Stephen King is so prolific that for as many movies based on his books that exist, it almost seems like there should be more of them. He’s written well over 60 novels and hundreds of short stories, which means that even though he’s an entire film subgenre unto himself at this point, there are still dozens and dozens of untapped tales waiting to hit the big screen.
Counting The Life of Chuck, which premiered at festivals in 2024 but opened wide this June, four of King’s stories will have hit the box office by the time 2025 comes to a close, three of which—Chuck, The Monkey, and this week’s The Long Walk—were first-time adaptations. (The fourth, The Running Man, comes out in November, nearly 40 years after the Arnold Schwarzenegger-led version, and we’re not counting King’s work cropping up on the small screen in October’s IT: Welcome to Derry.) Only 2017 and 2019 have seen as many King adaptations hit the big screen in a single year.
What about King’s stories makes for such good films? With the caveat that many of the movies based on his works are not especially good, it could be because King isn’t just a master of horror; he’s a master of people and emotions, as evidenced by his many great stories that aren’t scary. Whether he’s weaving a massive tale involving epochs and cosmic horror or an entirely mundane drama about two people in a small house, King understands how his characters tick—and he knows how his audience ticks, too. The best filmed King adaptations, a few of which were helmed by some of the most celebrated directors of their eras, understand this, too. The thrill, but also the challenge, of putting King’s work on the screen is that he typically has already created such a rich visual on the page.
This list of the 20 best King adaptations does not include TV shows and, perhaps controversially, TV miniseries like Salem’s Lot, The Stand, and the ’90s It, aren’t included, either. Not that they would make the list based on quality, but derivative sequels to films based on a King story, like Pet Sematary 2 or any number of cheap Children of the Corn flicks, aren’t included either. Ancillary documentaries like the great Room 237 are fascinating but also not up for consideration. Maximum Overdrive, the only movie that King directed, is eligible… but King himself joined the chorus of harsh critics, disowning it and never again returning to the director’s chair .
Here are the best Stephen King film adaptations, ranked.
20. The Mist (2007)
It’s common to joke, albeit half-heartedly, that Stephen King can’t write good endings. While this criticism is overstated, as a lot of his books have bone-chilling finales or thematically rich conclusions, there are certainly a lot of stories where he’s failed to land the plane. That makes it all the more frustrating that The Mist, the third of director Frank Darabont’s King adaptations, makes a drastic change to the original ending of the book that undermines what is otherwise a tight, engaging horror flick. Set in a small town in King’s home state of Maine, The Mist follows a group of characters who take shelter in a grocery store when a mysterious fog filled with eldritch monsters overtakes the town. Just as scary as the grotesque creatures outside are the factionalism and paranoia of the residents inside. It’s a cosmic horror creature-feature with plenty to say about human weakness, too. The ending of both versions has protagonist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and a handful of survivors, including his 8-year-old son, take a car as far as they can before they run out of gas. But where the book ends with David hearing a hopeful message on the radio, the movie has the tank run out. Rather than let his boy be torn apart by terrible creatures in the mist, David uses a gun to mercy-kill them all and screams in anguish because there isn’t a bullet left for him. Literally seconds later… the fog clears and the army rolls in to save the day. The bleak ending has its fans—including King himself, who praised its “nihilism”—but it’s a sadistic irony for irony’s sake that overshadows an otherwise exceptional adaptation.
19. Creepshow (1982)
Despite his reputation as a master of horror, a number of Stephen King’s short stories can more or less be summed up with “Now let’s do a silly one.” They’re still scary, but in the “having a fun scare around the campfire” variety rather than the true dread of some of his more fully developed works. Creepshow, an anthology film helmed by zombie icon George A. Romero, captures this side of King well. The collection of five shorts, two of which were adaptations of previously published work and three of which King wrote for the film, takes ghoulish pleasure in being spooky, adopting the vibe of old EC horror comics from the 1950s which aimed to scandalize and tantalize as much as they meant to terrify. King, who is a better writer than actor, even stars in one, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” where he plays a kooky farmer who is slowly overtaken by an alien weed. In another, Leslie Nielsen plays a sadistic millionaire who buries his cheating wife and her love up to their necks in sand before the tide comes in (only to suffer the same fate himself when their water-logged ghosts want revenge). It’s proudly cheesy stuff executed with deft confidence and great practical effects. All the segments understand the assignment, aiming primarily to elicit hoots and hollers. Creepshow, along with its sequel five years later (a third film and a TV series were made without King’s involvement) stands as a low-stakes testament to King’s ability to spin a yarn.
