If you want to hear the details about Patrick's life that had to be taken out of the movies
because they were way, way too dark for audiences, then stick around to the end of this video.
[Intro]
I wasn't planning on doing another It character on Horror History, at least not for a while,
but I got so many requests to cover Patrick Hockstetter, the twisted preteen with no sense
of morality making him the scariest human character in the novel.
One thing that Stephen King makes note of is the fact that Patrick’s behaviour probably
would have been picked up on by child psychologists had he been born in a later era, so in today’s
episode, we’ll attempt to analyse Patrick with a psychological lens.
To fully understand him, we’ve first gotta first take it back to his childhood.
[HORROR HISTORY]
Patrick Hockstetter was born in 1946 as the son of paint salesman, Patrick’s father,
and Patrick’s mother who is only described as being a devout Catholic.
Patrick is a plump boy with a perfectly round, pallid moonface, much different than the slender
looking Hot Topic version of Patrick from the theatrical version.
Patrick developed a psychiatric condition called Solipsism Syndrome, which is when a
person feels that there is no reality beyond their own mind.
Patrick believed that he was real, but that he was the only real person.
Nobody but him actually existed, they were just figments of his own mind.
The novel never explains how Patrick developed this disorder, but I would guess it may have
been related to the birth of his younger brother, Avery, in late 1950, because Solipsism Syndrome
has been associated with periods of extended isolation, most often diagnosed in astronauts
left alone for long missions in outer space.
Perhaps when Avery was born, he commanded all of Mr. and Mrs. Hockstetter’s attention
and left Patrick feeling isolated, maybe even neglected, and due to his young age -- he
was only five at the time -- the effects of Solipsism set in more quickly.
Patrick did not like when Avery was brought home from the hospital.
He claimed not to care if his parents had more kids, as long as his schedule was not
interrupted, and he began to feel jealous as his meals started coming in late and Avery’s
crying kept him awake at night as his parents constantly tended to the newborn.
It is not known to what extent his parents neglect reached, but Patrick did begin to
fear that Avery would replace him, so he took matters into his own hands one day when he
came home from Kindergarten.
His father was at work, and his mother was napping, so he wandered into Avery’s room.
What the five year old Patrick did next is considered to be one of the most disturbing
chapters in all of Stephen King’s writing.
He started by turning Avery’s head into the pillow.
He stood there and watched him struggle for air for 5 minutes before Avery managed to
turn his head back up.
Then he tried holding Avery’s face down into the pillow, testing if the baby’s snorts
for air would wake up Mrs. Hockstetter.
They didn’t.
So he decided to press Avery’s face down into the pillow full force, and did not let
go.
The feeling of doing this excited Patrick in a way he had never felt before.
After the deed was done, he casually strolled downstairs and made himself a plate of cookies
with a glass of milk.
When his mother woke up, she came downstairs before checking on Avery, thinking he was
still asleep.
Patrick showed her the drawing he had made at school, which was just a chaotic mess of
black and brown scribbles.
He told her it was a house and tree.
He would bring home the same mess scrawling lines every day, each time telling her it’s
something else.
These drawings are never explained, but they may be an indicator of Patrick’s stalled
development in response to his solipsism.
Age children age, they not only physically develop and grow from babies, to kids, to
teens, to adults, but there is also an emotional development taking place.
However, if a child had solipsism like Patrick, he never makes those emotional connections
with other humans, because he believes he is the only human.
So he becomes of sociopath.
Children’s drawings are one way that they’re able to express their emotions.
From a young age, such as 2 or 3, they may express themselves more through the process
than the final product.
So if they are trying to draw a car, they might scribble a bunch of fast lines across
the page.
But by age 5, they are able to understand how to create shapes and somewhat realistic
proportions, because their motor skills have developed, and they’ve emotionally developed
to want to make something more complex.
But in Patrick’s case, he hasn’t emotionally evolved at all, probably not since his parents
started thinking about having a second child.
Mrs. Hockstetter was worried by his disturbing artwork, but she just told herself he would
grow out of it and tried to ignore the problem.
She didn’t discover Avery’s death until 5PM, when she went to check on his unusually
lengthy nap.
Patrick sat watching TV through the uproar of screaming and crying that followed.
The doctor came at some point to see if there was any chance to save Avery, and when he
saw Patrick’s nonchalant reaction, he assumed that he’d gone into some kind of state of
shock and gave him a pill for it.
The incident was diagnosed as a crib-death.
There was a moment where Mr. Hockstetter noticed what looked to be Patrick’s snowy footprints
in Avery’s room, and almost put two and two together, but then forced himself to push
that thought away.
But perhaps what has really chilled readers is that over the remaining 7 years of Patrick’s
life, he felt no shame, no guilt and experienced no nightmares over what he had done.
In 1951, he began his first attempt at first grade.
