Sometimes They Come Back: How The Movie Drastically Changed King’s Book

Stephen King’s short story Sometimes They Come Back made the journey from page to screen, but ended up getting drastically changed along the way. Of course, King’s prose not translating to the big or small screens intact is nothing at all new. The most famous instance of King’s work getting altered in that way is definitely The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of which King has always hated, despite most of the world revering it as a classic. King felt it failed to capture the essence of his book.

There’s also been cases of King’s work getting changed for the screen that he’s actually loved, more than he’s disliked in fact. King famously loved the divisively dour ending of The Mist movie, and expressed his approval of the decision to kill Ellie instead of Gage in the 2019 remake of Pet Sematary. King generally doesn’t seem to mind screenwriters and directors taking liberties with his material if they don’t lose the core of the story, at least in his opinion.

While King hasn’t really talked about the 1991 TV movie adaptation of Sometimes They Come Back much, one wonders what he thinks of just how different it is from his short, which appeared in the 1978 Night Shift collection. Here’s how the two versions differ.

Sometimes They Come Back: How The Movie Drastically Changed Stephen King’s Book

The most basic elements of Sometimes They Come Back are largely the same. In both versions, a teacher named Jim Norman returns to his hometown with his family, decades after a group of greasers murdered his brother Wayne, and then got killed. For every time one of Jim’s student dies, another greaser joins his class, leading to a final showdown between them and Jim. Beyond that though, lots of notable changes occurred between the book and the movie adaptation.

For one, the Sometimes They Come Back title is not meant to refer to the undead greasers that menace Jim, it’s meant to be about the demon Jim uses black magic to summon in the book, which then takes his enemies back to Hell. It then warns Jim it might return. Also, while Wayne returns to help Jim at the end of the film, and the two then pay a fond farewell, it’s entirely different on the page. Wayne doesn’t come back, instead the demon Jim summons takes on Wayne’s appearance, leading to a sinister reunion.

Additionally, Jim’s wife gets killed by the greasers in Stephen King’s story, and the two don’t have any kids. All in all, the TV movie adaptation is much less dark and depressing, which is somewhat to be expected for a 1991 production. The one area that’s actually a bit darker in the movie is how the greasers died, as in the movie Jim took their keys and their car got hit by an oncoming train, while in the book, they get killed in a police chase.

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