I’m Really a Writer: King, Craven, and ‘Cooties’
By Brian Keiper
On the first day of summer school at Fort Chicken Elementary, substitute teacher Clint Hadson (Elijah Wood) stands before a group of very bored-looking fifth graders and says “Now I’m not really a teacher, I’m only substituting to pay the bills. I’m actually writing a horror novel.” It is with a little embarrassment that I admit that I have uttered something similar. Not so much the “I’m not really a teacher” part but I have let my students know from time to time that I write about movies on the side. They always seem thoroughly unimpressed. But they can’t help it, they’re twelve — they’re always unimpressed.
Before I go any further, I have to say that I love my job. I need to make that nice and sparkling clear before I continue. As far as actual viable careers go, it may well be the best job in the world. All that said, teaching is hard. As an elementary school music specialist, I feel like I have it easier than some of my colleagues in the regular classroom — I only see a class for a half hour at a time before moving on to the next, I can repeat the same lesson for each class in a grade level, and maybe best of all, music is a lot of fun! We play instruments and listen to music and hit plastic tubes called boomwhackers on the floor. So, not a bad gig. But it still takes a lot of physical, mental, and emotional energy that those who have never taught may not understand, not to mention time and resources. By the end of the day or on the weekends, I am spent. I am often so drained that the thought of sitting at my keyboard to write is debilitating. Sometimes it feels like a minor miracle that any words end up on the page at all.
Not long ago I was rereading Stephen King’s On Writing, perhaps searching for a little inspiration to help me out of the rut, when this passage describing his stint as an English teacher in the town of Hampton walloped me like a Louisville Slugger to the chops.
“…for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching. I liked my coworkers and loved the kids — even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting — but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then.” (page 73)
It suddenly all made sense. It was freeing and debilitating at the same time. It was the answer to my question of “why has writing become such a chore lately?” but the answer was pretty tough to take. Fortunately for King, the writing and publication of Carrie was just around the corner and his stories of writing Salem’s Lot in the laundry room of his family’s double-wide trailer with a portable typewriter balanced on his knees is an inspiring call to perseverance, but what did this all mean for me?
But then King wasn’t the only one of my creative heroes who had been a teacher. Wes Craven was a humanities professor when a group of students asked him to help with their film club. In assisting with a student film, he discovered his spark. Under pressure from his superiors to buckle down and focus on his advancement as an academic (earning his Ph.D., publishing papers) he quit and moved to New York where he worked in menial jobs trying to make ends meet as he found his way into the film industry. He learned to sync up dailies and edit before teaming up with Sean S. Cunningham and making his first feature, The Last House on the Left, in 1972.
I find stories like this inspiring, though I’m certain those years of struggle made both King and Craven wonder if they had made horrible mistakes by abandoning security for what must have felt in the moment like the longest shots in the universe. Craven’s journey to success was an even longer and bumpier road than King’s. Last House proved to be a double-edged sword. It was successful but made both Craven and Cunningham pariahs. It would be five years (with a pseudonymously made porno in between) before the release of his next film, The Hills Have Eyes, and another four until Deadly Blessing. In the interim years, several scripts went nowhere, films he wanted to make that were not horror were rejected outright, and many projects fell through. Even after the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, this seemed to be the story of his entire career: signed onto and dropped from project after project and denied the opportunities to make the films he really wanted to make. I can only imagine the uncertainty of those lean years.
It all reminds me of an episode of the Post Mortem podcast in which Mick Garris interviewed the late great film writer and historian David J. Skal. He said that people often asked him how they could become a writer like him. I will never forget his advice: “Keep your day job as long as possible.” I nodded in agreement and my heart simultaneously sank. I knew what he meant. Writing and publishing, especially in journalism and film history, is a volatile space. Magazines, websites, and whole publishing houses seem to rise and fall on a whim; two sites I wrote for regularly in my only four-year career have completely vanished from the web. Major sites and publications have undergone mass layoffs or shut down altogether. A few years ago, I could not imagine a world in which Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, and Sports Illustrated did not sit on magazine racks, but here we are. And the rise of AI is only making it worse. As much as I would love for my day job to be devoted to writing, it is a rarity. The fact is that very few writers, even well-known ones, make their living solely from their craft. Some hit the lecture or convention circuit, but most have regular old day jobs, and for a great many, that day job is teaching.
