‘They brought it on themselves!’: adapting and reflecting cultural fears, from The Shop to Rossum

Abstract

If horror reflects a particular culture’s fears, then the US government represented a major bogeyman in the 1970s; in Stephen King’s Firestarter (1980), for example, the lack of trust in a Vietnam/Watergate era government that operated both secretively and amorally drives the narrative, and the consequences of its actions are dire. By the 2000s, another monster had emerged: The Corporation, operating with little regard for the long-term consequences. In this article, I examine the narrative shift in focus from ‘evil government’ to ‘evil corporation’, and consider the influence of this aspect of King’s work on others, with a particular focus on the novel and film Firestarter (Lester US 1984) and its correspondences with the series Dollhouse (US 2009–10). In Firestarter , the threat of the Cold War leads a secretive government organisation to weaponise a child in order to gain a tactical advantage. In Dollhouse , the corporation plays on client desires and available technology through the systematic dehumanisation of certain individuals. While Firestarter tapped into Cold War fears, Dollhouse examined what happens when money collides with technology and no oversight. Both novel/film and series reflect the culture’s uneasiness with any authority that operates in the (metaphorical) shadows, regardless of what face it shows when dragged into the light.