He was seeking to recapture the feeling that he enjoyed so much that he discovered at the
side of Avery’s crib, so he started a little collection in his pencil box.
He would kill flies and torture beatles, and keep them in this box.
It was a microcosm for another distressing habit of his later in life, involving a refrigerator
at the dump.
On the way home one day, he discovered a dying cat that had been run over, and an old woman
caught him poking at it and told him off.
If only he had lived a little way down the road over in Ludlow, Maine, he would have
loved it over there.
*growl*
"Ahh!"
Patrick was forced to repeat the first grade during the 1951-1952 school year, but the
following summer, on a family trip, he would discover the only semblance of a true fear
that he would ever encounter.
In August of 1953, the Hockstetter family visited Brewster Lake.
One day when Patrick was swimming out in the lake, he got out to discover leeches stuck to his
body.
Not those leeches.
The other ones.
Leeches are the blood sucking worm parasite found in some freshwater lakes.
Patrick did not like the idea of having his blood sucked because it reminded him of his
mortality, and he believed he could not die because he was the only real person.
So he screamed and screamed until his dad pulled off the leeches.
This was the one and only thing that ever scared him, and it is described in the book
as a wretched loathing.
Patrick managed to get through second grade on one try, but the same could not be said
about third grade with Mrs. Weems.
As he got older, his strange behaviour became more and more apparent.
Mrs. Weems knew about the pencil box filled with flies whose wings had been removed by
Patrick, but he was quiet and didn’t really have any disruptive disciplinary issues, so
it was easy for him to fly under the radar compared to kids like Henry Bowers who would
disrupt class and start fights.
That’s not to say that Patrick had no issues.
Sometimes he would turn in his tests completely blank, or just with a large question mark,
like Nathan Explosion during his GED.
"Let's see here. OK.
“It’s a zero.
No questions were answered.”
“Ah.
Damn!
Seriously?”
“How could you have not known that?”
So he had to repeat the third grade as well.
I guess he had some Bruce Bochy even year magic in him, because he managed to pass the fourth
grade, and then it was in the fifth grade, in October of 1957 that he made one major
upgrade to his pencil box hobby by finding an abandoned refrigerator in the dump and
made it his new experimentation lab.
He would kidnap the pets of his neighbors in a cardboard carton and bring them to the
refrigerator to do horrible things to them, all in the name of recapturing the feeling
he’d gotten on Avery’s final afternoon.
He captured several pets and strays over the course of the next 8 months, discarding the
bodies in the bushes after he was through with them.
But as his need for a fix increased, he started to suspect that someone knew about what he
was doing.
The fridge grew a power over him.
He seems to develop some kind of ritual associated with opening it, which is only seen once by
Beverly Marsh from a distance and described as a swaying motion “like a guy in a horror
movie trying to summon a dead body out of a crypt.”
He would fantasize about the fridge during the day, drawing pictures of it in school
and dreaming of it during the night.
In one dream, the fridge was huge and he opened it to find a it contained a pair of eyes staring
at him.
This may be related to his worry that somebody knew about him.
When he ran out of pets to torture, he moved onto pidgeons and any other animals he could
find to satisfy his craving.
In 5th grade, he had Mrs. Douglass, and she had to deal with some new problems that his
previous teachers had not.
She kept him away from girls on the seating chart because of his tendency to get handsy.
Beverly was one of the girls who had to experience this.
“...all at once you’d feel this hand . . . almost as light as a feather, but warm and sweaty.
Meaty.”
Pennywise is pretty scary dude, but I’m starting to think he’s got nothing on Meatyhands
Hockstetter over.
What do you even have to do to get your hands to feel meaty--
“And the worst thing—the horrible thing—was the way he’d smile and never say anything.
Mrs. Douglas knew.
Greta Bowie told on him, and I think Sally Mueller said something once, too.
But . . . I think Mrs. Douglas was scared of him, too.”
Needless to say, Patrick did not pass the 5th grade.
“NOOOO!!!!”
Perhaps it was this fear that Mrs. Douglas had of him that was the reason he was allowed
to take summer school rather than repeating yet another grade, but these summer classes
did not stop him from terrorizing the kids of Derry during July of 1958.
Not only had Patrick reached full fledged psychopath status by now, but he was also
spending his free time with other troubled kids and had become a member of Henry Bowers
feared gang of bullies.
On July 20th, they were chasing down a boy named Eddie Kaspbrak.
Henry was desperate for revenge on Eddie for the part he played in a rock fight earlier
that summer.
When they caught up with him, Patrick, who had no real beef with Eddie but enjoyed causing
others to feel pain, slapped his face on both sides.
Henry ended up breaking Eddie’s arm, and when police sirens could be heard in the distance,
they decided to split, but before running for it Patrick left Eddie with a little parting
gift by spitting in his face.
This was the ultimate attack when it comes to Eddie, who was a known hypochondriac and
germaphobe.