Which brings us back to Clint Hadson, Fort Chicken Elementary, and the movie they inhabit, 2014’s Cooties. Clint is adamant that he is not really a teacher, telling his old friend Lucy (Alison Pill) who works at the school, “I ended up subbing a little in New York, but really, I’m a writer.” Even when the school descends into chaos from an outbreak of flesh-eating mania caused by tainted chicken nuggets, Clint insists, “I don’t have students. I’m not a teacher. I’m a writer.” Eventually, the reality of the situation brings him to confession. When he and Lucy are alone together, he tells her, “Remember when I said I wasn’t a teacher? That was a lie…That’s what I was doing in New York…I’ve been teaching first grade for two years.” He then lays out the realities of being a creative and a teacher in a heartfelt monologue.
“I mean, I thought I would have free time to write, on my free time, but as it turns out, there is no free time. Teaching’s the hardest job in the world. And I would look out at the kids in my class, and I found myself jealous of them. They have the whole world ahead of them. Their whole lives ahead of them. They have all these opportunities that have already passed me by.”
I have experienced much the same thing. Sometimes I get frustrated when I see students not taking advantage of the opportunities they have or not living up to their potential. I see so much of myself in so many of them. I just want to help bring that potential and that drive out. But then, that’s what teaching is supposed to be, isn’t it?
As in Cooties, sometimes teaching can feel like facing a horde of prepubescent flesh-eating zombies infected by tainted chicken. Ask any teacher what it’s like to stand before a class of twenty or thirty kids who have had nothing but candy for breakfast on the day after Halloween or Valentine’s Day. Or then there’s the day before a vacation or even a three-day weekend. Or the full moon. Seriously, ask any teacher about this and they’ll tell you it’s true — they’re like werewolves. Even though it’s a hyper-gory zombie horror comedy, Cooties somehow feels more realistic than most depictions of older elementary/middle school teaching. Heightened to be sure, but somehow authentic. It’s challenging. It’s draining. It’s sometimes scary. But is it worth it? Absolutely.
Take a look at King’s books. There are good and bad teachers in many of them but arguably his greatest hero is Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone, a teacher. From King’s later period, there’s Jake Epping in 11/22/63, another deeply sympathetic and compassionate teacher. King himself is a kind of teacher, revealing truths through his stories in entertaining and engaging ways as the best teachers do. Many who worked with Wes Craven complemented his directing style using terms like “professorial.” His films often used stories as a method of teaching about social, economic, religious, familial, and political issues at the heart of American life. When given the opportunity to make a straight drama, he chose the story of a music teacher and delivered one of the most accurate depictions of that job ever put on film.
In Cooties, the loudmouth, performatively macho P.E. teacher, Wade (Rainn Wilson), lets his guard down for a moment and laments that his brother-in-law, who makes foam fingers for football games, makes ten times more money than he does. He then goes on to state an insightful reality that every teacher has felt.
“Like, you tell people you’re a teacher and they look at you like, ‘oh, you must have wanted to do something else and couldn’t get anything going.’ It’s like ‘Fuck you, man. I’m raising your kids.’ I love my job. Teachers deserve respect.”
I love my job, too. I complain sometimes but I really do believe it’s the best job in the world. It can be tempting to look for the greener pastures and say, “I’m really a writer,” but then I think about my writing.
As I look back on my best work over the past few years here on Manor Vellum and elsewhere, I see some common threads. In my favorite pieces — the ones I’ve most enjoyed researching, writing, and presenting to readers — I dive into the history of films, the global circumstances in which they were made, and assess how they relate to film and the world now. I discuss how works of various filmmakers shed light on our current political and social plights and the ways they try to teach us how to overcome them. I examine the ways religion permeates our films and how these stories connect with and interrogate our way of life. In other words — I teach. So yes, I am a writer.
But I’m really a teacher. 🩸
About
Brian Keiper is a featured writer for Manor Vellum. Brian’s also written for Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, F This Movie!, Ghastly Grinning, and others. Follow him on Instagram @brianwaves42.
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