The infamous Misery hobbling scene where Annie Wilkes breaks Paul Sheldon’s ankles with a sledgehammer is the stuff of cinematic legend, but what she did to him in Stephen King’s book was worse. Misery is one of King’s more intimate tales of terror, focusing on almost entirely on two characters in a single room, and director Rob Reiner’s 1990 movie adaptation kept this claustrophobic intimacy. Misery saw Kathy Bates as Annie and James Caan as Paul turn in excellent, captivating performances as a psychopathic fan and the writer she takes hostage. However, one moment in Misery has ensured the movie is still being discussed over three decades since releasing — the scene where Annie breaks Paul’s ankles with a sledgehammer.
There are different types of horror, though, and while it might not feature a slasher killing teens, Misery is one of Stephen King’s most underrated horror adaptations. In the book, Annie Wilkes is even more sinister and unstable than she is in the film. Of course, it’s impossible to think of Misery without reliving the shocking Misery hobbling scene in which Annie takes a sledgehammer and uses it to break Paul’s ankles. The act makes it seem truly hopeless for Paul and is hard to watch, and the moment is now synonymous with Misery as a story. However, the most surprising thing about the Misery hobbling moment is that it doesn’t happen in the Stephen King Novel — because in the book Annie does something even more horrific.
Misery’s Hobbling Scene Is Worse in Stephen King’s Book
In the book version of Misery, when Annie decides she needs to make totally sure Paul won’t escape his room again, she doesn’t simply break his ankles with a sledgehammer. After all, it’s possible his legs could eventually recover. Instead, rather than the iconic Misery hobbling scene, Stephen King wrote Annie to straight up chop Paul’s foot off with an axe, then use a propane torch to cauterize the wound so that he wouldn’t bleed out.
When it came time to adapt Misery for the screen, the decision was made to have the Misery hobbling scene instead of amputating his foot due to two factors. One of the reasons for the Misery movie differences was that there was concern over the level of gore if they staged King’s original scene. The change worked well though, and Reiner’s alternative — Annie taking a sledgehammer to Paul’s shins after an agonizingly drawn-out buildup while she places the wooden blocks and straps — was perhaps even more unsettling than an out-and-out gore-fest with an axe.
Second, Rob Reiner wanted Paul to emerge victorious at the end of the Misery film, and felt that Paul losing his foot was too harsh a penalty for him to have to deal with going forward. At the end of the Misery movie, Paul is seen walking with the use of a cane, showing that he at least partially recovered from having his ankles broken. However, losing a limb and having the wound cauterized without anesthesia is a much harder thing to physically and psychologically move on from.
Why The Moment Annie Breaks Paul’s Ankles In Misery Still Works
While the hobbling scene in Misery is arguably worse in Stephen King’s book, the moment Annie breaks Paul’s legs in the Misery movie is still gut-wrenching. Stephen King is one of the most talented living horror authors, and his vivid descriptive style (and near-unending imagination when it comes to gore and torment) mean that this moment in Misery was always going to be horrific on the page. King isn’t an author who leaves the worst moments of his stories to happen off-page to be merely alluded to by other characters later on. Some crime and horror authors write around the grimmest events in their narrative, but Stephen King isn’t one of them.
However, literature is a very different medium to cinema. An argument can be made that it’s easier to create such visceral reactions with a combination of words and a reader’s imagination, and the changes made for the Misery ankle-breaking scene give it weight. The hobbling moment in Rob Reiner’s movie adaptation of Misery is just as difficult to watch as King’s original passage is to read, regardless of the different levels of suffering experienced by both respective versions of Paul Sheldon. In the Misery movie, the scene in which Annie breaks Paul’s ankles is incredibly tense, thanks in part to the camera being hyper-focused on Paul’s legs for most of the scene — making the distended angle Annie’s hammer-blow leaves them at impossible to look away from.
The fact that the hobbling moment in 1990’s Misery was achieved entirely without CGI is equally impressive. Paul’s “legs” in the movie are prosthetic. When Kathy Bate’s Annie swung a genuine full-weight sledgehammer (at full force to boot) it was guaranteed thanks to SFX team KNB EFX Group his ankles would “snap” at the most wince-inducing angle possible. The moment is nowhere near as gory as modern equivalents would likely depict a similar injury, but this works in Misery’s favor – the sound design of the “crunch” when Annie’s sledgehammer connects with Paul’s feet is more than enough to make the scene near-impossible to forget.
The Misery Ankle Breaking Scene Isn’t The Only Change Made For The Movie
The Misery hobbling scene isn’t the only change that was made when it came to adapting the book to the screen. One of the key Misery differences is that it takes Paul a lot longer to catch on to the fact that Annie is unwell in the movie than it does in the novel. In one of the best Stephen King books, Paul is aware pretty early on in his stay that Annie is a nefarious character, but is unable to escape. Another thing the movie leaves out is the story-within-a-story of Paul’s Misery character herself. Paul has a very contentious relationship with his creation that Annie is so wholly obsessed with.
Another major difference between the Misery movie and the book is the fire that burns Paul’s work. After Annie is unhappy with Paul’s ending, in the novel, he’s able to get away with burning a stack of papers rather than his creation. He isn’t so lucky in the movie. The Sheriff’s death in the Misery movie is another difference. In the movie, the Sheriff is merely shot in the chest with a shotgun by Annie, whereas in the book, he is brutally killed by being stabbed and then run over with a lawnmower.
A key difference between the book and the movie is the aforementioned burned manuscript. Since Paul escapes with his manuscript in the book, he is actually able to have it published in the end of the Stephen King novel. In turn, the novel ends up being a global bestseller. Outside the Misery ankle scene, the final major difference is the nature of Annie’s death. In the book, Annie does still hit her head on the typewriter and gets back up, but she eventually succumbs to her injury while she is trying to get a chainsaw to finish Paul off.
