“Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They are both fruit but they taste completely different.” This is not the greatest analogy in the world, but it’s the one we’ve got on the record from Stephen King about the two mediums that have made him a household name. With more than 80 credited adaptations of his novels and short stories, King has provided more grist for the Hollywood mill—its gleaming studios and dingy grindhouses alike—than any other author of the last half-century. And the films produced out of his source material vary about as wildly in quality as the books themselves—although not necessarily at a 1-to-1 ratio. Some of King’s best novels have made for lousy movies, while minor efforts have been translated brilliantly by imaginative filmmakers, and faithfulness isn’t a particularly useful barometer for quality: from Carrie and The Shining to The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, the King-branded films that have endured have displayed a willingness to rework and revise their core texts, sometimes to a startling degree.
With It Chapter Two set to open (and possibly top its predecessor’s record-setting box office) all of those previously comprehensive rankings of King’s film adaptations will be reshuffled; given his prolificacy, we’ll be doing this until the Maine Coast is underwater (we’ll float, too). So while I don’t have the strength to go through 80-plus titles—and settle once and for all whether, say, The Mangler is better than Maximum Overdrive (it is!)—I’ve been entrusted with a list of the 10 best, as well as some favorites that didn’t make the (completely subjective) cut.
Honorable Mentions
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
I promise I’m not trying to troll by omitting this deeply beloved—and, in its way, extremely accomplished—modern American classic; when I was 13 years old, I loved it very much. But a recent rewatch revealed something irredeemably sentimental about Frank Darabont’s film, much of it rooted in Morgan Freeman’s saintly acting (and voice-over), which doesn’t give us much room to think (or feel) on our own about his character or Tim Robbins’s jail-breaking banker; the explanatory dialogue and pushy musical score are the cinematic equivalent of having your food chewed for you (which is fine if you’re a baby bird like the one being secreted in the pocket of James Whitmore’s doomed lifer, Brooks). I respect the film’s fan base, which was mostly accrued after its initial box-office flop: Let’s just say enough other people love it enough that I don’t feel like I have to.
Misery (1990)
Kathy Bates deserved her Oscar for playing “no. 1 fan” Annie Wilkes to the hilt: She’s as frightening and implacable an antagonist as her inspiration in King’s novel. I can forgive Rob Reiner for not really trying to integrate the book’s meditations on writing, creativity, and the sources of our artistic impulses into the movie—they’re too interior and too intellectually complex to spend time on when you’re trying to keep an audience entertained. But their absence is felt. Misery the book is personal and perceptive in ways that King has rarely attempted or achieved elsewhere, drawing us into the process of building a story from the ground up (and how much it hurts when it’s torn down). Misery the film is effective, but impersonal. It’s superior to 90 percent of King adaptations but still significantly less than its source material—enough so that I’m leaving it off my list.
It (2017)
It’s scary, but it’s also repetitive, and at 135 minutes, its literal-minded reproductions of moments that should ideally be unfathomably freaky—the way they are in the mind’s-eye of an impressionable reader—just get tiring. Visually and tonally, Andy Muschietti’s film splits the difference between Stand by Me and the James Wan Cinematic Universe, never quite connecting with the book’s ineffable sadness. It’s possible that It Chapter Two will fulfill that part of the equation, while hopefully finding a way to reduce drag in spite of its even more formidable running time.
10. The Running Man (1987)
King wrote The Running Man under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, a pen name selected to let him stay as prolific as possible without oversaturating the market. The novel was written quickly in a burst of eruptive energy, and, from its countdown structure on down, it has an uncommon sense of momentum for a writer who often gets bogged down in details. The shift to a beefier, more cartoonish style in the movie is embodied in the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who exceeds Bachman’s lean, “pretubercular” conception of reality-show contestant Ben Richards. However far away from the book’s original vision the movie may stray, it ends up right in Arnold’s wheelhouse, letting him dispatch a series of worthy rivals (including Jesse Ventura, Jim Brown, and the great pro wrestler Toru Tanaka) with aplomb; he’s rarely been funnier. Family Feud host Richard Dawson gets a great showcase as well as the reality-TV mogul villain, and the cheesy, carnivalesque style has dated surprisingly well; its vision of 2017 was off, but as a snapshot of 1987 it’s a worthy piece of archaeology.
