Stephen King: horror and pee

King of horror and King of pee

If you read or watch enough of a creator’s work, you start to notice some recurring elements. For example, Stephen King‘s characters almost always piss their pants in his stories.

Pee is so common in King’s work that you can even find it in his film adaptations. For example, both the film and novel version of The Green Mile have major plot points involving pee. At one point the wicked Percy (played by Doug Hutchison) is groped by “Wild Bill” Wharton, which causes him to pee himself in terror, while Paul (played by Tom Hanks) spends most of the story battling a urinary tract infection. In Cujo, one of the most terrifying moments revolves around Tad (played by Danny Pintauro) opening the car door to pee while the murderous dog looms somewhere nearby. And then there’s The Shawshank Redemption, which ends with an inmate crawling to freedom through a literal pipe of human sewage which is not only urine.

Pee appears again in King’s follow-up to The Shining, Doctor Sleep. When young Danny Torrance (played by Roger Dale Floyd) sees the lady in the bathtub in his own house, he pees himself in fright. Though that particular bodily function doesn’t appear in the original novel, it certainly happened in The Shining. King’s revered novel includes several scenes in which Danny pees himself in fright. The most notable example happens when Danny is confronted by the Overlook’s bathroom lady in Room 237.

But even when pee isn’t depicted on screen. It still remains a major part of King’s work. After the first 24 hours, in Gerald’s Game, the handcuffed Jessie losses control of her bladder forcing her to lay in her own urine for hours on end. Most of the horror in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon starts after its main character, Trisha, leaves a hike with her mom and brother to relieve her bladder. In Misery, Paul is forced to drink his own urine to stay hydrated after he’s been captured by his biggest fan. The Stand describes Randall Flagg as “When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns”.

In the end, the most notable example may be The Night Flier, a horror story about vampires first published in Prime Evil: New Stories by the Masters of Modern Horror. This relatively short story features scared peeing multiple times and even has a vampire who pees blood.

Those examples don’t even touch upon the countless other times when King’s characters pee themselves in fright but they do give an idea of how pee is a recurring element in King’s stories: both as a symbol of terror and humiliation.

Source decider.com