With contributions by Megan Eaton 

Happy You Like It Darker Day! We’ll talk about some of those stories next week, but this week, I’m wrapping up our discussion of my students’ and my 3-week class by spotlighting a couple of student projects that engage with space and place in innovative ways. 

For their final project in our 3-week class on King’s short fiction, students were given the challenge of developing their own creative interpretation of one of the King stories we read, and they did an AMAZING job! Student projects included an original composition for piano inspired by “1408”; two makeup designs (one horror makeup for “Battleground,” the other a “Children of the Corn”-inspired Met Gala dress with matching eyeshadow palette and look); a “Children of the Corn” board game; a set of crocheted coasters with designs inspired by “Jerusalem’s Lot,” “The Man in the Black Suit,” and “The Raft”; a short story sequel to “Strawberry Spring”; a “Strawberry Spring”-inspired playlist; a phenomenal series of character design sketches for “The Man in the Black Suit”; and a wide range of reimagined visual interpretations, including posters, book covers, and a mood board.

Given our focus here on literary geography and place, I want to showcase a couple of student projects that really inventively engage with that theme, with student permission and collaboration. The first of these is a set design for “The Boogeyman” by Megan Eaton. 

Megan’s set combines simplicity of design—a single set for the whole story, requiring no changes or moving parts—with the psychological complexity required to tell the story of “The Boogeyman” effectively. Megan’s set design is two-tiered, with the psychiatrist’s office downstage and Lester Billings’ children’s bedroom located upstage and slightly raised. There are distinctive differences in the design of each of these spaces as well, with the psychiatrist’s office rendered realistically while the bedroom is tattered and worn, a nightmare version of the real-world space that reflects Lester’s trauma as he remembers and tells his story. There is an oversized closet door at stage left, looming over the action and offering a visual connector between these two spaces, as well as reflecting the exaggerated space this door takes up in Lester’s mind and memory, and the danger it represents. 

The color palette of the psychiatrist’s office design is dark, mostly comprised of black and reds, reflecting the ominous and threatening tone of “The Boogeyman.” There are some color variations in the upstage bedroom section, including lighter colored floor, rug, bedding, and wallpaper, though darkness creeps in around the edges of these elements, on the sections of the floor that merge with the psychiatrist’s office section and on the tops and edges of the wall. A small but unsettling visual element is the children’s drawings of the boogeyman posted near the head of the bed. Megan also added glow in the dark elements to this set design, further heightening the eeriness, the horror, and the fine line between light and darkness, the seen and unseen, which is so integral to the unsettling story of “The Boogeyman.” 

When asked how completing this project offered a different perspective on this story and its setting, Megan said: 

Completing this project really brought out the more psychological elements of the story through the configuration of my scenic design. The utilization of abstract elements such as the larger closet door and the simplified therapy room really tunes the viewer into our narrator’s altered and desolate viewpoint.

As Lester tells his story to the psychiatrist in the downstage setting of the office, audience members’ attention is drawn further in, immersed in his memory—and furthermore, in the complicated negotiation of his own role in the horror that killed his children, as reflected by the tattered, weathered elements of the nightmare bedroom scene. Megan’s innovative set design adaptation of King’s “The Boogeyman” offers a unique opportunity to engage with both the story itself and the perspective of that story’s teller, immersing us in the horrors of the boogeyman’s predation and in Lester’s own mind. 

Thanks very much to Megan Eaton, for her permission to share her amazing project and for her contributions to this post, including the featured photo!