18. No Smoking (2007)
Despite including many international best-sellers, Stephen King’s work has resulted in surprisingly few foreign adaptations. (Perhaps the specificity of a creepy old town in Maine can’t be so easily replicated overseas.) No Smoking, a Bollywood take on the story “Quitters, Inc.” from Night Shift, is a rare and fascinating example. Previously adapted as a segment in the 1985 American anthology Cat’s Eye, “Quitters, Inc.” follows a man who hires an exclusive firm to help him stop smoking, only to discover that their methods of enforcement include non-stop monitoring, bodily harm, and psychological torture. No Smoking is a loose adaptation, starring John Abraham as a callous businessman who gets roped into a similar program only to find the near-omnipresent “rehabilitation centre” has total control over his life, destroying his sense of reality along with his desire to light up. Occasionally held back by a very mid-’00s aesthetic and stylistic choices that come across second-rate David Lynch, No Smoking is nonetheless an effectively paranoid adaptation of King for another culture. The film only gets more interesting when you consider that director Anurag Kashyap’s two previous films had been absolutely marred and waylaid by censors, suggesting that he knew a little bit about a powerful, unaccountable agency taking over one’s work and life.
17. Pet Sematary (1989)
The story goes that Stephen King was so disturbed by Pet Sematary when he wrote it in the ’70s that he put the manuscript in a drawer, deeming it too dark and upsetting to publish until a few years later when he needed something to get out of a book contract. Reading Pet Sematary, it’s easy to see why; it’s a devastating depiction of grief and parental dread following a couple whose young son is hit and killed by a speeding truck. Perhaps even worse is the horrifying relatability, as the bereaved father ignores the warnings and buries his dead child in an ancient burial ground. Even though the thing that comes back is decidedly not his little boy, what parent wouldn’t at least be tempted to go to the same lengths to bring back their child, regardless of the danger? The 1989 movie adaptation maintains the novel’s themes and executes them with several effectively haunting visuals, but on the whole it feels surprisingly corny and chintzy—closer to the ghoulish spooks of Creepshow than the unfathomable, soul-crushing despair of the book. Still, Pet Sematary is surprisingly, enjoyably watchable, which is a bit of a backhanded compliment for an adaptation of something so dark.
16. 1922 (2017)
A Tell-Tale Heart for the heartland, 1922 stars Thomas Jane as Wilfred “Wilf” James, a Nebraska farmer who convinces his teenage son to murder his wife (Molly Parker) when she starts threatening to sell the farm and move to the big city with her boy, divorcing Wilf if she has to. Adapted from the story of the same name in Stephen King’s 2010 anthology Full Dark, No Stars, 1922 is a tightly focused story of jealousy and the terrible power of karma. Though a hair overlong, 1922 doesn’t quite exhaust its source material, instead tightening the screws for Wilf as everything he held so dear—the land and blood that he killed for—slowly rots away. Guilt is gnawing at him, and soon so too are an infestation of rodents, literally. It’s exactly the type of mid-sized, fairly grounded horror story that King excels at and that Netflix, which produced the film, can deliver when the streamer actually tries.
15. Christine (1983)
The ’80s was a heyday for both Stephen King adaptations and John Carpenter, yet Christine is the only time the two horror legends really combined their horsepower. (Carpenter was originally supposed to direct the Drew Barrymore-led Firestarted adaptation before he was axed; much later he scored the 2022 remake of Firestarter, and Carpenter’s music is the only good part of that film.) While Christine is neither’s best work, it’s a reliably spooky romp. Keith Gordon stars as “Arnie” Cunningham, a nerdy high schooler whose friendship with popular jock Dennis Guilder (John Stockwell) takes a turn when Arnie buys a 1958 Plymouth Fury—a haunted ride that soon becomes his whole identity. You don’t have to try too hard to find deeper themes in Christine (which, by the way, is the name of the car), including some very prescient takes on toxic masculinity and the corrupting power of image and nostalgia. Christine never gets bogged down in the message, though; having Carpenter in the driver’s seat means it gets a lot of mileage out of being a killer car movie with killer practical effects.
