15 Stephen King stories ranked from heartwarming to horrifying

2. The Shawshank Redemption

Everyone’s favorite cable TV movie starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman actually began life as a Stephen King novella. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is itself loosely based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy, “God Sees the Truth, But Waits,” first published in 1872.

King’s novella follows Andy Dufresne, a banker who is wrongfully condemned for the murder of his wife and her lover. He is sent to Shawshank State Penitentiary, where he is set to serve a life sentence for the killings.

Andy soon meets Red, a fellow prisoner whose claim to fame is the ability to smuggle in items from the outside world. Andy asks Red to get him a rock hammer, which he says is totally, definitely for making sculptures out of rocks. He also asks for and receives a poster of Rita Hayworth, which is coincidentally big enough to cover a man-sized hole.

Eventually, Andy becomes a model prisoner. He expands the prison library, helps others get their GED degrees, and begins to help the prison warden launder money. Because Andy has become so useful (and has inside knowledge of the warden’s scheme), it becomes nearly impossible for him to find evidence to exonerate himself.

Good thing he’s got that rock hammer, though. It’s even better that the prison guards are stunningly bad at checking the cells. If they had been more thorough, they would have noticed the hand-chipped tunnel behind the Rita Hayworth poster. As it is, though, Andy finally uses the tunnel to make it outside, where he presumably escapes to Mexico.