~ by kevin maher ~
“Slowly a sound started to build in Lard Ass’s stomach, a strange and scary sound… like a log-truck coming at you at 100 miles an hour.”
– from “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan”
as told by Gordy Lachance in Stand by Me.
Spend some time in Maine, and you might notice how narrow the roads can get. Especially when you’re driving along a slim stretch of concrete with those trucks coming at you. Big trucks. Log trucks. They’re everywhere.
Something must’ve happened to Little Stevie King growing up in Lisbon Falls, where he was mentally scarred by these 18-wheel leviathans.1
Looking back on his formative years, King has said, “without Richard Matheson, I wouldn’t be around.” Matheson wrote some beloved horror stories, including Duel – the grand-daddy of scary truck fiction!
The menacing truck has become a go-to scare in Stephen King adaptations. It’s as common as the cat in a haunted house movie. Hell, there are even some adaptations that throw in a truck that wasn’t in the source material. (I guess it feels more authentically like Stephen King’s writing when there’s a big truck.)
The truck motif gets at what makes Stephen King such a popular writer, he’s tapping into the terror of an everyday object. If you’re driving, walking or riding a bike you might encounter a garbage truck, a Peterbilt or a flatbed on the road. Depending on the size and speed, it can be deadly. It wouldn’t take much for a truck to crush your car, flatten your skull, or crash through the wall of a building.
The truck is very American. Big, loud, dumb and dangerous. Hauling cargo across the country, whether it’s a delivery of live-pigs or a shipment of Happy Toyz. These larger-than-life machines rumble along the road, like modern-day dinosaurs. And there’s no reasoning with a truck. Maybe that’s what makes them so scary to Stephen King.
Regardless of why it’s a recurring trope, we rounded-up over two dozen examples of scary trucks in King’s film and TV adaptations. This video was produced by Kevin Maher and edited by Paul Murphy, it originally appeared in the variety show Kevin Geeks Out about Stephen King at Nitehawk Cinema.