14. Cujo (1983)
There’s nothing supernatural happening in Cujo, which only serves to make it one of Stephen King’s scariest works. An adaptation of his novel from two years earlier, the 1983 film features a very good boy who is transformed into a hulking, foaming monster when a rabid bat bites the otherwise sweet St. Bernard. Donna (Dee Wallace, in what ends up being a very raw and physical performance) and her young son Tad find themselves trapped inside their broken-down car as Cujo, the rabid pooch who already mauled the mechanic to death, barks and snarls at the doors. It’s not always a guarantee that the effects from a movie in the ’80s will hold up; thankfully Cujo, brought to life by a combination of real dogs and mechanical hounds, is every bit the rabid menace he needs to be for the film to be effective. The whole movie feels, if anything too realistic; an unflashy, unadorned terror borne from a real-life virus.
We don’t get the reprieve of a flubbed effect or an over-the-top movie moment; instead Cujo makes us sit with Donna and Tad as they grow weaker and more desperate. The only relief comes from the movie’s change to the ending, as mainstream moviegoing audiences perhaps weren’t ready to see a child die after all that trauma. (Or at least they weren’t yet; Pet Sematary would hit shelves a few months after Cujo‘s premiere, and that book’s pivotal child death made it to the big screen.)
13. Gerald’s Game (2017)
There might not be a director who simply gets Stephen King better than Mike Flanagan, who has adapted three King works for the screen, each of which has its own special challenge that you might rightfully assume would make it difficult—if not impossible—to pull off as a feature film. With Gerald‘s Game, the first of the three, the catch was that the 1992 novel really only has one character, Jessie, a woman handcuffed to a bed after a bedroom activity goes wrong and her husband has a heart attack. Trapped with no chance of rescue, Jessie starts to lose her mind—eventually finding an escape. It’s the sort of thing a skilled author can pull off in prose where the reader is inside someone’s head; having to visualize the experience of hearing voices is much trickier. Flanagan pulls it off, in large part thanks to an incredible performance from Carla Gugino as Jessie, aided by a very game Bruce Greenwood (her late husband, who she’s hallucinating) and clever, not overly flashy editing choices to make what could be a stagnant scene come across as uneasily dreamlike—and, at times, downright nightmarish.
12. Doctor Sleep (2019)
Stephen King famously hated Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. This put Mike Flanagan in a tough spot for his sophomore King adaptation, because with all due respect, King is wrong. Kubrick’s Shining is a masterpiece and an iconic fixture of pop culture. Somehow, Flanagan needed to make his adaptation of Doctor Sleep, King’s 2013 sequel to the 1977 novel, do justice to both the author’s book and Kubrick’s celebrated film. He pulls it off. The film follows a now grown-up and tormented Dan “Danny” Torrance (Ewan McGregor) as he revisits his demons—and eventually the Overlook Hotel—while trying to save a young girl who has the same “shining” psychic powers as he did. Flanagan’s film leans into some of the hokey aspects of the story that Kubrick rejected in favor of a much colder sort of horror. At the same time, Doctor Sleep is embracing a lot of the Kubrick film’s iconography, and the return to the Overlook is an invention for the film that almost retroactively gives The Shining the big-screen ending King wanted. More than just squaring the book with the movie, it’s reconciling Kubrick’s hard cynicism and King’s tortured empathy, and King even went so far to say it “redeemed” the Kubrick film in his eyes.
11. It (2017)
It is one of Stephen King’s scariest books, but the scares aren’t what makes the first installment of Andy Muschietti’s two-part adaptation so good. In fact, the 2017 It isn’t especially scary, as it features an overreliance on CGI that hasn’t held up (always a risk in a horror movie) and the intentionally creepy, Victorian-styled Pennywise the Clown that Bill Skarsgård plays lacks the jarring uncanniness of Tim Curry’s more straightforward clown from the ’90s TV series. However, It has an incredible cast of child actors (Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, Jack Dylan Grazer, Finn Wolfhard, Wyatt Oleff, Chosen Jacobs, and Jeremy Ray Taylor) playing the Losers’ Club, a group of outcast kids who become friends—and then the only hope the town of Derry has against an eldritch child-killer who feasts on fear. Though it updates the setting from the ’50s to the ’80s and wisely drops some of the more controversial parts of the book, It captures the feeling of getting to know and love these characters in much the same way that readers do while paging through King’s massive tome. It’s a spooky, R-rated, coming-of-age adventure. (The sequel, It Chapter Two, which tells the grown-up half of the book’s narrative along with a bunch of gratuitous flashbacks to the kids, is unfortunately a total failure.)
