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Stephen King has more than 200 short stories to his name<\/a> (!), but the one that truly rattled me was “The Jaunt,” which effectively combines sci-fi and horror tropes to create a deliciously scary tale. This is one of those shorts that seem to be trudging a familiar path until you’re hit square in the face with a horrific twist, something that King rarely employs as an author who trickles down fear and suspense. While “The Jaunt” doesn’t have as many adaptations as it should, it is still widely acclaimed (along with other choice entries from his “Skeleton Crew” collection, including “Survivor Type” and “The Mist”). If we had to choose another King short story that deserves a feature adaptation<\/a>, it would undoubtedly be “The Man in the Black Suit,” which won the World Fantasy Award and the O. Henry Award in 1995.<\/p>\n King often peppers his short story collections with notes and anecdotes \u2014 for this particular one, he wrote that it is a homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” a tale that is soaked in the contradictions of Puritan culture (while still struggling to break out of the ideological mold). That said, the exact inspirations behind “The Man in the Black Suit” can be traced back to what a friend of King’s said about his Grandpa sighting the Devil in the woods. As outlandish as this sounds, the power of this anecdote lies in the strangeness of the alleged encounter, where the devil’s truly in the details (no pun intended). King was deeply inspired by it despite finding the writing process cumbersome, as some “stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”<\/p>\n “The Man in the Black Suit” is very much a devil at the crossroads story, one that places us firmly in the old narrator’s shoes as he guides us through his strange memories. We do have one<\/em> adaptation of the tale so far, namely E. Nicholas Mariani’s eponymous short film, but it fails to capture the raw terror evoked by King’s original. So, which aspects of the story would a feature benefit from?<\/p>\n