Originally written on July 5, 2025.

Seduction, Spillover, and the Systems That Turn on Us

I didn’t expect Maximum Overdrive to shift something in me. Horror had never felt like my genre—too loud, too visceral. But there was something in its apocalyptic absurdity that hooked me, something that echoed a chaos I couldn’t yet name. I’d always been drawn to end-of-the-world stories—not for the spectacle —but for the silence after. Emilio Estevez brought a kind of comfort, a known face in unfamiliar terrain. I’d already loved him in The Outsiders and The Breakfast Club—films that had etched themselves into my memory for entirely different reasons. Seeing him in this wild, mechanical nightmare grounded the absurdity, made it feel strangely intimate. That was the turning point—when Stephen King’s world cracked open, and I began to see his stories not just as thrillers, but as coded reflections of dread, isolation, even longing.

It also marked the start of something unexpected: my introduction to AC/DC. That soundtrack wasn’t just background noise—it was voltage, mood, momentum. I had to own it. The movie didn’t just introduce me to a writer; it handed me a whole new sound to feel everything through.

The crack widened quickly. The Stand was my first deep dive, and it felt like submerging into a slow-motion apocalypse—not a firestorm, but a quiet unraveling. King’s end of the world wasn’t about spectacle. It was about moral erosion, and the question of who we become when the scaffolding of civility crumbles.

Before Thinner, I read Insomnia—a title that felt oddly personal at the time. I used to joke that the book gave me insomnia while I read it, and that maybe Thinner would trim a few pounds if I just stared long enough. That was my brand of King-era humor: dark, a little self-deprecating, and born from immersion. But beneath the punchlines was a quiet truth—his stories didn’t just haunt me. They brushed up against something real, something close.

When I finally read Thinner, it wasn’t terror that got under my skin—it was consequence. It read like a curse you could almost imagine catching, a grotesque morality tale that lingered long after the pages had cooled.

His short stories followed—brief, uncanny jolts that left behind the kind of bruises you only notice after. And Christine—steeped in familiar terror—returned to the theme of sentient machines. But this time, it was personal. The car didn’t just haunt—it possessed. The horror was intimate, metaphorical. Loneliness disguised as obsession, destruction wrapped in desire.

Eventually, I arrived at It. And by then, I understood: King wasn’t just writing horror. He was writing memory. The ache of childhood, the silence that rots, the monsters we pretend we’ve outgrown but carry like scars. What began with one film’s absurd apocalypse became a mirror maze—each story reflecting back fragments I’d been too young, or too afraid, to name.

📽️ Sidebar: A Personal Policy

I usually recommend watching films before reading the books. Let the movie try first—because once the book speaks, there’s no turning back.

When I found out Stephen King had written an episode of The X-Files—a show that already held a strange, sacred place in my memory—it felt like discovering a hidden annotation in a book I thought I knew by heart. Uncanny, but oddly inevitable. King had apparently been rooting for Mulder and Scully too, weaving his signature unease straight into the tension between them. I understood the impulse. Around the same time, I was quietly shipping Elizabeth Maxwell and Kyle Bates from V: The Series. Another unlikely pair, another storyline I felt compelled to complete between the lines.

These days, I rarely read fiction. My ebook reader leans more toward nonfiction now—books tethered to research, inquiry, and the systems I’m trying to untangle. But that early obsession with King’s work left its residue: a way of seeing beneath the surface, of sensing subtext in everything, even when the story is true. It taught me that horror isn’t just a genre—it’s a lens. And sometimes, so is wonder.

And maybe that’s why Who Made Who never really left me. It wasn’t just the soundtrack to a film—it was a warning wrapped in a riff. “The video games say play me / Face it on a level but it take you every time”—those lines weren’t just about machines. They were about systems. About seduction. About the illusion of control. The beat was addictive, but the message was clear: “Nothing gonna save your one last dime ’cause it own you / Through and through.”

But I don’t play it the same way anymore. I don’t drop the coin and hope for mercy. These days, I read differently. I write differently. I see the code behind the chaos. I still hear the beat—but now, I’m the one asking the questions.