Stephen King Hates Halloween - "Late Night With Conan O’Brien"

How are you? I'm very well. I was just thin

king

about something today thin

king

about you coming on the show. It's almost Halloween, it's a couple of weeks away from Halloween and I have to think there's a lot of pressure on you around Halloween. 'cause when the kids ring the doorbell and you answer the door, it's Stephen King, it's Halloween, if you just give them a Clark bar and tell them to have a good

night

, somehow it's gone, it's come, you know what I mean, Is there pressure on you to do something crazy? Either intense, I hate Halloween for the reason I just described or if I could go to the gulag right on Halloween, I probably would because it used to be that we stayed home and literally thousands of people gathered at the house and we gave up.

I don't know how much and candy and everything else and we got to the point where we were thinking about bringing in smoke machines and putting up fake tombstones and everything and I'm like, wait a second, I'm turning into Halloween Santa Claus, right, right, right. came back too much about everyone going to Stephen King's house on Halloween, that's going to be a really fun thing to do and I mean, Santa Claus isn't real and I'm like, Santa Claus could be real. I'm still hoping to find out what Santa Claus could be, yeah, yeah, hey, I'm curious.

Did you give so many people

night

mares? How about you? Do you have nightmares and have you had a really scary dream? Putting them in is like passing a gallstone you know, just passing them on to other people just so you start having nightmares, but you yourself sleep well, it's more blessed to give than to receive,

conan

and you know it's a good thing because obviously some of the Things I've done are pretty twisted and it's the kind of thing like if you had these fantasies in real life instead of in my life, you would go to a psychiatrist and you would pay 60 70 $80 for an hour it's not even a full hour, it's 50 minutes and they pay me for these things, you know, it's a great life, instead of going to a therapist, you just write it and people pay a lot of money to read it because sometimes they go to the movies even well, let's talk about what happens with that because you were one of the first people to come up with the idea that a clown could be a terrifying figure, you actually appeared in that, which became a movie you wrote about a You created a homicidal clown.

It is very effective. Were you afraid of clowns when you were a child? Well, you know, when you were a kid I went to the circus, there were like 12 grown people who piled out of a little car with their faces. white as dead, their mouths were red as if they were full of blood, everyone was screaming, their eyes are huge, which I don't like, why were your clowns screaming? So I started looking at kids when I got a little older and I said, I know all the kids are terrified of him and parents say, Aren't clowns fun?

Johnny and then Johnny says, "No, get me out of here." We're all crazy because they look monstrous and kids are really scared of them. Do you have that kind of monstrous thing going for you? Have you ever had a personal interaction with a clown that scared you? Yeah, well, it didn't exactly scare me, but I was on a book tour for my first big book tour and I was on my way. At home you do nine ten eleven cities in four days, it's surreal anyway. By the time you were done, Cleveland was the last city and the plane began to pull away from the gate.

We're going from Cleveland to Burlington to Portland, where I was going. Get off and drive home. The plane moves away from the gate and then comes back in. I'm sitting in first class and the door opens again and Ronald McDonald gets on the plane, he's fully dressed, fully dressed, oh yeah, you know, then he sits next to me. Me because I attract weirdness, you know, I'm like a magnet and at the time I was so weird after all these rubber chicken dinners and everything else that it didn't even surprise me that he has orange hair, orange juice all the time . nine yards he sits next to me this was years ago the plane takes off don't smoke the light goes out he takes out a package he bends over lights up lights a cigarette yes I can't ask the stewardess for a gin and tonic he's sitting there drinking a gin and tonic smoking I can't and I say the only thing I can think of is where you come from says McDonaldland Yeah right so I say is this, not really where you come from and he had come from McDonaldland which is a real place in Chicago and he was going to open a McDonald's in Burlington Vermont but you talk about surreal 40,000 feet with Ronald McDonald and you think: What if this plane crashes?

I'm going to die next to a cloud, a drunk too, yes. I have to ask you this because I'm from Boston. I know you've been a lifelong Red Sox fan, right? And I always remember you talking about this. You were famous for saying that. You were so convinced that they were never going to win the World Series, you were actually going to put something to that effect on your tombstone. I was going to have a tombstone that said "not in my lifetime," but someone sent me a t-shirt at the end of last year that said "now." I can die in peace, that's really nice, it was really nice and I'm going to wear that shirt, but I hope I don't die for a long time and I can see that happening two or three more times, it doesn't look like that. well this year right now, but yeah, you never know.

I mean, are you one of those people who are happy now that it happened? You know I don't need it to happen again this year, you don't need the Red Sox to do it. This year you feel this way about your first sexual experience, what was it like, yeah, yeah, then when I was 50, we the boy from Colorado will be in stores October 4th, it's a bit, but it's powerful , If that. We were talking about yeah, he's getting dirty fast. I'm doing a commercial and this weekend Stephens will be at The New Yorker festival here in New York City.

Really exciting. Thank you so much. The same.