August 22, 1986 saw the releasein theatres of Stand by Me, director Rob Reiner’s excellent adaptation of Stephen King’s novellaThe Body.

The Body, subtitled Fall from Innocence, was the third novella in King’s collection Different Seasons, originally published in 1982.

In an amusing and typically articulate afterword to Different Seasons, the author explainsthat he wrote the four stories to prove he can write more than just horror.

It certainly is not a story that would immediately be associated with King (who, to be fair has proved he is capable of writing anything in the years since). It is a beautifully nuanced coming-of-age tale about four young boys whose adventure one summer changes their lives forever.

Stand by Me works simply because it perfectly captures the spirit of King’s prose. In Rob Reiner’s steady direction and Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon’s flawless and extremely faithful adaptation, the young actors Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell had at their disposal the perfect tools to bring the four protagonists to life, and they all turn in superb performances.

Wheaton’s Gordie Lachance, the quiet, bookish, sensible and most sensitive of the quartet, is the focus of the story. It is he who narrates proceedings as a grown-up (portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss), as he is the one most affected by the events of the two days in the summer of 1959 just before the boys return to school.

The chubby and timid Vern (O’Connell) overhears his elder brother Billy describing how he and his friend Charlie discovered a body, believed to be that of Ray Brower, a local boy who went missing a few days before.

When Vern tells his friends, they decide to set out and see the body for themselves; not quite sure why they want to do it, only that it suddenly becomes very important that they do.

The four of them are dealing with major issues: Gordie lives in the shadow of his elder brother Denny who died a few months before. Chris (Phoenix) comes from a family of criminals and alcoholics and everybody expects him to turn out the same. Teddy’s (Feldman) violent tendencies are the result of his psychopath father who burnt his ear off when he was a child, while Vern lives in permanent terror of his elder brother and his bullying friends, led by Kiefer Sutherland (before he began channelling his rage into bringing down myriad terrorists on a24-hour basis).

As their odyssey unfolds an almost imperceptible change occurs among the boys. A close encounter with a freight train, the strange noises of the night and a swim in a bog full of leeches reveals their innermost vulnerabilities and prompts them to bare their souls to one another like never before, revealing their innermost fears as they reach the cusp of young adulthood.

Only when they finally encounter their target does the full horror of their expedition set in. If Stand by Me is not a typical horror film, it most definitely underscores the emotional horror as epitomised in that moment of discovery. It’s a moment in which the boys realise that their lives will change forever; that their innocence is lost and that they have finally started to grow up.

Reiner’s controlled direction, the boys’ relatively retrained reaction and the simple mundanity with which the body is presented, lying undisturbed in the undergrowth, drives home the overwhelming emotion of the scene much more powerfully than gallons of blood or vales of tears would have.

It is the audience who has to fight back the tears, however, as the film reaches its denouement, especially on the final shot of Chris as he disappears from Gordie’s view, a stark reminder that the young actor portraying him was dead seven years later.

In an interview with Empire Magazine, King describes Stand by Me as “the first really completely successful adaptation of my work”.

The magazine itself described it as being “as fresh and moving as it was when it was first released. Superbly acted... the classic of its genre.”

It certainly harks back to a classic genre and I hope that the recent success of Super 8, which resembles it in some ways, might persuade film-makers that simple stories about people and their lives can still connect with audiences the way Stand by Me did 25 years ago.