10. The Life of Chuck (2024)
A certain type of viewer is absolutely going to be allergic to The Life of Chuck, a simultaneously huge and small-scale story that features plenty of cinematic gimmicks, an extended dance scene, and an almost twee sense of optimism that cuts through a universal, inevitable horror. Let down your guard, though, and you might find that The Life of Chuck‘s stylized, deliberately disorienting celebration of life despite the certainty of death will overwhelm you. Told backwards in three acts, The Life of Chuck starts with the end of the world and ends with a personal affirmation of wonder. Mike Flanagan, who already had two Stephen King adaptations under his belt, understands how to convey the author’s essential earnestness to the screen regardless of the degree of difficulty, laying out numerous great parts that, not unlike the life experiences of Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), add up to something much greater than their sum.
9. The Green Mile (1999)
The Green Mile gets criticized, not unfairly, for being a bit maudlin—even Stephen King himself cracked that it had the vibe of an “R-rated Hallmark Hall of Fame production.” Starring Tom Hanks as a death-row prison guard who encounters a gentle giant (Michael Clarke Duncan) with wondrous healing powers, Frank Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption follow-up tries very hard to be more magical than the other prison-set King flick. And yet, despite being an Oscar-hopeful crowd-pleaser rather than a horror movie, The Green Mile features some of the most upsetting imagery and themes in any King adaptation. Every trip to the electric chair is horrifying; a sequence where an intentionally botched execution ignites a still-living prisoner’s screaming head in ghoulish blue flames is up there with any supernatural fright King’s ever conceived. The heavy-handed sentimentality is a welcome, necessary respite.
8. The Dead Zone (1983)
A moviegoer with only a surface-level familiarity with David Cronenberg might think that The Dead Zone is relatively restrained by the famed body-horror guru’s standards. However, although Christopher Walken’s flesh doesn’t turn inside-out, Cronenberg’s uncanny, clinical coldness comes through in a story about a man whose mind is causing him to experience a disconnect from the world his body inhabits. (Also, there’s an indelible scene involving a pair of scissors that’s gnarly enough to scratch the body-horror itch.) After an accident, Walken’s Johnny Smith develops psychic powers, though his visions of the future are just about indistinguishable from crippling paranoia—especially when he becomes convinced a promising politician will start a nuclear war if he’s elected. Cronenberg captures the way such a gift might unwind a person in an effectively unshowy way.
7. The Long Walk (2025)
Stephen King published The Long Walk in 1979, decades before The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, though the film adaptation premieres in a world where those more recent deadly contests are the household names. Thankfully, the new film shows that The Long Walk did much more than just, er, walk so that others could run; it’s a unique work of its own and an incredibly emotional story of death and endurance, made all the more powerful by how mundane its conceit is. The adaptation, directed by Hunger Games alum Francis Lawrence, doesn’t shy away from the unglamorous reality of the totalitarian state in which it is set, nor the contest in which its young protagonists must keep walking or be killed. Nor does he cut away from the many execution-style shots to the head that eliminate the young men who fall off the pace. Aesthetically as well as thematically, it’s almost a dystopian riff on Stand By Me, following a group of ’50s Americana-styled boys as they take a hike, though the “lifelong” friendships some of the contestants forge are inherently, terribly brief. The Long Walk uses the rawness of its spartan premise to venture deep into uncomfortable territory, culminating in an ending that blurs the lines between perseverance and defeat, hope and nihilism.
6. Stand By Me (1986)
It’s interesting to watch as one of the great coming-of-age movies ages itself. The power of Stand By Me‘s ’50s nostalgia changes for younger generations who aren’t looking back at a childhood that so closely resembles their own, and the ending line about never having friends like the ones you did when you were 12 feels less like a timeless melancholy truth and more like a depressing admittance of defeat from the Baby Boomers. All the same, there are universal truths in Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “The Body.” Growing up is complicated and hard, but it’s full of special moments and laughter, often coming from unexpected places. And, even if you don’t see yourself in Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell as they make a trek to see a dead body in the late summer, right before everything starts to change, there’s still a comfort in seeing them start to figure it out.
