Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (71 page)

Edie heard herself say “Oh dear God!” 

Uptown, another siren began to wail, and they all three turned toward it. And it seemed to her that the boy’s smooth brown face held something enigmatic and beyond her reach, a sense of expectancy, and perhaps of blind promise. 

“John--” she began. 

And then the huge explosions ripped through the night. 

They Bite (Undated)
 

The screenplay for
They Bite
is held in Box 1010 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. Written permission from King is required to access this work. The 115-page screenplay may have been written about 1976 (this conclusion is drawn from the timeline of the story) and it appears to be incomplete, although it is clear the story is nearly told by the last page.
Further research since this piece first came to light has been unable to clarify whether or not the screenplay
is
by Stephen King, so it may be deleted from King’s canon at some future point. 

In the screenplay, which is an America Under Siege tale, a graduate student arrives at a desert camp, where students are conducting a fossil dig at a fault that went back to the Jurassic period. Shortly afterward Brian Alcott goes out to the dig where strange creatures rise up from the ground, pushing large columns of rock into the air, coming out of the resultant holes, attacking and killing people and eating anything that gets in their way. During one attack a four-year-old girl, Kimberly, runs from the camp in terror and into the desert. 

After each wave of attacks the creatures metamorphose, shedding their skins and taking on the features of their most recent food, including plants, inanimate objects and even people. Between waves of attacks Alcott and Heather Smith, another student working on the dig, ride bicycles to a nearby airport and fly a light aircraft to the camp, where it crashes. Using guns from the airport the survivors beat off another attack, which include creatures shaped like humans. The Professor in charge of the dig speculates that the creatures rise up only every 65,000,000 years, feed, breed and die. 

Kimberly returns to the camp, where she is revealed as a creature, which attacks and kills “her” mother, Mary. The creature speaks and is a perfect replication. This leads to paranoia among the survivors, who discover, from a human shaped shell interior left in their communal bathroom, that one of them must be a creature. They also come to the realization that this creature is the Host, waiting for its reproductive organs to mature and lay eggs inside the bodies of the others. They retreat to corners of the room and watch each other with suspicion. 

The impostor turns out to be Heather Smith, who is now the “Breeder” creature. She attacks a girl named Shelly Thompson, placing eggs into her pregnant belly and stuffing her into a hole in the ground. Heather/It then dies. The crisis appears to be over for another 65,000,000 years. The next morning the police arrive at the camp. 

As few readers will ever be able to peruse this screenplay further detail on various characters and events contained within follow. 

The screenplay King has this to say of the creatures:  

For millions of years they had lain motionless in their burrows, swimming in foetal fluids, silent, unobserved. Man had never known them, for they were older than Man and had never walked the Earth with him. They had outlived every species of living thing that walked or flew, swam or crawled. But now a change was taking place; their sluggish vital processes were beginning to accelerate. Dim impulses throbbed through their minds. They were hungry.  

Professor Davies speculated that they rise up every 65,000,000 years and, at their last appearance, had wiped out the dinosaurs.  

Thanks to the metamorphosis there are many variants of the creatures, which would make for interesting special effects should a movie ever be made from this script. As an example, one creature was a three-legged bug. Killer, the camp’s female collie, fought it and another creature but lost, with the “bug” creature killing and eating her. When its sac was full of food it flipped on its back, resting on its bloated sac and lay still. After a while the stomach sacs were no longer transparent. Soon afterward the creature cracked open, shedding its old shell and re-appearing in the soft state, before quickly hardening. The new creature was quite different. While the first had three legs, this had four, as well as some kind of head. It quickly turned yellow, rather than black, as in the first generation. It mimicked the collie, which its first generation had killed, by using a segmented exoskeleton with patterns of color representing fur. 

One of the students, Clark, got a first generation creature to examine between attacks. The head and thorax were fused together and Professor Davies thought it must be an arthropod, due to its segmented exoskeleton. However, as it was radially symmetrical he and Clark thought it must form a new Class. They agreed that although the creatures metamorphosed like insects they belonged to no known Class of animal. The first creature to come out of the ground was the size of a large house cat, had pale green, soft, transparent skin and several articulated stick-like limbs. It and those that quickly followed it rapidly became black, with strong, hard shells and began attacking and eating anything nearby, whether human, animal, plant or inanimate. 

The creatures were easily killed while in the resting state between “generations.” When one ate a chair and rested, one of the humans killed it by hitting its sac with a shovel. The creature gave a “horrible, chittering shriek” while dying.  

The worst of the creatures was the “Breeder,” or “Heather Creature,” which mimicked the body of Heather Smith. It had large wing casings and used tendrils to try and capture its prey. It flew and had a wingspan at least 15 feet across. It used its ovipositor to place eggs directly into Shelly Thompson’s pregnant belly, buried her and then died. The survivors could only presume that Shelly’s body would give up more of the creatures in another 65,000,000 years. 

