Everything You Need To Know About Stephen King’s Cinematic Universe

Paul Sheldon (Misery)

In the 1990 film adaptation of Misery, we see renowned author Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan) terrorized by nurse Annie Wilkes (played by Kathy Bates – for which she won an Oscar) after she rescues him from a devastating car crash in a remote location. Wilkes is unhappy with the fact that Sheldon plans to kill his literary character – Misery Chastain – and holds him captive and abused while forcing him to write an entirely new book in which the character returns.

Both Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes are mentioned in the source material for The Dark Tower, but it’s Sheldon that’s the more connected of the two. He’s not only revealed to be from Derry, Maine, but also grew up next door to one of the children from the story of It. He recounts a tale about his mother taking a trip to Boston with Mrs. Kaspbrak – presumably the mother of Eddie Kaspbrak who, in the upcoming adaptation of that story, is played by Jack Dylan Grazer.

Teddy Duchamp (Stand By Me, Carrie)

Teddy Duchamp is probably most famous for being played by Corey Feldman in Rob Reiner’s 1986 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Body (published in 1982) – titled Stand By Me.

In the movie, Teddy is one of four young friends from the small Oregon town of Castle Rock, who set out to search for the body of a local missing boy in the summer of 1959. The young Teddy is an animated, eccentric individual with a knowledge of pain and darkness that periodically sweeps across him like a storm cloud. As the film reaches its denouement, we learn that Teddy was rejected by the U.S. Army as an adult and spent some time in prison before finding work undertaking odd jobs around his hometown. This stays quite close to the source novella, which states that Teddy died between 1971 and 1972 having been working in road maintenance.

But the very striking name of Teddy Duchamp also crops up in Carrie (the book of which was published in 1974) – in the description of a man who ran Teddy’s Amoco gas station in Chamberlain, Maine. While the timelines of these characters do not entirely match (the Teddy Duchamp mentioned in Carrie dies in 1968), it’s perhaps a tantalizing glimpse of an early attempt at connection between his works, on the part of Stephen King.