No author is adapted for the big screen more often than Stephen King. Since achieving literary fame with his debut novel Carrie, King has been one of the most famous writers in the world. Horror fans adore his tales of the macabre, many of which have been translated to the screen by filmmakers with a reverence for his work.
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Two years after Carrie hit bookshelves, Brian De Palma helmed a masterpiece adaptation with Sissy Spacek playing the titular telekinetic teen. King’s stories have been adapted into movies like clockwork ever since. But what silver screen versions of his work are truly the best of the best?
Carrie (1976)
Brian De Palma deftly builds the tension toward the blood-drenched prom night finale in his film adaptation of Carrie, while Sissy Spacek gives a revelatory turn in the title role.
The 2013 remake supposedly set out to adapt the novel more faithfully, but the 1976 original already nailed it. All the remake did to update the story for the modern-day was having Carrie Google “telekinesis” when she begins to discover her powers.
The Dead Zone (1983)
Christopher Walken gains the ability to see how people die in The Dead Zone, directed by “body horror” pioneer David Cronenberg and produced by Halloween franchise co-creator Debra Hill.
Thanks to Cronenberg’s razor-sharp direction and Walken’s nuanced lead performance, The Dead Zone is one of the greatest – and most underrated – Stephen King adaptations.
Gerald’s Game (2017)
King’s 1992 novel Gerald’s Game had been considered unfilmable for 25 years before Mike Flanagan came along with a vision to bring it to the screen for Netflix.
Carla Gugino stars as a woman trapped in a failing marriage who goes to a cabin with her husband to reinvigorate their sex life and finds herself struggling to survive when he dies of a heart attack after handcuffing her to the bed.
Misery (1990)
Stephen King’s personal hell comes to life in Misery, the story of a famed author who’s saved from a car wreck by his biggest fan… who turns out to be a sadistic psychopath. When she’s unhappy with the cursing in his latest book, she torches the manuscript and forces him to start from scratch.
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James Caan and Kathy Bates each give career-best performances as Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes, respectively. The latter won the Academy Award for Best Actress, making Misery the only King adaptation to win any Oscars.
Christine (1983)
A nerdy teenager is filled with confidence when he buys a 1958 Plymouth Fury in John Carpenter’s Christine, adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name.
The car turns out to be evil as it tracks down and kills its owner’s bullies one by one. As the stakes are continually raised, the car reveals its jealous, possessive nature.
The Mist (2007)
After helming The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, Frank Darabont completed his Stephen King adaptation hat trick with The Mist, which sees a small town invaded by Lovecraftian monsters when a mysterious fog settles over it.
Thomas Jane stars as a suburban dad who’s holed up in a supermarket with his son, plotting to get home to see if his wife is okay. The movie builds to a truly harrowing final scene that even the author agreed improved on the source material.
It (2017)
Andy Muschietti’s terrifying adaptation of the first half of It became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time when it hit theaters in 2017. Bill Skarsgård’s unsettling portrayal of Pennywise blew the Tim Curry incarnation out of the water.
Unfortunately, the movie was let down two years later by an overstuffed, underwhelming sequel that’s almost three hours long and barely has a single effective scare.
Stand By Me (1986)
Rob Reiner used Stephen King’s novella The Body, which tells the tale of four boys journeying into the woods to find a corpse that’s rumored to be there, to create the definitive coming-of-age movie.
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What makes Stand by Me work so well is the palpable chemistry shared by its incredibly talented cast of child actors: Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Ranked as the greatest movie ever made by IMDb users, Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a man who is wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his wife. Struggling to cut it behind bars, he befriends veteran inmate Red.
Darabont uses Andy’s imprisonment as a strong thematic tool, while Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman’s electric chemistry brings Andy and Red’s friendship to life.
The Shining (1980)
Stephen King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, because the director threw out a lot of the novel and instead gave his own take on the story of a writer working as the winter caretaker at a snowbound Colorado hotel who goes mad in the isolation and tries to kill his family.
Despite King’s objections, The Shining is hailed as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Jack Nicholson gives a riveting performance as Jack Torrance, while Kubrick’s disturbing visuals have had fans interpreting the film’s meaning for decades.
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