This 1980’s Movie With 92% on Rotten Tomatoes Is Best Stephen King Adaptation (According to Him)

Summary:

• Stephen King got his wild international fame thanks to his sinister novels revolving around evil clowns and horrifying ghosts, but he nonetheless has some stories that don’t include anything supernatural.
• Surprisingly, one of such stories turned into a film that King later called his most favorite adaptation.
• The movie was released back in 1986 and is based on King’s novel that follows a group of boys that discover each other’s disheartening secrets.

Stephen King is a real king of horror — with all his terrifying and eerie stories that later transformed into internationally successful films like The Shining or It, the author has seemingly carved his way in a unique and easily recognizable way.

And though King may have got his world fame thanks to horror stories, he also has some deeply touching and quite dramatical novels — with one of them being turned into King’s most favorite movie adaptation.

Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, Stand by Me is a 1986 dramedy that stars, among others, late River Phoenix. The storyline doesn’t introduce either blood-thirsty clowns or evil ghosts, but still has one mystery hidden in the plot (without which Stephen King probably couldn’t do anyway): four 12-year-old boys living in Oregon back in the 1950s find out the approximate location of where a missing local boy’s body has been found.

While they all embark on a search for that uncanny place, the characters unveil each other’s personal problems and secrets that before were carefully kept from everyone else’s hearing.

The film thus takes up another significant theme that Stephen King rarely elaborates that much in his stories — but if he does, it becomes a whole new level of the problem.

Tense relationships with parents, abuse and all the traumas that these problems result in are put in the center of Stand by Me — and that’s probably the reason why King eventually liked the movie so much.

It may come as a surprise for many, but even Kubrick’s The Shining didn’t impress the author that much — in fact, he even berated the iconic classic film saying that the adaptation didn’t have the “heart” of the original novel.

But quite the reverse happened to Bob Reiner’s Stand be My as King said he found the film to be very autobiographical — one more proof that the proclaimed author’s deepest stories don’t come as just a piece of his imagination.