9. Stand by Me (1986)
Essentially a kinder, gentler cousin to It—or maybe an older brother, since its source short story “The Body” was written four years before the latter’s publication—Stand by Me is about four preteen boys facing down their metaphorical demons instead of a real one; it’s among the light sprinkling of King tales that elide the supernatural entirely. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t morbid: The plot, after all, is about traveling into the forest to find a dead body, which can be read as a confrontation with mortality itself. The key to Rob Reiner’s movie version is that it recognizes the depth of the subtext without letting itself get dragged down; it has a fond, nostalgic tone and lets its quartet of young stars—Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman, Wil Wheaton, and an achingly tender River Phoenix—be endearing without too much undue cuteness. Reiner claimed he modeled Wheaton’s incarnation of aspiring writer Gordie on his own adolescent ambitions and anxieties as the son of a successful comedian, but in the end, the film resonates more as a portrait of King himself—one attuned to the melancholy that’s always bubbling underneath his work’s malevolence.
8. Creepshow (1982)
The team-up of director George A. Romero, then in his Dawn of the Dead–era heyday as the most important working American horror filmmaker, with King was seen as a monumental summit; the movie that resulted from their collaboration is uneven, but its best bits hold up as well as anything in either master’s canon. Conceived as an homage to the grotesque EC horror comics of the 1950s (as well as the 1945 British horror anthology classic Dead of Night), Creepshow features five self-contained vignettes within a self-reflexive wraparound segment; its twin peaks are “The Lonesome Death of Jody Verill,” starring King himself as a farmer whose discovery of a downed meteorite sparks a gruesome (and hilarious) physical mutation, and “The Crate,” a lean, mean, miniature creature feature with a wonderfully old-school set of special effects. Kudos is also due to the great character actor E.G. Marshall in the climactic “They’re Creeping Up on You,” playing a man whose panic-room-style apartment is infiltrated by a horde of cockroaches: His disgust and terror is infectious.
7. Cujo (1983)
Essentially a monster movie à la Jaws, Lewis Teague’s Cujo strips away most of the mystical bluster of King’s book, which hinted that the eponymous Saint Bernard was infected by a demonic evil before turning on his loving family; there’s no such suggestion in the movie, which, if anything, makes the lethal metamorphosis more unsettling. Teague, a journeyman director who got the gig on the strength of the parodic reptile-on-the-loose thriller Alligator, succeeds in conveying the terror and claustrophobia of the scenario, trapping resourceful mom Dee Wallace and her meek son Danny Pintauro in a Ford Pinto for an extended, spatially coherent attack sequence that refuses to let up. The movie is as nasty and single-minded as Cujo himself: It’s simple, and it works.
6. Salem’s Lot (1979)
Not a movie, but a miniseries; not a masterpiece overall but containing maybe the single best scare in any King adaptation (including the ones by Kubrick, De Palma, and Cronenberg). Reggie Nalder’s master vampire “Mr. Barlow” was styled by director Tobe Hooper in honor of the original Nosferatu, Max Schreck, except in lurid, late-’70s living color: Making his first appearance at the foot of a prison-cell bed, he’s fucking terrifying. Tobe Hooper’s choice to make Barlow mute (instead of a verbal manipulator as in the book) has some strong Leatherface vibes, and while Salem’s Lot lacks the compression of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it’s still spooky and atmospheric—a Maine-set immersion in the Dracula mythos with exactly the same sprawling, ensemble dynamic that King regularly evokes on the page.
5. The Mist (2007)
H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos has long been one of King’s guiding influences, and Frank Darabont’s adaptation of The Mist honors that relationship while also working as a 21st-century political parable. In the midst of apocalyptic upheaval, the denizens of a small town (including solid, decent family man Thomas Jane) sequester themselves in a supermarket and split up into factions, including an evangelical sect trying to use the end of days as a recruiting tool. A combination siege narrative and social commentary—punctuated by some great jump scares and lubricated in real, R-rated gore—The Mist was originally meant to be shot in black-and-white, and that it achieves a vintage Twilight Zone creepiness is a compliment to Darabont’s instincts. His great achievement, though, was rewriting King’s ending—not a tweak but a full-on switcheroo that stands as one of the gutsiest turns in any contemporary Hollywood genre movie. The revised climax provides the kind of gut punch that we go to horror movies for—it’s impossibly awful in the moment and genuinely haunting in retrospect.
4. Christine (1983)
“Let me tell you a little something about love,” says Arnie (Keith Gordon), in Christine. “You feed it right, and it can be a beautiful thing.” Unfortunately for him, his would-be lover has an insatiable appetite for destruction: that’d be his sentient, bitter Plymouth Fury, which responds to his gearhead affections by trying to kill anybody who threatens (or desires) him. King’s source novel is one of his best, and John Carpenter—deep in a groove after Halloween, The Fog, and The Thing—wrings every ounce of possessive pathos and technophobic terror out of the premise. If the ’80s were partially defined by revenge-of-the-nerd narratives, Christine is more about the horror of the geek-id unleashed. Arnie is a sweetheart until he’s not (crossing the thin line between social outcast and raging asshole), while Christine is like the American Graffiti starter kit—the hot girl and the cool car—in one vicious, fetishistic package. They’re made for each other, and the pat, good-over-evil ending can’t extinguish the spark between them: Carpenter knows better, and the last shot proves it.