There was quite a group of humans in the camp and, as in any good horror movie of this type, few of them survived. The hero is Brian Alcott, a 21 year old from Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was from a wealthy family and a grad student from USC, where he had poor grades, except in palaeontology. He had once collected guns and was a target-shooter. He arrived at the camp the night that the creatures rose up and rode with Smith to the airport to bring back a plane and weapons. He and Smith developed an attraction before she was revealed to have become another creature.  

Heather Smith was an attractive, red-headed 20 year old from Phoenix. She had been Davies’ lover and was a model plane builder and enthusiast who used her knowledge to fly the plane out of the airport. It crashed after a creature attacked her but she survived and started to develop a relationship with Alcott. She turned out to have been taken over by the Breeder creature. 

The head of the dig was Professor Sewell Davies, a Professor of palaeontology. He was nearly 60, tall, lean, bearded and suntanned. Despite being an obvious victim (in most such movies he/she who digs up the trouble dies as a form of retribution) he survived the creature attacks on the camp, although his former lover did not. 

The other students killed by the creatures were Owen Clark, who had managed to sleep with both Louise and Connie, who were also victims (strange how all the young women who “slept around” died in the slaughter, isn’t it?); Harry Emerson, another of Louise’s lovers, also slept with yet another victim, Donna Wadsworth; Mary Isringhaus, mother of Kimberly, divorced but not sleeping around; and Gil Thompson, Shelly’s husband. Chris Whittaker, who readers will not be surprised to learn, had slept with Donna Wadsworth, died after his arm was ripped off by one of the creatures. 

The other victim was James White Feather, the American Indian camp cook. Despite putting up a valiant fight, he also died at the hands of the creatures, but had not slept with any of the female students! 

Kimberly Isringhaus, Mary’s four year old daughter had curly blonde hair. Terrified by the initial bug attack she ran out of the Camp and into the night. She appeared to have returned later, much to the relief of the survivors, but was actually a creature. 

Only Alcott and Davies survived, leaving the first State Patrolman who arrived at the camp the morning after the attacks to ask, “Anybody else left alive here?” 

The script does not identify the location of the Camp at which all this mayhem occurs, other than to place it in the desert, near the town of Pueblo Junction. Blue mountains could be seen in the distance. It was basically a group of Quonset huts painted riotous colors. Surrounding them were a water tank, generator, wooden crates and picnic tables. The storehouse hut was given the grandiose name, “Darwin Hall.” The mess hall was known as “The Student Union.” “Harris Hall” was the utility shed, with cyclone fencing at both ends, and this is where the survivors spent the first night.  

The airfield, from which Alcott and Smith flew a Beechcraft Sierra 200, was about 20 miles from the Camp and was presumably closer than Pueblo Junction. It was comprised of a couple of buildings and a couple of hangars. When they arrived it had lost power, phones and had been smashed up by the creatures. 

The time setting for the story is 1976. It is unclear why this screenplay, if indeed it is by King, was not produced. It is possible it has too close a story line to that of other science fiction/horror tales. It certainly has the feel of
Alien
meets
Friday the 13th
and producers may have decided that the storyline was simply not original enough. There can be no real expectation that this screenplay will ever be produced or released to the general reading public. There are no links from this work to any other King fiction. 

King’s Screenplays 

King seems to enjoy writing screenplays, either adapting his own work or, in two cases, that of another writer and writing original works for the screen. The following is a list of screenplays King is known to have written. 

Asylum
Adaptation of Patrick McGrath’s novel 

Carrion Comfort
Unproduced original screenplay
 

Cat’s Eye
Original movie script, released in 1985, including a wrap-around and three segments,
Cat’s Eye
,
Quitter’s, Inc.
and
The Ledge 

Children of the Corn
Unproduced adaptation of his short story 

Chinga The X-Files
episode written by King, with material added and changed by series creator, Chris Carter 

Creepshow
Original movie script, released in 1982, including a wrap around and five segments,
Father’s Day
,
The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill
,
The Crate
,
Something to Tide You Over
and
They’re Creeping Up on You 

Cujo
Unproduced adaptation of his novel 

The Dead Zone
Unproduced adaptation of his novel
 

Desperation
2006 TV adaptation of his novel 

Dolan’s Cadillac
Unproduced adaptation of his short story 

General
Unproduced form of the wrap-around segment of
Cat’s Eye 

Golden Years
Original TV series script, released in 1991 

Kingdom Hospital
TV series, based on a Danish series, released in 2004 

Maximum Overdrive
Original movie script, directed by King, released in 1986 

Molly
Unproduced screenplay written for
The X-Files 

Night Shift
Unproduced adaptation of his short stories
Strawberry Spring
,
I Know What You Need
and
Battleground
. Also includes an original wrap-around segment 

Poltergeist
Original movie script, unproduced
 

Pet Sematary
Movie adaptation of his novel, released 1989 

Rose Red
Original mini-series script, debuted in 2002 

The Shining
Mini-series adaptation of his novel, debuted in 1997 

The Shining
Unproduced adaptation of his novel 

The Shotgunners
Unproduced original movie script