What It Is: Machines that come alive and try to kill people. There's a surprising number of examples throughout King's work, including Blaine The Mono (a suicidal monorail) from The Dark Tower series, Christine the vintage car from Christine (think David Hasselhoff's Knight Rider only less camp and more terrifying) and pretty much everything electrical in Maximum Overdrive. What It Means: King takes something we all believe to be safe and turns it into something to fear. The best horror takes something from reality that you wouldn't normally be afraid of and twists it slightly, completely disorienting the reader. Not only that, but this plays on the world's already underlying fear of technology. All too often to we hear of machinery failing (plane crashes, electrical devices short-circuiting) and killing people, from individuals to massive losses of life. The Homicidal Machine trope is King's way of subverting our present technological anxieties, exaggerating them so that we have no choice but to face them.
