The Best Stephen King Adaptation Remains The Simplest

Stephen King is famous for many things, but brevity is not one of them. He’s produced more than his fair share of short stories and novellas, but King’s biggest successes — The Stand, It, 11/22/63 — double as doorstops. It in particular, often considered King’s masterpiece, is meticulous to the point of exhaustion. It’s unlikely that anyone finished its 444,000 words and thought, “But how did the evil, shapeshifting clown impact the United States Air Force?”

And yet that’s the premise of prequel series It: Welcome to Derry, which is answering question after question about Pennywise that no one has ever had. Derry has generally been well-received for the grisly inventiveness of its scares, but even positive reviews, like that of SlashFilm’s Chris Evangelista, noted that it “seems a little too hellbent on explaining every single mystery.”

At this rate we’ll soon be watching Cujo: The Puppy Years, but King, and horror in general, is at its weakest when lore overtakes tension. That’s why Misery remains one of King’s most effective novels, and why Rob Reiner’s film adaptation, which came out 35 years ago today, is still thrilling in its brutal simplicity.

When romance novelist Paul Sheldon breaks his legs in a wintery car crash, he’s rescued by nurse and superfan Annie Wilkins, who takes him home and insists they’ll head to a hospital as soon as the roads are cleared and the phone lines restored. That doesn’t quite end up being the case.

Annie, in a career-making performance from Kathy Bates, is everything you don’t expect in a horror villain, from her self-deprecating nervousness to her aversion to profanity. She dresses and decorates like your grandmother, but there’s a simmering rage there too, and Bates makes a frustrated “cockadoodie” land harder than a revving chainsaw. When she gets hold of Paul’s new book and learns that her beloved bodice ripper heroine has been knocked off, she forces him to write a retconning sequel while most of the outside world leaves him for dead.

Annie has become a symbol of the obsessive superfan, although to King, she represented his substance abuse problem (the movie, presumably for the sake of time, excises Paul’s addiction to Annie’s painkillers). Regardless of how you interpret Annie, you certainly wouldn’t want to be left in her care. While the scene where she hobbles Paul is the movie’s most famous, it’s her sudden swings from solicitous to spiteful that really terrify. How do you anticipate what’s coming next when even your tormentor isn’t sure?

So yes, Misery can be seen as a portrayal of entitled fandom — one imagines there are countless Annies out there today, held at bay only by easy access to fanfiction — but it is also the simple logic of domestic abuse. When Annie berates Paul for the extremes he “makes” her go to, you really do buy that she feels like the wronged party. Her lot in life has reduced her to self-pity, and she’s willing to try balancing the cosmic scales with a sledgehammer and a pistol. That was a terrifying breath of fresh air in 1990, as the slasher genre finished its tedious slide into extremity and parody.

Ironically, given Paul’s condition, everyone seemed to enjoy stretching their legs. The frustrated Paul represented King’s annoyances at being pigeon-holed into horror, Bates made a name for herself outside the theatre scene, James Caan played against type in his continued re-emergence from temporary retirement, and Reiner was taking a break from comedies like When Harry Met Sally. Even Richard Farnsworth and Frances Sternhagen are memorable as a laconic sheriff and his wife, whose investigation into Paul’s disappearance, the biggest diversion from the source material, offers relief from the claustrophobia of Annie’s kitschy prison. It was a storm as perfect as the one that drove Sheldon off the road and gave Misery its frustrating sense of wintery isolation.

Between the growing difficulty of hiding someone off the grid and the near-impossibility of buying a King proxy as creatively hamstrung, Misery almost feels like a period piece today, but it remains effective in its taut simplicity. The King pop culture machine will keep churning for the foreseeable future — we got two remakes of his perambulation-based thrillers this year alone — and Misery hasn’t been entirely immune to its machinations, as a reimagined Annie was the focus of Castle Rock Season 2. Still, it seems mercifully unlikely that we’ll ever get a sequel where an aging Paul tangles with a cult of psychic vampires. Once upon a time, a writer had a bad run-in with a fan. What more do we need to know?