10 great films based on short stories

There’s a certain neatness to the concept of Osgood Perkins’ gleefully gory The Monkey (2025), though the results are decidedly messy. It’s based on Stephen King’s 1980 short story of the same name, which features a satanic cymbal-clashing toy monkey – changed in Perkins’ version, due to copyright issues with Disney, to drumsticks – that, when its key is turned, inflicts a grisly end on its selected victim. Packed with blood-splattering fatal sequences riffing on the Final Destination formula, the riotous chaos rendered in the life of its protagonist is a handy allegory for the sheer unpredictability of tragedy. 

That King’s body of short stories alone (totalling around 200) has triggered countless adaptations – from the hotel horror 1408 (2007) to the adaptation King helmed himself, Maximum Overdrive (1986) – is evidence enough that short stories make for great filmmaking material. The genre is governed by a streamlined precision and economy with words, offering in a nutshell a single idea, unlike its sometimes-unwieldy counterpart – the novel. More often than not, short stories are imbued with a sense of mystery because of what is left unsaid, allowing filmmakers a degree of freedom in filling in the gaps.

Arguably, there is a corollary between the fates of the two art forms: the boom of the short story as print production accelerated – stories appearing everywhere from newspapers to magazines – coincided with the dawn of the film industry. As The Monkey arrives on UK screens, we’ve chosen 10 adaptations that skilfully do a lot with a little. 

Director: Howard Hawks

When Cary Grant’s fiancée asserts at the start of this zany screwball escapade, “our marriage must entail no domestic entanglements of any kind,” you’d think it improbable that such familial commitments would also entail adopting a young leopard. But that is the central conceit of Howard Hawks’ big cat caper, in which the eponymous ‘baby’ is the feline. 

Co-adapted by Hagar Wilde from his Collier’s Magazine short story, with the help of Dudley Nichols (previously enlisted on the work of John Ford), the story sprints to keep up with the shenanigans of Grant’s character, a palaeontologist, and the wildly unpredictable heiress played by Katharine Hepburn, who get themselves into an assortment of scrapes. While it sank at the box office, the film cemented Grant and Hepburn’s standing as an onscreen couple – starring in a triptych of pictures together, this one exemplifying their dizzyingly frenetic spirit – and kickstarted Wilde’s new screenwriting career. 

Director: Carol Reed

Introduced by his producer Alexander Korda to Graham Greene – by then author of the 1938 gangland novel Brighton Rock and 1940’s The Power and the Glory – Carol Reed would embark on two collaborations with the writer. The first was a reworking of ‘The Basement Room’ from Greene’s debut collection: set at the French embassy in London, it gives a child’s-eye-view of what took place before a woman’s ill-fated tumble down the building’s grand staircase.

Beginning as the boy’s ambassador father heads out on official duties, Greene’s script hurls Phillipe (child star Bobby Henrey) between the opposing poles of his stand-in guardians Mr and Mrs Baines. Little does Phillipe know that the foundations of their marriage are falling apart, while Mr Baines has an affair with a woman the child believes to be Baines’s niece. The cleverness of Greene’s story resides in how adult lies are refracted by a child’s perception, and under Reed’s direction it unfolds as a terse chamber piece.

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Writers have long toyed with the unreliability of narrators to their own ends. In cinema, a touchstone example is Akira Kurosawa’s split-perspective masterpiece which threads together various views on the same chain of events to demonstrate the fickleness of the act of seeing. This is underpinned by Kazuo Miyagawa’s innovative, sun-dappled cinematography. Lesser known is the story Rashomon hails from – not, misleadingly, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s tale of the same name, but his ‘In a Grove’, first printed in 1922.

The narrative adhesive which binds the broad cast of characters together is the slaying of a samurai. That he has been murdered is irrefutable, but, inconveniently for the authorities, nobody can agree on the exact circumstances around it. Filmed by Kurosawa in the shadow of the Second World War and while Japan was still under American occupation, Rashomon’s meditation on the nature of truth as the country adjusted to its recent past is especially potent. 

Director: Kurt Neumann

Spawning two faithful adaptations and an entire The Fly series, George Langelaan’s 29-page story is a prime example of a little going a long way. Perhaps the most outlandish yarn to be committed to the pages of Playboy Magazine, this queasy body-swap horror was discovered by German director Kurt Neumann while rifling through a 1957 issue.

Despite its lowly origins, The Fly fared better than typical B-movies (though produced by the B-movie subsidiary, it was released by 20th Century Fox instead of Regal Films). It also elevated its lead Vincent Price above his prior roles in mere genre movies. With a storyline possibly inspired by Langelaan’s plastic surgery during the Second World War – his appearance was altered so he could spy in Nazi Germany – The Fly tells of the invention of a teleportation device which, thanks to a six-legged critter, has revolting ramifications. 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Daphne du Maurier famously despised the liberties Alfred Hitchcock took with her source material, transplanting her story from the rugged coast of Cornwall to Bodega Bay and switching her characters from honest country folk to polished city dwellers. The feature didn’t go down well with critics either, Philip K. Scheuer insisting it betrayed Alfred Hitchcock’s “abhorrence to the whole human race”. Hot on the heels of Psycho (1960), Hitchcock’s output had hit a grisly streak. 

