Stephen King’s ‘Thinner’ Movie Is Weirder Than You Remember

Though the film is branded as Stephen King’s Thinner, the book was the third-to-last novel that King released under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. In 1996, the same year the movie version of Thinner hit theaters, King published his penultimate Bachman novel, The Regulators.

However, when Thinner debuted in 1984, it was not yet common knowledge that Bachman and King were the same. In fact, the original release of Thinner included an author photo of Bachman, which used a picture of Richard Manuel, an insurance agent to King’s literary agent at the time, Kirby McCauley.

As with many of his novels, King pulled elements from his life to create the plot of Thinner, which centers on an obese man who gets cursed to lose weight uncontrollably after he fatally drives over a Romani woman.

In an interview with the Washington Post, King cited a frightening experience that involved a time when a doctor told him he needed to lose weight because he had entered “heart attack country,” a line he uses in the book. He also described his resentment of having to lose weight, and how it eventually transitioned into the idea of a character who couldn’t stop shedding pounds.

There are subtle details from King’s weight loss journey that find their way into the Thinner film, such as an early scene where we see the main character, Billy Halleck, empty his pockets before weighing himself in the morning. King also makes one of his obligatory cameos in the movie, playing a pharmacist named Mr. Bangor, a nod to King’s hometown.

While most of us probably saw Thinner on VHS at our local video stores, the movie actually got a limited theatrical run in 1996, where it played alongside Michael Jackson’s Ghosts, a short film/extended music video starring Jackson in multiple roles, co-written by Stephen King and Mick Garris, and directed by special effects legend Stan Winston.

The 40-minute horror musical features several dance numbers set to Michael Jackson songs like “Is It Scary” and “Ghosts,” telling the story of a spooky Maestro (played by Jackson) and his ghostly family who get kicked out of the town of Normal Valley by a belligerent mayor (also Jackson). In spite of its star power, Michael Jackson’s Ghosts has yet to receive an official DVD or Blu-ray release.

Like its source material, the Thinner film adaptation focuses on Billy Halleck, an obese attorney who kills an elderly Romani woman with his car. He later finds himself on the receiving end of a curse that makes him lose weight uncontrollably after the Romani woman’s father touches Halleck’s cheek and says, “Thinner.”

What could have easily been a slow-burn film of paranoia and despair ends up in a different direction. After only a cursory introduction to our cast of characters, we cut right to the chase of the fateful (and fatal) accident that kicks off the main plot. The reality of Halleck’s predicament is apparent within the first half-hour, leaving the film plenty of time to diverge into prescient dream sequences, bizarre encounters, curses hidden in pies, and even shootouts before the final credits roll.

Sure, it’s Billy Halleck who runs over the senior woman, and he’s who we spend most of our time with in the movie, but he gets help during the trial, as he leaves without charges. The judge assists in pushing the case through a coroner’s inquest, and the sheriff tells lies on the stand.

Ultimately, all three fall victim to respective curses, each one taking on a slightly different form. The judge, who is cursed with the word “lizard,” develops scales and shows up in a prophetic dream sequence. The sheriff, whose curse involved “leper,” appears on screen with heavy prosthetic makeup and resembles Joseph Merrick, AKA the Elephant Man.

Setting aside that many now consider the word “gypsy” an ethnic slur, the use – and misuse – of Romani characters is common in horror literature and film. While “gypsy curses” were prevalent in turn-of-the-century horror, by the time King wrote Thinner, the trope already felt more than a little archaic.

Thinner also adds some elements of class warfare to the mix, as New York Times film critic Lawrence Van Gelder pointed out in his 1996 review. Gelder said that the movie “has the outlines of Shakespearean tragedy and the intellectual content of a jack-o’-lantern.”

One of the first things we see Billy Halleck do in Thinner is getting a high-level mobster (played by Joe Mantegna) acquitted on a charge that involves taking out a contract on another man’s life. What could have been a simple bit of character development for Halleck instead turns out to be the Chekhov’s Gun of Thinner when Halleck asks his new mobster friend to help remove his curse.

This leads to one of the film’s most outlandish scenes: the mobster engages in a firefight with the entire Romani encampment.

Stephen King has always cited horror comic books as an essential part of his literary makeup, and the streak of morbid humor that runs through many comics is apparent in King’s stories and films like Thinner.

The cinematic adaptation of Thinner was also produced by Richard P. Rubinstein, who produced films like Creepshow and Dawn of the Dead, as well as horror TV shows, including Tales from the Darkside and Monsters.

Thinner was never a hit with audiences or critics. As of 2018, it has a rating of 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, in spite of a handful of positive reviews, including one that calls it “Stephen King’s freakiest film in eons.” Thinner’s struggle with audiences started before the film debuted.

Test audiences demanded more gore and reacted badly to the film’s ending, which initially hewed more closely to that of the book.

No stranger to heavy makeup, as he had previously played RoboCop in RoboCop 3, Robert John Burke had to undergo many dramatic transformations to play the part of the cursed Billy Halleck in Thinner. Over the course of the film, the character loses an enormous amount of weight, going from 300 pounds to under 200. To play the role, Burke lost 20 pounds and still had to spend anywhere from four to six hours in makeup every day, depending on where they were in the course of Halleck’s striking transformation. At the peak of his curse, Halleck was supposed to weigh around 120 pounds.

The filmmakers also considered more dramatic effects to show Halleck’s flesh hanging off his bones near the end, but the ideas were scrapped. Some other gore effects were also shot but not used, though the film has no shortage of the red stuff, including a mangled corpse with a chicken stuffed in its mouth.