Frank Darabont's film of Stephen King's novel, made three years after it appeared and by the director who had already adapted King's Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The book was published in 1996 as six short monthly instalments, deliberately imitating the Victorian serial, and the film restores it to one continuous story. What it keeps is the frame: an old man in a nursing home telling what happened on a death row block in 1935, and the reason he is still alive to tell it.