Stephen King is a true treasure, a master storyteller whose many books — and their many movie and TV adaptations — have been impacting pop culture since the '70s.
From iconic horror movies like The Shining to coming-of-age masterpieces like Stand By Me, it's easy to get lost in the Stephen King universe without even reading one of his books.
Even if you're a true King connoisseur, you'll likely be surprised to find out about a few of these facts.
Critics noted that this King adaptation shifted from a darker movie into a comedic action film after switching directors. Arnold Schwarzenegger himself said it was a bad call, as the new director — Paul Michael Glaser — shot things more like a TV show.
Needful Things, a forgettable 1993 horror movie starring Ed Harris, was not well received on its release. In fact, The New York Times review read, "though this is by no means the grisliest or most witless film made from one of Mr. King's horrific fantasies, it can lay claim to being the most unpleasant."
Apt Pupil comes from the same set of novellas that spawned The Shawshank Redemption, so it's no surprise that its movie rights were snapped up. Production just couldn't get off the ground, spending nearly a decade in hiatus before the film's eventual release in 1998.
King has never been one to shy away from his demons, and he's acknowledged that he was "coked out of [his mind]" during the production of Maximum Overdrive, a film he wrote and directed.
The Dark Tower movie was too big to fail. Otherwise, it would have failed. Production was filled with problems, cycling through a series of filmmakers until screenwriter Akiva Goldsman wrestled the unwieldy script into something more workable.
It, a two-part film adaptation, memorably featured Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown. He's said in interviews that while acting is acting, he was still scared at times that he was traumatizing the child actors on set.
Dogs and certain other animals can be trained to adequately act in a movie, but cats? Pet Sematary has a cat-centric plot, so it had to use eight to nine British Blue cats to fulfill the demands of the role.
The best movie sets are the ones that don't need much dressing. The Shawshank Redemption shot its exterior prison scenes at the Ohio State Reformatory, an imposing old institutional building located in Mansfield, Ohio.
A movie with a name like Firestarter is going to have a few flames. Director Mark L. Lester said it was the toughest film he'd ever worked on. The fires were the hardest part, as the film was heavily reliant on practical effects in a pre-CGI era.
Film productions use all sorts of different ingredients to make fake blood. For the stuff used in Carrie, set dressers used syrup and food coloring. It sounds innocuous enough, but it quickly hardened like glue under the harsh studio lighting.
Christine is a story about a specific car, one with murder on its mind. But production of the film necessitated way more than one Plymouth Fury: 23 to be exact. This is because so many scenes in the movie feature the car getting smashed up.
The ending of The Shining is unforgettable: Jack Torrance freezes to death and becomes part of an old photograph. Boom. Done. But director Stanley Kubrick had an alternate ending in mind, one that heavily implies the events of the film were all a hallucination.
2007's The Mist features a lot of creepy monsters, most of which were based on actual props and practical effects. One of the child actors in the film liked a spider model so much that he was allowed to take it home.
According to his Stand By Me co-star Kiefer Sutherland, Jerry O'Connell got himself into some trouble while the film was being made. He literally tied up his babysitter so he could attend a fair, then accidentally drugged himself. He needed two days to recover.
Doctor Sleep is a sequel of sorts to The Shining, featuring a grown-up Danny Torrance. In one of many callbacks to the original, a giant version of Danny's childhood Big Wheel was used — and actors were invited to ride it.
If you want a fact to make you feel good inside, consider the friendly Saint Bernards used during the Cujo production. Stagehands had to tie their tails down because they were happily wagging so much.
King wrote Misery the novel, but Misery the movie surprised him. James Caan, who starred in the movie, said in an interview that King attended a screening and got particularly animated during one of the final scenes.
While Bill Skarsgård took great pains not to traumatize the kids in It, his predecessor — Tim Curry, who starred in the 1990 TV adaptation — actively wanted to scare kids. He stayed away from them off-set and refused to mingle so they'd be uneasy around him.
Would you pull a knife on a casting director in order to make an impression? It seems risky, but that's exactly what actor Courtney Gains did during a Children of the Corn audition. It won him the role.
Michael Clarke Duncan is absolutely perfect as John Coffey in 1999's The Green Mile, nearly winning himself an Oscar in the process. He was referred to the role by his friend, Bruce Willis.