Yet there are intriguing echoes to be found in the director’s departure from his trademark thrillers in favour of horror, and du Maurier’s own change of tack at this point in her career. The author had previously forged her reputation with romances like Frenchman’s Creek, Jamaica Inn and The King’s General, but, with her collection The Apple Tree, turned instead to catastrophe of a biblical magnitude. An apocalyptic eco-horror released one year after Rachel Carson’s environmental treatise Silent Spring, Hitchcock’s adaptation proved incredibly prescient.

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

A whistle-stop tour through London’s swinging 60s –  including fashion photography, drug-fuelled house parties and rock’n’roll – Michelangelo Antonioni’s opus was adapted from the jottings of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. ‘Las babas del diablo’ – later retitled ‘Blow-Up’ in line with the film – was inspired by an anecdote shared with Cortázar by Chilean photographer Sergio Larraín. Distilling the soul of 60s mod culture, a key array of actors, models and characters from the decade star, among them Vanessa Redgrave, The Yardbirds and Jane Birkin. Even Cortázar himself briefly cameos. 

Under that bustling surface, though, there are more sinister forces at work: a potential love triangle, a murder and a corpse that the central character, Thomas, doesn’t even report to the police, lend an increasingly existentialist bent to the film’s second half. 

Director: Christopher Nolan

The image of a freshly snapped Polaroid that opens Christopher Nolan’s pacy, noirish second feature – an image within an image of what appears to be a crime scene emerging from the shadows – sets the benchmark for the disorientation to follow. The confabulatory concept of a man with anterograde amnesia, at the mercy of the conflicting wills of those who manipulate him, was dreamed up by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, who told the filmmaker the idea during a fraternal road trip. 

Technically, the latter Nolan’s story hadn’t yet been finished, so – unusually – the writing and the adaptation took place in tandem. Together the brothers worked out the labyrinthine logic of a plot simultaneously moving forwards and in reverse, consolidating Nolan’s career-long obsession with the mechanics of time. The younger Nolan’s confirmation bias fable ‘Memento Mori’ would later be published in Esquire, while the slim-budgeted Memento, initially unable to secure distribution, catapulted the director to acclaim. 

Director: Ang Lee

It is rare for a short story to boast the scope of Annie Proulx’s decade-spanning ‘Brokeback Mountain’ – Proulx claimed it took her twice as long to write the story as it had done for her to pen a novel. But the scale of this narrative is interlaced with its meaning: an interrogation of homophobia in what Proulx called “the land of the great, pure, noble cowboy”, it centres on two men torn apart by society’s intransigence.

Shot in the hulking Canadian Rockies (rather than Wyoming, where The New Yorker original takes place), despite the emotional explosiveness to this tale, there is a cool restraint in Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography and the pacing. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal also nimbly walk the tightrope between sentimentality and reserve. Proulx was doubtful about its adaptation, but she later said: “I may be the first writer in America to have a piece of writing make its way to the screen whole and entire.”

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Slow cinema and short stories make for an ideal pairing, as proved by the longtime alliance of Jonathan Raymond and Kelly Reichardt. The director’s ruminative mode and the writer’s attention to atmosphere are a combination nonpareil. The Oregon writer gave Reichardt her grounding in the Pacific Northwest – the filming location she is now best-known for – after they met via Raymond’s former boss Todd Haynes, and they were soon finding their footing together with the 2006 camping drama adaptation Old Joy.

Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt’s quietly tragic road movie, follows the duo of the film’s title: the nomad Wendy, travelling north to the tundra of Alaska on the promise of work, and her pup companion Lucy. When Lucy is lost along the way, the rest of Wendy’s life begins to unravel. The bare bones of this story might sound scant, but the result is gently devastating. Plus, it includes a terrific canine performance from Lucy who was garlanded with the Palm Dog. 

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

The prolific Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s short stories are usually hinged on unresolved mysteries, toeing the border with the otherworldly. This magic realist undercurrent also runs through Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s pensive, poised and only marginally adorned adaptation of ‘Drive My Car’ from the author’s collection Men Without Women. (In turn, Murakami’s collection borrows its name from Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 anthology, which also tells tales of ineffectual men.)

Often roving around Tokyo in his cherished Saab, actor and director Yūsuke Kafuku’s life is gradually upended by a car crash, which reveals he has glaucoma in one eye. His screenwriter wife, meanwhile (who is oddly always struck with inspiration after having sex), is discovered dead in their apartment. Just before, Kafuku had learned she was having an affair – leaving him with a catalogue of unanswered questions. The unlikely friendship fostered with his untalkative new driver allows Kafuku to heal over the wounds of the past in this powerfully restrained reckoning with grief.