here.” Spell is not a perfect film, but it hews
close to the plot of Misery while interrogating intra-racial differences of class, region,
and privilege–not unlike the way Misery itself explores those same differences between
Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes.

Notes:
[i] Means Coleman, 169-97. The opening scene of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) in
which a Black character from Brooklyn negotiates the “creepy-ass suburbs” evokes the
racial divide of horror’s places.
[ii] King references H. Rider Haggard several times in the novel; see 8, 65, 76-7, and
80.

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[iii] King, 76-7.
[iv] King, 348.
[v] Ibid., 268. Earlier in the novel, Africa seems to have become an ambiguous symbol
of both confinement and freedom for Paul. He says to himself, “‘Oh, Africa’” after he
escapes from his bedroom briefly (but is afraid his escape will be discovered) (164).
And when Annie cuts off and cauterizes his foot, he screams, “‘The pain! The goddess!
The pain! O Africa!’” (233). When he screams “AFRICA!” to the state trooper, it is a
word that seems to embody, then, both his entrapment and the hope of freedom.
[vi] See King, 229. There is a little more detail in this speech in the novel, including
Annie’s spelling out that it was the “British” who hobbled the natives.
[vii] Historians of early diamond mining in South Africa make no mention of hobbling as
a practice; encroachers on others’ mining property and diamond thieves were flogged
not hobbled. See Meredith, 44-5, 116.
[viii] Osterholtz describes the discovery at Sacred Ridge, a Pueblo site in southwestern
Colorado, of the prehistoric remains of thirty-three individuals who had been hobbled by
blows to the sides of the ankles.
[ix] The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), to take a counter example of a film that is
almost (aside from Scatman Crothers as Hallorann) as white as Misery, and which is
also set in Colorado, illuminates the region’s history of race and racism, specifically
Native American displacement and democide, in almost every scene. See Blakemore.
[x] Caldwell; McGrew.
[xi] Benardello.
[xii] Caldwell.
[xiii] Muir, 23-25.
[xiv] Benardello.
[xv] At least two reviewers noted the racial connotations of Delivered. See Langberg
and Musnicky. Langberg argues that the film “outright fumbled” the racial dynamics and
is “irresponsible” for not developing them further. I disagree with this view since I

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