I am hard at work on another chapter for my book on literary geography and King, this one on exploring King’s Maine through film adaptation, including both adaptations that were filmed in Maine and adaptations that intentionally create a powerful sense of place on screen.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction of that chapter, currently in progress:

Film invites viewers into a fictional world in an immersive way, combining sound, image, and myriad manipulations of both to situate viewers within the specific place they depict and alongside the characters who occupy it. While readers may have their own personal imagined versions or interpretations of a fictional place, film adaptation establishes a shared vision, a popular culture touchstone of that universe. King’s work has been prolifically adapted, on film and television, from major motion pictures to “Dollar Babies,” where students and first-time filmmakers were able to secure the rights to adapt a King story for just one dollar (this program ended in 2023). These adaptations have also varied widely in terms of quality, from Oscar-nominated films like Misery (1990) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994) to those that strayed far from the established path of King’s fiction, like The Lawnmower Man (1992) and countless Children of the Corn sequels, prequels, and requels. While the depth of King’s characterization and the massive scope of some of his longer books like IT (1986) and Insomnia (1994) pose challenges for filmmakers and others have faced the opposite hurdle when they attempt to adapt King’s short fiction into full-length feature films, but the stories King tells lend themselves well to adaptation. As Tony Magistrale argues, “Hollywood’s attention to Stephen King helps to make us realize that this writer is more than just a remarkably popular and a readily recognizable cultural icon; it confirms his status as one of America’s greatest storytellers, a versatile artist capable of producing narratives so compelling that they translate well into a variety of visual mediums” (“Introduction” 2). In addition to the stories themselves, another element of King’s work that has translated very effectively across a wide range of mediums is his description of the iconic settings of his novels and stories, which include canonical towns like Derry and Castle Rock, as well as Maine locations a bit further from the beaten path, like the woods behind the Creed house in Pet Sematary (1983) and the mill town of Gates Falls in “Graveyard Shift” (in the 1978 collection Night Shift).

This chapter addresses two key themes in King adaptation, framed within the larger discourse of place, spatiality, and literary geography: adaptations filmed in Maine and adaptations that invest in the creation and exploration of King’s fictional places. The first section focuses on King adaptations that have been made, either in whole or in part, in Maine, emphasizing King’s commitment to these films reflecting and benefiting the state that inspired them. As King argues, films set and filmed in Maine “should serve as commercials for the state as much as all the movies made in California, Los Angeles, New York have served as commercials for those places” (qtd. in Unearthed and Untold). Some of these feature quite isolated glimpses of Maine, like Bangor International Airport in the 1995 miniseries The Langoliers, several are grounded within the reality of Maine towns or landscapes, including Creepshow 2 (1987), Graveyard Shift (1990), Thinner (1996), and Storm of the Century (1999). Mary Lambert’s 1989 Pet Sematary is the ultimate example of the significance of place, the Maine location, and adaptation, with Ludlow and its surrounding wilderness serving as an active and powerful force that requires constant and intentional navigation, rather than a static backdrop setting.

The second section features King adaptations that invest in the depiction, navigation, and exploration of King’s fictional places. In these films, the Maine setting is almost a character in and of itself, exerting its influence and immersing the viewer in a sense of place that James Arthur Anderson argues that King’s readers—and through adaptation, viewers—“knows more about [these towns] than he could know about his own hometown even,” which creates a sense these places as “hyperreal” (122). Through King’s description of these places and the filmmakers’ adaptation of them, viewers are invited to explore the streets of Derry in Andy Muschetti’s IT films (2017 and 2019) and Welcome to Derry (2025 – ), to walk through Castle Rock both past and present in Stand By Me (1986) and the Hulu series Castle Rock (2018-2019) and to contend with the limitations and leverage the resources of Chester’s Mill in Under the Dome (2013-2015). Whether filmed in Maine and showcasing real-world locations or through filmmakers’ visual interpretation and active exploration of King’s fictional world, these films, miniseries, and television series invite viewers to imagine and immerse themselves within King’s Maine.

Quotes are from Tony Magistrale’s “Introduction” to The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to Secret Window (2008), Justin White and John Campopiano’s Unearthed and Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017), and James Arthur Anderson’s The Linguistics of Stephen King: Layered Language and Meaning in the Fiction (2017).