Formal Film Study: Stephen King Book-to-Movies

Stephen King is a contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy author. He is also considered a screenwriter, columnist, actor, television producer and film director. He has published 50 novels, including seven under a different pen-name. His books have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books. Stephen King is most known for his books Carrie, The Shining, Misery and It. I decided to study the movies Stand By Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption..

Stand By Me is based off King’s book The Body. The drama comedy follows the story of four young boys who set out on a hike during Labor Day weekend of 1959 to find a dead body of a missing boy their age. The movie begins with a man looking at an article about an attorney who was stabbed to death. The man then goes into a flashback of his childhood with the story of their adventure. After hearing about the body from his older brother, Vern tells his friends about its location and they decide to find the body and become heroes of the town. During their trip, though, they run into many obstacles that begin to tear their group apart, but they always find a way to forgive one another. When they finally find the body, they decide that t is best to leave the body where it is and make an anonymous tip to the police about the body. In the end, after the hike, the group of friends all go their separate ways with their paths never really crossing again.

Misery is more of a horror thriller with the main character psychologically insane. A famous author named Paul Sheldon gets caught in a blizzard on his way back to New York from Colorado and ends up veering off the road and crashing his car into a ditch on the side of the road. He is thought to be dead by the viewers, but he is saved by an unknown person who prys him out of the totalled car. Sheldon wakes up in what looks like a guest room in someone’s house and is greeted by the smiling face of Annie Wilkins, his biggest fan. Annie explains how she saved his life and now she is dedicated to nursing him back to health until the roads reopen and he can go to a real hospital.  But the truth is, she has no intentions of letting him leave her company or her house. When Annie finds out that Paul had killed off Misery, the main character of his most famous novel series, Annie gets very agitated and things get very tense. She forces Paul to write the next book in the series where he must bring Misery back from the grave and chooses her true love. Paul begins to see that Annie is insane and tries to escape...but she has locked the doors and shut off all outside communication. Meanwhile, the local sheriff is on the case of tracking down the missing Paul Sheldon.  Annie ends up shooting the sheriff after he discovers Paul locked in her basement. As Paul begins to finish up his new novel about Misery, he asks Annie to get the three things he always has when he finishes a novel. Annie is so excited that Paul wrote Misery back into the novel and that the novel is almost done that she begins to let her guard down. Paul seizes the opportunity and attacks Annie. They fight for a while and Paul ends up killing Annie in the end.

The Shawshank Redemption is a drama about an innocent man stuck in jail. In 1947, banker Andy Dufresne was convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences at Shawshank State Penitentiary. Andy befriends the contraband smuggler, Red, who gets him a rock hammer so Andy could make chess pieces. After Andy overhears a guard complaining about taxes on a forthcoming inheritance and informs him about a financial loophole, Andy ends up becoming the prison’s bookkeeper.  Soon he discovers that the warden was collecting kickbacks. Andy continues to loiter the money using an alias on behalf of the warden.  Years later, a new inmate, Tommy, comes in and joins Andy and Reds friend group. He reveals that an inmate at another prison claimed responsibility for an identical murder, suggesting Andy's innocence. Andy approaches the warden with this information, but the warden refuses to listen...realizing that he would lose Andy’s bookkeeping skills if let go. He instead places Andy in solitary confinement and has a guard murder Tommy, under the guise of an escape attempt. Andy refuses to continue with the scam, but the warden threatens to destroy the prison library if Andy doesn’t go along. After Andy is released from solitary confinement, he tells Red of his dream of living in Zihuatanejo, a Mexican Pacific coastal town. While Red shrugs it off as being unrealistic, Andy instructs him, should he ever be freed, to visit a specific hayfield near Buxton to retrieve a package. The next day at roll call, Andy’s cell was empty. Furious, the warden throws one of the rock chess pieces at a poster in the cell and the rock went right through it. Andy had escaped through a tunnel he dug in the wall with his rock hammer behind the poster. Andy was finally free and went to live out his life in Zihuatanejo where he would be met up by Red in the future.

Both Stand By Me and Misery were directed by Rob Reiner, a director, actor and producer. As stated from The New York Times, William Goldman says ’'His films have a certain comedy style, coupled with a sweetness and toughness,”. Rob’s films have a funny aspect to them but are more complex than what is shown. In the movie Stand By Me, the boys are not just going on an adventure to find a corpse, they are coming of age and heading into Junior High where they will ultimately split up. Also, when the boys find the corpse, the main character, Gordie, is faced with the flashbacks of his father blaming him for his brother’s death.  Thats when the turning point of the movie happens. Instead of becoming heroes by finding a dead kid’s body, they decide to become heroes over something truly noble. Although Misery does not have as much comedy throughout as Stand By Me, it still has funny segments. Misery has more of the horror aspect. Rob’s cinematic use in the movie is more of a gritty look. He uses many closeups of the main character, Annie’s, face that shock the viewer when popped up on the screen. The overall mood he set for the movie is much darker than Stand By Me, and with every scene it leaves the viewer thinking they know what might happen next.  Usually, they are wrong...the movie has many twists that you don’t see coming.

The overall connection between the three movies is that each of the main characters go through a traumatic and life-changing event.  Gordie, in Stand By Me, at a very young age, sees the dead body of a kid near his own age.  This triggers memories of his father saying that it should have been Gordy that died instead of his athlete brother.  He convinces the rest of the group to leave the body alone, instead of returning it to town and becoming heroes.  In Misery, Paul Sheldon nearly dies in a horrible car accident, only to be rescued by an insane superfan and held hostage.  He struggles for months to keep Annie convinced that he is rewriting his book while he tries to figure out a plan of escape.  He ends up killing Annie and uses his ordeal to inspire a new best seller.  In Shawshank Redemption, Andy is wrongfully accused of murder, then sentenced to life in a run-down and corrupt prison.  While he was in prison, he uses his time to do good things for other inmates, like helping one get his diploma and establishing a prison library.  He bides his time, eventually becomes a trusted prison employee, only to use the warden’s corruption to bring down the warden and set himself up for life after he escaped.