In the castle rock, lifeless.
The newly retired old man kissed his wife goodbye in his suit and leather shoes one second before drove suicide and drove into the lake.
The young prison guard, staring at the screen in the surveillance room, suddenly, like a wicked man, took out his gun and started killing.
There is no sign of death, like a ghost, spreading across the castle rock.
This is a fictional American town located in Maine.
The prison in [Shawshank Redemption] is located here, and Delhi in [Joker Cry] is adjacent to it. In Stephen King's horror universe, it is as core as Sanlitun .
Castle Rock is not alone.
In 2018, 31,000 small towns were distributed across the United States, and in the more voluminous American horror films.
There is always such a small town, weird and gloomy, with weird waves.
When the United States was a British colony, small towns were built on the North American continent.
The early small towns were all attached to the port. The inland was a tribe of Indians, and the colonists were warring all the year round. The small town had no climate and was scattered.
Until the end of the 19th century, the Americans won the war against the Indians. Coupled with the maturity of industrialization, the northern and ancient towns began to splice together due to the perfect transportation system, and metropolises appeared.
In the south, due to the long-term dominance of agriculture, urbanization is not as strong as that in the north. Urbanization is more like urbanization, and a large number of small towns blow out.
The prosperity of small towns under industrialization destroyed the traditional life pattern of the southern plantation economy and affected every southerner in all aspects.
Among these people, there are such a small number of educated people .
In 1871, Edward Eggleston compiled the daily life of his brother's town into a story and wrote the book "Indiana Teachers." The tepid literature of American towns began.
A few years later, the novel was made into a movie, and the small town appeared on the screen for the first time.
The early 20th century was the golden age of American literary circles. The small-town literature that was born at the beginning caught up with its good times and ushered in a small climax.
First was the poet Edgar Lee Masters, who published "The Spoon River Collection" in 1915 .
And the most successful is Sherwood Anderson. In 1919, his short story "Small Town Freaks" , with the background of industrialization, wrote about a group of small towns that were incompatible with the development of the industrial age due to their adherence to traditional values during the process of urbanization. "Image.
Due to the deepening of the theme, "Small Town Freak" is also regarded as the true originator of small town literature .
Among the many writers, there is a stranger who, on his own, opened up a path of horror for the small town literature.
This person is called Howard Philip Lovecraft , who is also the creator of the famous Cthulhu myth.
Most of the stories in the huge horror kingdom he created took place in a fictional town called Arkham.
More than 30 years after his death, there was an English teacher in Maine, USA, who was struggling to survive by writing horror novels.
Influenced by Lovecraft, he plans to introduce a fictional town in the third novel.
Never thought, the effect was outstanding, the sales of the novel was amazing, and he also established the horror universe from then on.
The book is called "Witch Carrie" and the English teacher is Stephen King .
Film and television works are inseparable from the literary soil, how permeable between the lines, how depressing the small town on the screen.
Compared with fictional works, it is derived from reality and it is more creepy.
Art comes from life. In the short history of the United States, there have been so few incredible small towns.
It had already begun when the first British people landed on the American continent.
In 1587, a ship full of more than one hundred British immigrants went straight to the Americas and opened up a North American colony on the order of Elizabeth I.
The ship finally stopped at Roanoke Island , North Carolina . Three years later, the first small towns on the North American continent were established on the island.
It started on the evening of August 18, 1580, when the newly appointed governor of the colony, John White, had just arrived in Roanoke by boat, and before he reached the town, he saw the town’s wolves for help.
He led his men to arrive in a hurry, but found that more than a hundred people in the entire town were all missing. The dinner was still warm on the table and the candles were not burned out, as if they had just left.
White immediately sent people to search, but searched the entire island. Not only was no living person found, there were no dead bodies or traces of fighting. What is more bizarre is that the boats this group of people took were also docked on the shore before sailing.
The only clue was that " CROATOAN " was carved on a few scattered trees nearby .
In the following 14 years, the British government sent people to investigate many times, but to no avail. To this day, it is still an unsolved mystery.
This may be a natural disaster, but even more depressing is a man-made disaster.
In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, the priest’s daughter got a strange disease of dancing.
This disease now has an exact name, rheumatic dancing disease, and at the time, the diagnosis given by the doctor was bewitched by witchcraft.
So the residents were summoned to the square, and the girl began to identify the wizard.
At the beginning, only three women were pointed out. After three months, more than 200 people were charged because their condition did not improve.
The farce ended in January of the following year. A witch trial was held in Salem. In the end, 19 people were hanged and one was stoned to death.
When the town falls into collective ignorance and there are no ghosts, it is equally breathless.
Time came to modern times. In 1947, on the outskirts of Roswell , New Mexico , due to a thunderstorm the night before, when a farmer inspected the damage, he found metal fragments scattered around the countryside.
Subsequently, the military intervened to collect all the debris and block the news.
The next day, Roswell’s "Daily News" published a report entitled "The Air Force Found a Falling UFO in Roswell ", which was later reprinted by the "New York Times". Soon the entire United States learned that the aliens had crashed. Roswell.
Although the military has always claimed to be investigating balloon crashes, skeptics and UFO enthusiasts still firmly believe that it is a flying saucer, and the small town’s location near the US Army Air Force base deepens its mystery.
To this day, there are different opinions on what exactly fell that night, and Roswell has become synonymous with UFO.
These real horror towns are like nightmares hidden in history, and they will last forever, enriching the creative inspiration of the horror of the town.
The United States is vast and sparsely populated, and small towns are far apart and isolated by nature.
The biggest feature of American democracy is the separation of powers and governance. Small towns, as the basic unit of decentralization, have a high degree of autonomy and resemble a micro-state.
Because of this, the town is like a utopia. To a certain extent, it can be regarded as another kind of obstruction, and this is the nutrient of terror .
Like [Silent Hill] , the residents of the town are all cults who committed evil and burned Alisa to death. As a result, they reaped the fruits of their own lives and pulled the entire Silent Hill into another dimension.
There is also [Horror Wax Museum] , the entire town of Ambrose was killed by perverted murderers and made into wax figures. Because it is too remote, if the protagonist and his party break into this place, the dark secrets are still unknown.
In the small town in [2001 Mad Men] , the residents have all become murderers, but the surrounding towns have failed to spare them, allowing them to slaughter passers-by who strayed into it.
In the American TV series "Under the Dome" , it is even more decisive. An invisible force covers the town of Mills like a sky. Under physical isolation, the inhabitants compete for resources and explode out of animality, and the town is like a jungle.
In addition to the fictitious utopia, the real horrors of the town are also on the screen.
The sixth season of "American Horror Story" is the story of Roanoke, but the reason for the disappearance is attributed to the ghost.
The drama "Salem" with the same name as the town introduces real witches and magic.
As for the small town of Roswell, during the years when aliens became popular, it was moved into various related film and television works, the most famous of which was the 1994 movie of the same name.
The most terrifying town on the screen is Castle Rock.
Thirteen of Stephen King’s novels took place here. It is a perfect paradise, like a cage, trapping every inhabitant, and like an entrance, leading to the horrible hell of a small town.
Just like in "Castle Rock", the sun is always gloomy, the supernatural is as usual, the death god is stationed for many years, and the abnormal soul dances.
The town people always said: "It's not me, it's the problem with this place. "
And here, there is nothing new except death.
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Author/Yaoyao Wine
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Pocier"
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