After William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie, Stephen King is the most-frequently adapted author in history. His work has graced the big and small screens countless times, but he only crossed over into The Twilight Zone once. The 1985 revival series featured an adaptation of "Gramma," a Lovecraft-inspired short story about a young boy who is left alone with his menacing grandmother.

"Gramma" was thought to be unfilmable due to its reliance on internal monologs and repressed memories, but The Twilight Zone scribe Harlan Ellison proved it could be done. In fact, "Gramma" was also adapted into the 2014 Blumhouse film Mercy, which deepens the story's connection to the Cthulhu mythos. Fans can compare these interpretations to Stephen King's original vision by reading Skeleton Crew, the Stephen King collection that also includes the newly-adapted story "The Monkey."

After the original run of The Twilight Zone concluded in 1964, its iconic creator Rod Serling sold the rights to CBS, who launched the first revival series in 1985. The latter writer especially had the challenging task of adapting the Stephen King short story, "Gramma."

Though CBS spent a hefty sum on the King property, no one was quite sure how to bring it to life. While he waits for his mother to come home, he half-remembers disturbing rumors about forbidden books that gave the old woman strange powers. When his grandmother dies, the dark energy within her is transferred to Georgie.

As reported by Cinema Blend, Ellison described his struggles with "Gramma" on his commentary track for the out-of-print The Twilight Zone DVD set.

(T)hey said, 'Here, take a read of this,' and I read it, and I said, 'Well, this is an impossible script to do...' And they all started grinning, and they said, 'Guess what? You're going to do it.'

Douglas E. Winter's book Stephen King: The Art of Darkness describes how, just like in the story, Stephen King's aunts and uncles set up his mother to care for their ailing parents, and the 14-year-old future author was there when his grandmother died:

So my mother was like a sharecropper, only her crop was these two dying people in their eighties... I remember sitting on the bed beside (my grandmother), holding my mother's compact near to her mouth because it was something I had seen in the movies. And there was nothing.

Since "Gramma" is largely concerned with a child's inner turmoil, Harlan Ellison needed to externalize the more exciting elements. King's writing cleverly hints that the tale takes place in H.P. Lovecraft's world by alluding to the grandmother's occult library, and patterning her supposed senile babbling after Lovecraft's "Cthuvian" language.

Directed by Pete Cornwell of The Haunting In Connecticut, this interpretation's protagonist feels a close kinship with his witchy grandmother, but he learns that her abilities come with a high price for the whole family. Both the The Twilight Zone and the Blumhouse film use demonic possession as an allegory for an older loved one losing their faculties, though the feature film is more sympathetic.

With the Osgood Perkins adaptation of the latter story due to arrive in 2025, now is the perfect time to read this 40-year-old anthology to enjoy King's concepts in their original form.