As one of the best-selling authors alive, and one of the most celebrated horror novelists in literary history, Stephen King’s work has long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers.
For nearly 50 years, his novels and short stories have inspired some of the most celebrated horror movies, and timeless classics in other genres too. Not every adaptation has hit the mark, but with Oz Perkins’ The Monkey and Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck arriving this year and both already receiving glowing reviews – and Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man likely to follow suit - it seems like you can’t count out the promise of adapting a King work just yet.
To celebrate the release of The Monkey in UK cinemas, we’ve decided to count down our 10 favourite Stephen King movie adaptations to date. Do you agree with our choices?
10) The Dead Zone
Despite a warm reception at the time, it’s easy to see why The Dead Zone is now considered more of a minor David Cronenberg effort; the director had already left an impression with a far more unnerving telekinesis story (Scanners), and nobody would claim the source material was Stephen King’s best telekinesis tale either.
However, minor Cronenberg – especially during this early “body horror” period of his career – still offers more unnerving spectacle and food for thought than most directors can at the top of their game. King and Cronenberg make for an inspired match, and it’s a shame this is the only time the Candian auteur tackled one of the horror maestro’s novels.
9) It: Chapter One
Arguably Stephen King’s most iconic creation, Pennywise the Clown infiltrated the nightmares of an entirely new generation with this 2017 adaptation, updating the earlier chapters of the tale to a 1980s setting to create a dark, Spielbergian nostalgia.
On a sheer personal level, the only reason it isn’t higher is because I had the worst cinema experience of my life seeing it, with a packed opening weekend crowd having full-volume conversations in every single corner of the auditorium whenever Pennywise was in the background. As soon as I revisit the 4K, I’m sure this will fly further up the list.
8) Dolores Claiborne
After winning an Oscar for Misery, it was hardly a surprise that Kathy Bates would want to play the lead role in another King adaptation – and if you ask her now, Bates will tell you that Dolores Claiborne features the greatest performance of her career. A minor hit upon release, the non-linear, morally murky murder mystery has now largely been forgotten, but is ripe for rediscovery; it’s the kind of character-driven procedural we often complain Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.
7) Doctor Sleep
Typically, a decades-late sequel to a titanic masterpiece is recipe for a cinematic disaster, coasting by on nostalgia with nothing new to add to the mix. In this case, you can factor in the additional risk of it being an adaptation of a sequel novel by an author who hated the beloved film of its predecessor - the likelihood that anything good would come out of this belated Shining sequel was so slim, you could have been forgiven for writing it off before you’d seen a single frame.
Which is why it remains a surprise that Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is as good as it is, with even the return to the Overlook Hotel in the third act avoiding obvious nostalgia bait to examine the lingering trauma of Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) into adulthood. The bloody, supernatural horror you would want from the story is still there, but it’s the tortured character study which makes it unforgettable.
6) The Shawshank Redemption
No, The Shawshank Redemption is not the greatest film of all time (deal with it, IMDb users!), nor is it the best Stephen King adaptation. But after years of hearing that it’s “overrated” due to being permanently number one on the top 250, we do have to remind you that it is still a fantastic extension of the 1982 novella, a tear-jerker that has lost none of its power over the years of obsessive rewatches.
5) Christine
Long after Herbie asked audiences to imagine a car having a mind of its own, King and director John Carpenter a deadly spin on the concept with Christine.
Carpenter admitted at the time he didn’t find the bonkers screenplay scary, only taking the job as he was worried work would dry up after The Thing flopped at the box office – despite his lack of confidence, it became one of his definitive films, extending his creative hot streak during this period.
4) Misery
A year before The Silence Of The Lambs became an Oscar sensation, the ground was laid for the Academy’s brief love affair with the horror genre when Kathy Bates took home Best Actress for Misery – to date, it’s the only King adaptation to have won the gold. In the 34 years since its original release, it has aged like a fine wine, in many ways ahead of its time in its satirical takedown of toxic fan culture.
Annie Wilkes is one of the author’s most disturbed creations, but despite the overcharged intensity of Bates’ performance, she manages to avoid reducing her to a simplistic caricature. It’s a character study about celebrity obsession every bit as richly drawn as Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy – just with more blood.
3) Carrie
Stephen King’s debut novel put a new spin on the term “period piece”, tracing the story of Carrie White’s infamous prom night through conflicting reports. Director Brian De Palma took a far more straightforward approach, making the supernatural horror far less ambiguous in translation, but no less thrilling as a result.
After decades of King adaptations, the first major film lifted from his work remains one of his strongest, and I’d argue it’s likely because the author wasn’t a beloved institution at the time, allowing De Palma to transform it into a sleazy thriller you couldn’t mistake as the product of any other filmmaker. In a career filled with dazzling set pieces, the director has still rarely reached the giddy heights of the meticulously captured prom sequence.
2) The Shining
There’s a much-disproven rule that if Stephen King hates your adaptation of his book, then it’s probably one of the best. However, when the most terrifying realisation of one of his novels is the one he still despises to this day, despite being reclaimed as one of the great American horror movies after its initial critical drubbing, you can’t blame people for this misconception.
Yes, The Shining departs from its origins on the page, but it remains a mystery how a master of the genre struggles to appreciate Stanley Kubrick’s deeply unsettling supernatural thriller, the rare movie in the genre that gets more tense with each breath of psychotic dark comedy. Many filmmakers have tried to imitate it, but nobody has ever managed to match it.
1) Stand By Me
Many of King’s most beloved works are horror-infused coming-of-age stories, but his purest take on that genre – 1982 short story The Body – wound up onscreen feeling quintessentially King even as it marked a minor departure. There’s still a gothic air to proceedings, as a group of friends embark on a journey to find a dead body, but in the hands of director Rob Reiner, it becomes a nostalgic fable without fundamentally altering the DNA of the tale.
The author’s recurrent narrative preoccupations reappear here, with bullied child protagonists, tense bursts of violence, and vivid depictions of suffocating small-town life from a young person’s perspective. In the hands of Reiner, then still best known as a comic filmmaker, it was the recipe for a different beast altogether – the first King adaptation which could be called a tearjerker, and a gateway drug to his work for audiences who didn’t think they could handle horror.
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