1922: Netflix Adaptation vs. the Novella

2026-11-02

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Spoilers follow for both the novella and the 2017 Netflix film, including the endings.

1922 is one of the quieter entries in Stephen King's catalog — no clown, no haunted hotel, no cursed car, just a Nebraska farmer, a confession, and a well full of rats. It opened King's 2010 novella collection Full Dark, No Stars, and in 2017 it became a Netflix original film, written and directed by Zak Hilditch and starring Thomas Jane. It's one of the most faithful King adaptations out there — Hilditch lifts whole passages of narration straight from the page — but the two versions still land differently, mostly in how much they're willing to spell out.

The setup, in both versions

Wilfred James is a tenant farmer in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, in 1922, working land his wife Arlette inherited from her father. Arlette wants out — she wants to sell the acreage to the encroaching Farrington hog-butchering company, cash out, and move the family to Omaha. Wilfred, who can't imagine himself as anything but a farmer, decides he'd rather kill her than lose the land. He talks his teenage son Henry into helping, partly by playing on Henry's own resentment: Arlette has been cruel about Henry's girlfriend, Shannon Cotterie, the daughter of the Jameses' neighbor Harlan Cotterie. Father and son cut Arlette's throat in her bed, then haul her body — along with a dead calf, meant to mask the smell and throw off suspicion — down the farm's well. Both the book and the film play this opening passage almost beat for beat, including Hilditch's choice to keep King's framing device: an older Wilfred, holed up in a hotel room years later, narrating the whole thing as a written confession.

The rats, and whether they're real

The defining image of 1922 — book and film alike — is what happens to that well afterward. Rats move in, in numbers that seem to track with how guilty and unraveled Wilfred becomes rather than with anything a biologist could explain. King never resolves whether the rats are literal or a symptom of Wilfred's collapsing mind, and that ambiguity is the novella's real engine: a confession from a narrator whose grip on reality is visibly going, written by a man who may be the only person who can see what's haunting him. Hilditch's film keeps the same unresolved quality through most of its runtime, leaning on Thomas Jane's performance — twitchy, sweating, talking to things no one else can see — to carry the "is this really happening" tension that King does on the page through prose alone. Where the film does differ is in pulling the rat imagery further into the open visually by the final act, giving Wilfred's unraveling a more overtly staged, on-screen horror-movie shape than the comparatively restrained final pages of King's text, which resolve mostly through a newspaper clipping rather than a scene.

Henry and Shannon: the "Sweetheart Bandits" subplot

The other engine of the story — and the part that turns a one-location confession into something with actual plot momentum — is what happens to Henry after the murder. Shannon Cotterie gets pregnant, her father ships her off to a home for unwed mothers rather than let the Jameses' name near his daughter, and Henry breaks her out. The two run off together and, over the following months, drift into a string of small-time robberies, picking up the kind of tabloid nickname King loves to give doomed outlaw couples: the papers dub them the "Sweetheart Bandits." It's a clear, acknowledged echo of Bonnie and Clyde, and it works as the novella's second tragedy — Wilfred's violence doesn't stay contained to Arlette, it reaches forward and poisons his son's life too. Both the book and the film keep this subplot largely intact, including its ending: Shannon is shot during one of their robberies, and Henry — having lost the one thing the murder was never supposed to cost him — doesn't survive the aftermath either. The film stages this fairly plainly on screen; King's prose keeps Wilfred, and the reader, at one remove, learning about it the way Wilfred does, through newspaper reports rather than direct witness.

What the film trims and compresses

Hilditch's adaptation runs just over 100 minutes, which means a novella built almost entirely out of one man's internal confession has to lose some interiority to survive the translation. The film compresses the time Wilfred spends alone on the farm after Arlette's death, cutting some of the slower, more granular passages where King lets guilt accumulate in small domestic details — meals eaten alone, chores that used to be split two ways, the farmhouse's silence. What survives instead is the voiceover: Hilditch uses Jane's narration to carry over big chunks of King's actual sentences, which is part of why the film reads as unusually faithful even where it's trimming for time. Supporting characters get thinned out a little too — Harlan Cotterie (played by Neal McDonough) and Sheriff Jones (Brian d'Arcy James) are present in both versions, but the film gives them less room to be anything other than functions of the plot, where the novella spends a bit more time on how the whole community's slow suspicion closes in on Wilfred.

The ending: a confession that outlives its author

Both versions end the same way structurally — Wilfred, older and alone, finishes his written confession in a hotel room in Omaha, convinced the rats (or his guilt, materialized as rats) have finally caught up with him. In King's novella, the story closes on a newspaper clipping: Wilfred James has been found dead in his hotel room, having apparently bitten himself to death in a fit of madness, a detail the text never fully explains and never needs to. It's a King specialty — an ending that refuses to confirm whether the horror was ever supernatural at all, versus a man destroyed entirely by his own conscience. The film keeps that same beat and the same essential ambiguity, but — true to how it's handled the rats throughout — pushes the final moments a little more into visualized horror-movie territory rather than leaving everything to an off-page news item. Some longtime readers of the novella have found the film's choice to show more than the source material tells slightly less unsettling than King's clipped, understated final page; others think Jane's performance earns the more literal treatment. Either way, nothing about the ending's meaning changes between versions: Wilfred's confession is the only form of justice anyone in the story gets, and it costs him everything to write it.

Casting and tone

Thomas Jane carries the film essentially alone for most of its runtime, aging believably across the years the story covers and doing a lot of the "unreliable narrator losing his mind" work that King's prose handles through sentence-level craft. Molly Parker plays Arlette, appearing mostly in the film's early scenes and in Wilfred's guilt-driven hallucinations later on — a structural choice that mirrors how the novella keeps her presence alive in Wilfred's head long after the murder. Dylan Schmid and Kaitlyn Bernard play Henry and Shannon, and the film gives their doomed subplot enough room that it doesn't feel like an afterthought, even compressed. It's also worth noting Jane's history with King adaptations: he played the lead in 2007's The Mist, another grim, morally bleak King story, and 1922 sits comfortably alongside it in Jane's filmography of King characters pushed past their breaking point. If you want the other side of that comparison, our breakdown of how The Mist's movie ending differs from the book's covers a similarly stark divergence in tone.

Which version to experience first

The film is the easier entry point and a genuinely strong one — low-key, well-acted, and unusually faithful for a King adaptation, which makes it a good test of whether the story works for you before committing to the prose. But the novella is worth reading either way, because King's control of Wilfred's voice — a confession that slowly reveals its narrator is lying to himself as much as to the reader — is the kind of effect that's much harder to fully replicate on screen, however good Jane's performance is. If 1922's mix of guilt, rot, and an unreliable narrator you can't fully trust appealed to you, it's a strong candidate for our list of underrated Stephen King books worth a look, and our rundown of King's best and most controversial endings is worth a read for more of his habit of leaving the worst parts unresolved on purpose.