3. The Dead Zone (1983)
I’m not sure that there’s a better lead performance in any King adaptation than Christopher Walken’s turn as the physically disabled, emotionally drained psychic Johnny Smith, whose terrible foreknowledge of things to come turns him into a would-be presidential assassin; Walken imbues the role with the severe grace of a prophet. Working for hire, David Cronenberg suppresses his more outrageous sensibilities to put across a story rooted less in body horror than ephemeral dread, conveyed beautifully through Walken’s acting, not yet mired in bug-eyed self-parody. “The ice is going to break,” Johnny warns a client, a line that points directly to King’s methodology of fragile surfaces concealing hidden depths. What makes the The Dead Zone so frightening—and finally deeply moving—is how it commits to the psychology of a guy whose destiny is destroyed and fulfilled by the way he’s slipping through the cracks.
2. Carrie (1976)
It opens with an insidiously brilliant update of Psycho’s shower scene and ends with a jump scare that Hitchcock would have envied; in between, it’s merely the tenderest and most affecting movie ever made out of one of King’s novels. “Tender” is not a word usually associated with Brian De Palma, and there are aspects of Carrie more in line with (if not hugely formative of) the director’s sardonic sensibility: In between his virtuoso camera curlicues (spinning, tracking, soaring, plunging), he exploits the mean-girl high school milieu for bitchy humor and shameless T&A, and turns Carrie’s mom (Piper Laurie) into a ripe gothic-spinster caricature (“These are godless times,” she snarls at a classmate’s mother). He also goes a lot further than King in humanizing his heroine, aided immeasurably by the sublime work of Sissy Spacek—an impossibly brilliant actress who becomes translucent in front of the camera. We’re complicit in everything Carrie is thinking and feeling, and that includes her murderous rage in the home stretch, as baroque and deep red as any giallo while still rooted in a kind of bruised humanity. It’s that sense of betrayal, of somebody who hasn’t just broken bad but been broken, period, that conjures up such unholy fury, and which gives the last shot a power beyond its exacting Pavlovian reflexology (it may be the best-timed shock in movie history). Carrie is reaching out from beyond the grave, yes, but more importantly, she’s reaching out. In hell, as in life, she’s a lonely soul in need of a friend.
1. The Shining (1980)
Like it was going to be something else? It’s almost beside the point to cite the staying power and inventory the iconography of Stanley Kubrick’s hugely unfaithful and inarguably visionary riff on a book that’s also very possibly its author’s best. What’s interesting is how even while diverging so aggressively from his source material, Kubrick still extracted all the rich marrow from its bones. On the page, The Shining is a tale of human frailty, with Jack Torrance succumbing pathetically to a haunted hotel’s atmosphere of temptation; onscreen, Jack Nicholson’s complicitous grin invites us to enjoy the liberation of stir-craziness, and the onus is on us to not get caught up in his good vibes. The altered tone suits Kubrick’s gallows humor, which was always about confronting and critiquing his audience’s baser impulses: reinventing The Shining as a slapstick comedy about murderous patriarchal insecurity is a daring move.
King’s objections to the result are fair enough: He has every right to feel betrayed, and even insulted (as anyone who’s seen Room 237 knows, the shot of a crushed VW bug by the side of the road was a subliminal diss on Kubrick’s part, reducing the book’s featured vehicle to a bit of background collateral damage). But history is not on the writer’s side. The most memorable thing about the follow-up 2013 novel Doctor Sleep is how hard King works to make us try to forget the movie of The Shining, mentioning “room 217” rather than “room 237” on the second page and flashing back to a climax involving a croquet mallet instead of an ax. It’s a nice try, but it doesn’t work: Kubrick’s movie is part of modern horror’s DNA double helix, and it’ll never be extracted. Just ask Mike Flanagan, whose upcoming movie version of Doctor Sleep is seemingly designed in line with Kubrick’s aesthetics—or Steven Spielberg, who devoted a long stretch of Ready Player One to reverent Overlook Hotel cosplay. There’s a wonderful, savage irony in King’s least favorite adaptation of his work also being the best—and so it will remain, forever, and ever, and ever.
