Toss off that trench coat, sit back and pass the popcorn, because we’re celebrating 30 years of Stephen King‘s Thinner!
Directed by horror icon Tom Holland (Child’s Play, Fright Night), this cautionary tale may be a divisive Stephen King story, but its offbeat charm lies in the larger-than-life world Holland created. The characters feel plucked straight from the pages of a deeply twisted comic book, where personalities are heightened, morality is at an all-time low, and reality takes a delightfully bizarre turn. An unusual blend of visceral horror, dark comedy, and zany storytelling that gives the film its own personality.
Released in 1996, Thinner follows Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke), an overweight, well-connected attorney who seems to have it all: money, influence, a comfortable suburban existence, and an appetite for excess. But when a moment of distraction behind the wheel results in the death of an elderly Romani woman, Billy’s privileged world begins to unravel. Thanks to his connections in local law enforcement, he escapes legal punishment, but the victim’s grieving father, Tadzu Lempke (Michael Constantine), has another kind of justice in mind. With a single touch and one chilling word, Lempke places a supernatural curse on Billy.
Apparently, Billy wasn’t the only one to cross Lempke’s path and suffer supernatural consequences. Now Billy and his corrupt pals are in a desperate race against the clock to find Lempke and convince him to reverse their fates.
With his body wasting away, his friends dropping like flies and his options disappearing, Billy finds himself caught between vengeance, desperation, and a particularly gruesome moral dilemma. Yet beneath all the supernatural wickedness, Thinner is also an unlikely buddy movie. Billy’s friendship with Richie Ginelli, played to sleazy perfection by Joe Mantegna (The Twilight Zone, The Godfather Part 3), becomes one of my favorite parts of the film, with Ginelli willing to go to outrageous lengths to save his pal.
Originally penned under Stephen King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman, the film rights were quickly purchased by producer Richard Rubinstein (Pet Sematary 1989, The Night Flier) after Bachman’s true identity was accidentally revealed by a King fan—furious that some guy named “Bachman” was plagiarizing King.
Famously plagued by many delays, Thinner was rejected by major studios during its five-year stint in development hell, with Holland and screenwriter Michael McDowell (Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas) rewriting the screenplay roughly 15 times. Following Holland’s great success with his TV miniseries The Langoliers, Rubinstein and Holland finally secured a greenlight from Paramount.
Thinner went into production in Maine with a $14m budget, which is estimated to have risen to about $17m (around $37m today), mostly because of a last-minute, studio-mandated change to the ending. Originally, Holland shot the exact ending from Stephen King’s novel, in which Billy finds his daughter dead after unknowingly eating his cursed pie. Feeling remorse, Billy succumbs to the same fate. Test audiences apparently hated this bleak ending, so Holland rewrote the final reshoot that we see today.
Dread Central spoke with director Tom Holland: “It was my second Stephen King adaptation after The Langoliers, and we originally followed the novel with the first draft by Michael McDowell, a very talented writer. The only makeup effect I dropped was the mayor [a scaly monster in the novel], as I was being pressured by the line producer to cut effects for budgetary reasons, and substituted it with a dialogue scene.”
Makeup effects were key to the project, including mechanical gore rigs, intricate age makeup on actor Constantine, plus Burke spending 5+ hours daily in the makeup chair beneath layers of prosthetics and heavy makeup to achieve his physical evolutions.
Said Holland, “The original design was done by the famous Dick Smith, who did The Exorcist. Dick wasn’t available, so he sent it to Greg Cannom, who was in ill health at the time, and gave it to his guy Vince Guastini. So physical work was handed to Vince, applying the sections of the suit and keeping the edges taped down, which was terribly difficult beneath the hot lights.”
Effects master Vincent Guastini tells Dread: “All these effects were going to be flown in from Greg Cannom’s shop in Los Angeles, and Greg would occasionally come to Maine and supervise, then hand it to me. I wanted to work with Greg Cannom, who was one of my heroes, so I originally thought I was going to go up there to work with Greg, but I ended up kind of running my own show.”
Guastini continued, “We had some problems with certain stages of Billy’s character because the ears were attached to the neck. Greg was trying to achieve Dick Smith’s original sculpt design to make the ears look like they were drooping from weight loss on the sides of the neck. Tom’s originally from New York, very blunt—to a fault—and said, ‘Why does Billy look like a creature from the Black Lagoon?’ So we had to adjust the prosthetics and cut off the deflated earlobe design that bothered Tom. Of course, in the final editing of the film, you’re not going to see any of that.”
Dread spoke with the director’s son, Josh Holland, who plays various characters in his father’s films, including thug Frank Spurton in Thinner: “He passed his love of movies to me, so having the experience of being on his sets was always my favorite place to be. He’s my dad, so he’s my hero. We both have a very twisted sense of humor. He’s killed me off every time I’ve worked for him. We consider it a form of family therapy, like this glorious death in Thinner.”
As a footnote, I generally hate giving random test audiences that kind of power, and in this case, the studio really dropped the ball by forcing Holland to change Stephen King’s original ending—which I feel was more satisfying.
One of the most demented aspects of Thinner is that nearly everyone is awful, as King serves up a collection of morally bankrupt characters. Between the corruption and racism, it just gets worse and worse. Despite the buddy bonds, I still found myself rooting for everyone’s demise. Thinner wants us to sympathize with Billy as he is literally being erased, but let’s not forget he’s a privileged attorney who escapes responsibility for a woman’s death thanks to his boys’ club friends. When given the chance at redemption rather than sacrificing someone else, Billy chooses selfishness.
Regardless of my personal quibble with the ending, Thinner is a gripping horror classic and a feat of practical effects with memorable performances, and it’s definitely worth a watch or rewatch.
Make sure to follow Dread Central and Anastasia Elfman across social media, and check out my companion video for a look at my Top 5 Thinner gruesome moments!
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