Escape Into Books
Your home for book news, reviews, and bookish fun. Follow along on Facebook.
Catherine O’Hara will always be remembered for her comedy, but one of her strangest screen roles came from the mind of Stephen King. In 1997, the future Schitt’s Creek star headlined “The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson,” an episode of The Outer Limits based on a deep-cut King short story that has quietly threaded its way through his career.
The Stephen King short story that wouldn’t stay put
King first published The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson in Rolling Stone in 1984, then kept reshuffling it across formats for decades. The tale later appeared in a limited edition of his collection Skeleton Crew and was eventually reworked into a key subplot of his alien-invasion novel The Tommyknockers. That unusual journey makes Becka less a one-off curiosity and more a hinge between King’s short fiction and his sprawling novels.
On television, the story took another left turn. In King’s version, a woman starts getting divine messages from a 3D picture of Jesus on her TV, warning her about her husband’s infidelity. For The Outer Limits adaptation, O’Hara’s Becka accidentally shoots herself in the head while watching a soap opera and survives with brain damage. The vision that follows isn’t a religious icon but a smirking “8 By 10 Man” in a tuxedo who nudges her toward murder. Directed by Steven Weber, the episode aired June 6, 1997 and gave O’Hara a rare horror showcase.
It’s an oddball entry even by King standards: a King adaptation tucked inside someone else’s anthology series, years before prestige horror TV like Castle Rock turned his interconnected universe into an explicit playground.
Why ‘Becka Paulson’ matters in King’s adaptation-obsessed era
Nearly 40 years after Becka first appeared in print, King’s shorter work is more in demand than ever. Film versions of his stories The Monkey and The Long Walk are slated for 2025, and his adaptation pipeline is so crowded that even comparatively obscure titles like “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” and The Talisman are back in development churn.
That context helps explain why The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson keeps resurfacing. In 2020, The CW tried to spin the concept into a full series, retitled Revelations, before the network’s sale scuttled the project. More recently, King has stayed in the spotlight with new work like his 2025 novel Never Flinch, even as Hollywood mines his back catalogue for anything that can anchor a movie, series, or streaming miniseries.
For readers, Becka’s strange afterlife is a reminder of how porous King’s universe really is. A short story can morph into a novel subplot, then a one-off TV hour, then an unrealized series pitch—all while sitting alongside heavy-hitters like the stories in Skeleton Crew or the adaptations powering King’s modern screen renaissance.
And if you want to see Catherine O’Hara at her strangest, The Outer Limits episode is still streaming on Prime Video—a tiny, unsettling corner of the ever-expanding Stephen King screen multiverse.