I imagine Patrick took great pleasure in what would be taken as such a hurtful act.
Later that month, Patrick is hanging out with the Bowers Gang again and suggests they go
to the dump.
They all have their parts around the ankles as they try to ignite their farts with a lighter.
After some time, Henry’s minions Belch and Victor have to leave, so just Henry and Patrick
remain.
Henry takes a turn being the… ahem…. the Fuel source and Patrick gets to close and
burns his… uhh… exhaust pipe?
And he gets pissed.
Patrick offers to show something to Henry, telling him it will feel good.
So he ends up giving him a “hand”, and also giving himself a “hand” at the same
time.
They’re both enjoying themselves, so Patrick offers to take it a step further by doing
a little… pipe… cleaning…?
And Henry kind of realizes what he’s gotten himself into and lashes out to knock Patrick
to the ground and tells him that he doesn’t go for any of that stuff.
They argue over whether or not Henry liked it, and Patrick had a crazy smile on until
Henry dropped a bombshell on him, that would make one of Patrick’s biggest worries come
true.
After the… pipe examination… incident…
Henry threatens Patrick to try to get him to stay quiet about it, and Patrick basically
blackmails him, asking for $1 in exchange for silence.
But little does he know, Henry has a counter of his own, saying if Hockstetter tells, he’ll
tell everyone about what Patrick does at the refrigerator and get him thrown in a mental
asylum.
This is the only time in the book where Patrick sounds kind of scared while he responds -- not
the same fear as his fear of leeches, but more of a worry about getting caught, because
he knows that breaking rules means consequences.
With that, Henry leaves, forgetting to take with his lighter as he did.
Patrick continued to sit there for the next five minutes playing with the lighter, pants
still at his ankles.
You’d think someone who is afraid of leeches might also be bit conscious about ticks, but
apparently not.
A few minutes later he returned to the refrigerator to check on a pidgeon he’d caught two days
before.
He wanted to discard the corpse because of Henry’s threat and perhaps clean out the
inside of the fridge as well, just in case.
When he opened the door, he saw that the pigeon was all skeletal, the meat was completely
picked off of it’s bones, and the inner walls of the fridge were covered in small
flesh colored creatures that Patrick thought looked like Macaroni shells.
One of these creatures latched onto his arm and slowly turned red.
He still didn’t think it was harmful because he still believed it was not real.
But then he came to a realization about what they were: some kind of flying leeches, his
worst fear, but with wings.
Yeah, that’s pretty scary to think about.
He screamed, and swatted at the thing, which was growing in size, and it bursted, but to
his horror, the head remained in tact and was still clenched to his arm.
He had to pry the thing off using his fingers, (which is actually what you’re supposed
to do).
Then the other leeches flew out of the fridge and attacked him.
As usual, he felt no pain, just a draining sensation, and stark terror.
One flew down his shirt.
Another landed on his eye and began draining it’s fluids.
One went inside his mouth and feasted on his tongue.
Some of them, including the one in his mouth burst upon reaching capacity.
He lost so much blood he began to get woozy.
He fell to the ground and rolled over and over.
Before passing out, he saw a figure.
This was IT, the shapeshifting entity that takes the form of it’s victim’s greatest
fear.
“...as the figure drew closer, he saw its face was running like wax.
Sometimes it began to harden and look like something—or someone—and then it would
start to run again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind who or what it wanted to be.”
I think that Patrick was just so psychologically messed up that It was unable to find another
fear for Patrick that would be suitable.
While there wasn’t another form that he feared, he was afraid of an idea, which was
the idea of his death.
He believed that if he died, all others would die because he was the only real person.
I guess the leeches were a strong enough form to do Patrick in though.
Just goes to show that even the craziest psychopaths have at least one thing they are afraid of.
I get chills every time.
The shapeshifting It said only one thing to him: “Hello and Goodbye.”
before dragging Patrick’s body to the Barrens.
He passed out on the way there.
When he awoke again, he was inside of the sewers.
It had already begun feeding on him.
There’s not a whole lot more I can say about the life of Patrick Hockstetter.
We’re only given clues about the origin of his solipsism that put a dark cloud over
his youthful development and shaped him into a homicidal sociopath and on the way to becoming
the full-blown psycho as a pre-teen.
However his issues started, it’s clear that they continued because of his increasing need
to feed his addiction.
The movies do paint Patrick to be a sadistic character with some scary issues, but don’t
attempt to come close to the dark and disturbing details of Patrick’s life in the novel.
Hopefully this analysis of him did him justice.
And by the way, let me know who else you’d like to see covered here on Horror History,
or what franchise you’d like to see me cover.
And if you haven’t already seen it, the playlist on the left contains episodes on
every other major character in IT.
Remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring the deathbell for
notifications and I’ll see you in the next one.
Assuming we both survive.