Most of us know Stephen King as the master of horror. The Shining. Carrie. Things that go bump in the night.
But King has published well over 60 novels and novellas, plus hundreds of short stories. A lot of them have nothing to do with horror at all. And some became movies you have probably seen more than once, without ever realizing King was the one who wrote them.
Here are seven films you may not know started as Stephen King stories.
Stand By Me (1986)
Four boys head into the woods to find the body of a missing kid. Along the way, each of them faces something harder than the journey itself.
If you saw this one in theaters or caught it on cable in the late ’80s, you may not have known it was based on King’s 1982 novella The Body, published in a collection called Different Seasons. The film starred Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell.
King himself has called it the only nakedly autobiographical story he has ever written. In an essay dedicated to the film’s late director, Rob Reiner, King wrote: “Those kids were my friends. We never walked down a railroad track to see a dead body, but we got up to other stuff. The story was about my reality as I had lived it on the dirt roads of southern Maine.”
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
A banker goes to prison for a crime he says he did not commit. Over two decades, he plots his escape, builds a friendship with a fellow lifer, and quietly tries to make life better for the people around him.
This one is also based on a novella from that same 1982 Different Seasons collection; King called it Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. It is widely considered one of the most faithful adaptations of his work ever made.
Here is the funny part. The studio actually downplayed King’s involvement when they marketed the film. At the time, King was beloved by horror fans but not taken seriously in literary circles. So they quietly left his name out of it.
King tells a great story about this in his book On Writing. He ran into a woman in a Florida supermarket who recognized him. She told him she liked uplifting things, like that movie Shawshank Redemption. King told her he wrote it. Her response? “No you didn’t. No you didn’t!”
Hearts in Atlantis (2001)
Anthony Hopkins plays a man with psychic powers who befriends a boy who has lost his father. The film is loosely based on King’s 1998 collection of the same name, three novellas and two short stories linked by shared characters and told in chronological order.
King described the work as semi-autobiographical, saying: “Although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened.” The book explores childhood in that decade and what followed, including Vietnam War trauma and the end of the era’s idealism.
Apt Pupil (1998)
A boy discovers his neighbor is a Nazi war criminal. Instead of turning him in, the boy blackmails him, demanding brutal stories about the concentration camps. It takes both of them somewhere very dark.
There is also an intriguing theory that connects this story to The Shining. In King’s novel, the manuscript Jack Torrance is supposedly writing mentions a character named Denker, which is the name of the Nazi in Apt Pupil. If that is intentional, it adds a whole other layer to the story.
Secret Window (2004)
Johnny Depp plays a writer going through a divorce who is accused of plagiarism by a mysterious stranger. He becomes obsessed with proving the short story is really his, and strange things start to happen.
The film comes from King’s novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, published in his 1990 collection Four Past Midnight.
The Running Man (1987)
Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Stephen King adaptation? It is true. This action film is based on King’s 1982 novel of the same name, one he published under the pen name Richard Bachman.
Both the book and the movie are set in a dystopian future where supposed criminals are hunted on a violent game show. But the similarities mostly stop there. In King’s book, the main character is a desperate man trying to pay for his sick daughter’s treatment. In the film, Schwarzenegger plays a falsely accused helicopter pilot who becomes a symbol of resistance against the government.
King’s novel stretches the manhunt over a full month, with the public able to turn contestants in at any time. The movie condenses everything into a few hours of television. King’s version is also considerably darker and more pessimistic. A 2025 remake starring Glen Powell returned to King’s original source material rather than following the 1987 film.
Gerald’s Game (2017)
A woman is handcuffed to a bed as part of a game with her husband, and then he dies. Trapped without food or water, she begins to hallucinate. A deformed figure appears. Long-buried memories start to surface.
Director Mike Flanagan adapted King’s 1992 novel, which had long been called unfilmable because so much of it takes place inside the main character’s head. Flanagan pulled it off and even included the book’s complex, controversial ending.
Not bad for a man the literary world once refused to take seriously.