5. Dolores Claiborne (1995)
Thank goodness Dolores Claiborne was adapted in the mid-’90s and not two decades later. Had it come out in the era of prestige TV, it’s easy to see how instantly some streamer would’ve taken its plot—a woman (Kathy Bates) who was suspected in her husband’s death 20 years ago is accused of murder a second time as her estranged daughter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) comes to visit—and stretch it across eight or more bloated episodes. Instead, Dolores Claiborne is a tightly loaded mystery that explores repressed memories, abuse, and complex family dynamics as it deftly toggles between the two cases until it all comes terribly together. Like many Stephen King stories, the truest horrors are the ones that exist in reality.
4. Misery (1990)
The Academy Awards have historically been loath to recognize horror movies (though hopefully that’s starting to change). That Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her performance as Annie Wilkes in Misery—and that the award remains the only Oscar any Stephen King adaptation has ever won—shows just how undeniable her performance was. James Caan plays disgruntled novelist Paul Sheldon, who crashes his car during a blizzard and wakes up to find that Annie, his “number one fan,” has rescued him.
In reality, she’s an unstable obsessive who has taken him captive, demanding that he write a new ending to her favorite book series. A tense thriller anchored by a pair of incredible performances, Misery is surprisingly prescient in the way it resembles modern stan culture. Only difference is, the Annie Wilkeses of the world today take their perceived investment in and ownership of their favorite creators to the internet instead of a remote Colorado cabin.
3. Carrie (1976)
The first Stephen King movie, an adaptation of his first novel, remains one of the best. Brian De Palma’s lurid, almost feverish depiction of the bullying and abuse that Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) suffers at school and at home manages to feel empathetic rather than exploitative.
It’s an overwhelming, intoxicating experience, which makes Carrie’s famous breaking point—a telekinetic rampage after she gets a bucket of blood poured on her head at prom—a release that’s as terrifying as it is cathartic. King’s works have always run on big, outsized emotions, and De Palma, with all his extra-ness, may have been the perfect director to first bring the author’s work to the screen.
2. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The Shawshank Redemption sits at the top of the IMDb user-voted list of the 250 best movies ever made, and it’s trendy to hold this fact against it. Sure, the story of Andy Dufresne’s (Tim Robbins) time behind bars, friendship with “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), and eventual escape is a crowd-pleaser, but the best movie ever made? In all of cinema history? Of course not—though that shouldn’t at all discount what an achievement The Shawshank Redemption is. A deeply humanist tale of perseverance and endurance, Frank Darabont’s first and best Stephen King adaptation is triumphant filmmaking (that also happens to look better than almost every movie released this century just by dint of having been made in the ’90s). It’s no small feat to have all but the most jaded, cynical audience members bowled over by a moving story no matter how many times they rewatch it.
1. The Shining (1980)
For as much as he can write scenes of cruelty and imagine depraved, bone-chilling moments of terror, Stephen King is ultimately very earnest and emphatic. It’s clear from the care with which he writes even his most villainous characters that he wants to understand them, if not necessarily condone their actions. This is why King is not a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Where King saw Jack Torrence, a man brought down by his demons (and some spectral ones) as a tragedy, Kubrick saw a monster from the jump. Jack Nicholson certainly reads as unstable and ominous from his first moment on the screen.
Kubrick’s mastery of mood and anxiously eerie tone in The Shining is so profound that even if everyone agreed with King that he’d botched the central characterization, it might still be hailed as one of the all-time horror greats. (Iconic scares like the pair of spectral girls and an elevator full of gushing blood are unique to the film, and Shelley Duvall’s performance, though unfairly maligned at the time of The Shining‘s release, is outstanding.) Perhaps, though, Kubrick’s cold view of Jack and choice to diminish some of King’s sympathetic nuances serve to heighten the terror; how much does knowing the complex motivations of a domestic abuser help their victims? There are endless ways to read into The Shining, whether you’re searching for Jack’s inner goodness or finding unintentional clues that prove it’s really about Native Americans or Kubrick faking the moon landing. You can watch The Shining over and over again and still find more to discover, but at the core there’s an undeniable, unavoidable horror that hits more deeply than any other King adaptation.
The post The 20 Best Stephen King Adaptations, Ranked appeared first on TIME.
