Nightmares and Dreamscapes: Autopsy Room Four

(S01E07) Everyone has a list of fears, and being buried alive and waking up during surgery are both very high on my list. People have awoke during surgery before -- it's rare, but it does happen. Stephen King based his short story "Autopsy Room Four" on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which a man is paralyzed in a car accident and pronounced dead, despite being very much alive. To his horror, he's taken to the autopsy room to be hacked into, but he manages to save himself by crying a single tear to show he's still alive.

As King writes in a note after the story, a tear is nice and all, but he wanted his protagonist, Howard Cottrell (Richard Thomas) -- who gets paralyzed by a snake bite while golfing -- to demonstrate a different way of showing he was still alive. So King has him get a huge boner while the older sexier doctor is handling his junk. That's very King-like, and it works on paper, but I knew it was going to be difficult to portray that on television and not have it seem trite or silly. In King's story, Howard is single, but in the televised version he's married and suffering from occasional impotence due to an old war wound. The backstory makes Howard's eventual "rise from death" seem a little less gauche, but it's still kind of goofy.

Just the thought of being able to think and feel but unable to communicate that fact to people who are preparing to slice into your ribcage, lop off the top of your skull, and peel your face off like an orange peel is horrifying, and it begs the question as to why this episode wasn't scarier than it was. Admittedly, I had already read the story so I knew nothing was actually going to happen to him, and that may have made it seem less horrific to me. Still, even the best horror films can still seem frightening after you've seen them a dozen times. Hitchcock inspired King to write his story, and I'm guessing a little more influence from the Master of Suspense would have helped with this TV adaptation as well.