The Outsider's Malevolent Stranger Is a Stephen King Trope, But It's Never Been More Apt

There's a figure lurking on the edges of the HBO series The Outsider. He is, as Beanie Feldstein's Booksmart character might exhort, the titular Outsider. Clad in a hooded sweatshirt, with a horrifically deformed face, he stalks the periphery, feeding off of the pain and misery that result from the act of unspeakable evil he's introduced into a community.

In writer/producer Richard Price's HBO adaptation of Stephen King's novel, the flashes we see of The Outsider are sudden and deeply unsettling. He's among the crowd of bystanders gawking at a crime scene. He's walking down the street at the precise moment a grieving husband/father hangs himself and crashes through his second-story window. He's hovering by the crib of a newborn baby. The experience of watching The Outsider is the experience of scanning every single shot for another appearance by that hooded stranger. It's made for a terrifically tense and foreboding viewing experience.

The idea of a malevolent entity whose mere presence in a community causes chaos, harm and/or death is one that recurs often in Stephen King's fiction. In his 1991 novel Needful Things, a stranger comes to town and opens a novelty shop — only the stranger is the devil, and with every tchotchke he sells, the townspeople of Castle Rock are pushed closer and closer to violent conflict with each other. This is a theme that re-emerged in the Hulu series Castle Rock (which was not written by Stephen King, but rose from his characters and themes), with the mysterious Kid appearing in the bowels of Shawshank prison and, upon being let out, traverses Castle Rock as horrific acts of violence follow him wherever he goes.

Stephen King has played with this narrative device in some of his biggest works. In The Stand, his stand-in for the devil is Randall Flagg, and while Flagg's mere presence doesn't trigger mayhem the way the Outsider does (Flagg draws people to him in other ways), he's often described as akin to the devil figure in the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," where he was present in some way for every famous disaster in human history. In It, it's not so much the figure of Pennywise who inspires the town of Derry towards its most evil impulses, but rather the town itself that pushes its residents towards evil, with Pennywise being but one manifestation.

King's recurring themes of evil and its effect on the masses may be a longstanding trope, but in The Outsider, it feels perfectly in tune with the present moment. As my colleague Aaron Barnhart pointed out in his recent review of Amazon's The Hunters, so much art these days seems to be a reaction in some way to the age of Trump and and the myriad ways in which public life seems increasingly threatened and threatening. After watching white-supremacist rallies in Charlottesville turn violent, King's vision of the potential evil of humans triggered by a malevolent figure feels more urgent than ever.

The Outsider has been a good show overall, despite some weaknesses on a scripting level — Ben Mendelsohn's Detective Ralph Anderson has been left to tread a whole lot of water while Cynthia Erivo's Holly Gibney has emerged as the show's shadow protagonist — but the series features a dynamite cast, with not only Mendelsohn and Erivo but also Julianne Nicholson as a righteously furious widow and Mare Winningham as Anderson's wife. But it's this recurring theme of a dark force just at the edges of our communities, waiting to prey and feast upon our misery, that's delivered the show's most potent and chilling moments.

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Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.