4. “The Shining” (1980)
After this movie was completed, Jack Nicholson vowed to never work with Stanley Kubrick again and he kept his promise. But it wasn’t just him – the whole crew was exhausted after infinite retakes and constant dissatisfaction of the director. SK himself kept getting calls from Kubrick at 3 in the morning. As a result “Shining” turned out to be much less of a King adaptation and much more of a Kubrick movie. Nonetheless the original story elements are still here.
A struggling writer (Nicholson) with a wife and little son accepts a job watching a remote hotel during winter. It seems like a good idea and easy money until things go really bad. The little boy begins to see ghosts from hotel’s gruesome past while his father’s own hidden demons start to come out.
3. “Carrie” (1976)
“Carrie” is SK’s very first novel and the first work to be adapted for the screen – by Brian de Palma. Sissy Spacek did a convincing portrayal of Carrie – a quiet mousy girl, living under a dictatorship of a religious fanatic mother at home and bullied by the girls at school.
Due to a particularly nasty incident in the showers involving her, the girls of her class are banned from attending the prom. One of the classmates, in attempt to redeem herself, convinces her boyfriend to invite Carrie to the prom, while another plans to mock her before the whole school. What they don’t know is that Carrie has a secret – her newly developed telekinetic powers – and pissing her off is a really bad idea.
2. “Stand By Me” (1986)
The film was adapted by Rob Reiner from novella “The Body” of “The Four Seasons” collection – one of the most heartfelt and humane of all SK’s works. It’s about childhood friendships that can’t be compared to anything else and can only sadly missed ever since they end.
Four boys – Gordie, Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell), go on a field trip after one of them gets a tip: there is a dead body lying in the woods – of a local little boy who recently went missing.
Boys hope to make the official “discovery” and make it into the papers, unaware that a gang of older bullies, headed by young and wild Kiefer Sutherland, is headed in the same direction. Throughout their journey the boys face some serious grownup dangers and begin to see many things in life with different eyes.
1.“The Shawshank Redemption” (1994)
It’s hard to be objective when talking about your favorite movie, but I’ll try. While the original can hardly be called a masterpiece of King’s it certainly is the biggest achievement of writer and director Frank Darabont. Taking novella “Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption” he cut out its weaker points, enhanced its strongest points, and as result wrote a screenplay for one of the most incredible onscreen stories of survival, persistence, will and hope.
Shot in a slow-paced mode, the movie didn’t do too well at the box office, but later went on to become one of the biggest rental hits ever. It’s also currently holding first place in the imdb’s top 250 movies of all time. If this doesn’t convince you the movie is a must see, I don’t know what will. Banker Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is unjustly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and sent to Shawshank Prison with two life sentences to serve.
But instead of giving up, going mad or killing himself, Andy adapts in ways he can. He befriends Red (Morgan Freeman), provides free accounting services for guards and the warden, and hangs posters of beautiful ladies on the wall of his cell. That is until one day he quietly slips out of his cell – an operation that took him almost 20 years to prepare.
