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EARLY IN 1987 I SAW ROB REINER'S FILM, STAND BY ME. WHAT SHOWED first and most obviously about this film was its marvelous presentation of a passage into adolescence theme. The movie Stand by Me, as a matter of fact, is a very American, very charming, and very accurate portrayal of what it means to be a 12-year-old boy at the brink of manhood. The moviegoer sees and enjoys four boys' overblown sense of "macho," their need to break off babyish ties with family, their intense concern about their own genital apparatus, their deep distrust of all adults, and their dawning realization of abstractions such as "intimacy" or "hypocrisy." The prepubertal dialogue in the film is great. Although I grew up as a girl and never heard any of my 12-year-old friends term one another "wet ends" or throw out invective such as "suck my fat one," the preadolescent in me still understands. The children of Stand by Me are speaking the language of American childhood.
This "passage into adolescence" theme may be what the reader wishes to think about when a film, as accurately evocative of preadolescent childhood as this one is, comes up for discussion. However, there was something else in Stand by Me to which I will devote this entire paper—and that is its mood of terror. Terror strikes the viewer of this film, I think, from the very beginning. A full-grown man sits in a pickup truck reading his newspaper. His best friend from childhood, Chris Chambers, has been killed trying to break up a knife fight in a fast food restaurant. How suddenly, how unexpectedly does a life end. How horrifying.