Hollywood has been churning out adaptations of Stephen King stories since Gerald Ford was president of the United States.
The process began slowly – not least because there weren’t, at first, that many books to adapt – placing a good four years between Brian De Palma’s Carrie, in 1976, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in 1980. But, by the time Ronald Reagan left office, King Adaptation Inc was a subindustry in itself.
One reason to attempt a top 10 now is that we’ve had four theatrically released King yarns this year alone: Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey in February, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck in August, Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk in September and, out this week, Edgar Wright’s The Running Man.
By one calculation (please don’t ask for our maths), The Running Man is the 50th movie adapted directly from a King text to achieve theatrical exhibition. That is some achievement.
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Nobody – not even one S King of New England – would claim the quality is consistent. Such atrocities as Silver Bullet, The Dark Tower and (directed by King himself) Maximum Overdrive did not much trouble the scorers. But the top 10 confirms an extraordinary ability to build story in a way that comfortably accommodates the unforgiving gawp of the movie camera.
King’s core métier is, of course, horror, but at least two titles here are not remotely in that genre. Two more are, at most, barely horror adjacent. It is his gift for teasing and tantalising that wins over screenwriters. If his characterisation is sometimes glib, that only allows more space for good actors to stretch out and extemporise.
There is half a century of adaptation here. Maybe the bloke needs an honorary Oscar.
10. The Running Man
Paul Michael Glaser, 1987
Two entries in this list come from the books King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The Running Man, published in 1982, was among that unnamed class of dystopian science-fiction yarn that imagines a futuristic re-creation based around the violent annihilation of participants: Death Race 2000, Rollerball, The Hunger Games, Battle Royale and so on, up to the other Bachman adaptation listed below. Arnold Schwarzenegger, reaching the apex of his fame, played the “runner” who must evade professional killers for the amusement of a TV audience. Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, saw the film as “an engagingly mean, cruel, nasty, funny send-up of television”. That satirical bite has even more relevance now. Edgar Wright’s incoming adaptation replaces Schwarzenegger with Glen Powell.
9. The Long Walk
Francis Lawrence, 2025
So, yes, here is the other “Bachman book” about dystopian re-creations for the entertainment of a cynical, despairing public. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are among a party of Americans who, in time of postwar depression, find themselves engaged in a nation-spanning walk whose fascist organisers put a bullet in the head of anyone dawdling more than allowed. There are reminders of the films listed in the entry above, but the true antecedent seems to be the marathon dancing competitions – documented in Sidney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – that offered conditional relief during the Great Depression. Less violent than many King joints, but the relentlessness of the misery makes it a genuinely tough watch.
8. The Dead Zone
David Cronenberg, 1983
What was that we were saying earlier about the satire being more relevant now than it was at time of release? Christopher Walken plays a man who, after acquiring the ability to see a person’s future just by touching them, learns that, if unchecked, a rising politician (Martin Sheen as, for once, an anti-JFK) will go on to become president and precipitate nuclear annihilation. There are pointers towards King’s 23/11/63, his best book this century, in the protagonist’s moral unease at altering an apparently predestined future for a US leader. It is interesting to note that the only collaboration between King and Cronenberg, though roughly in horror territory, trades their mutual taste in gore for a more restrained unease.
7. The Mist
Frank Darabont, 2007
With The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, Darabont was already established as among the most celebrated cinematic interpreters of King. His third assault on Stevo finally saw him getting around to a bit of horror. Based on a story the author first conceived as long ago as 1976, The Mist stars Thomas Jane as a father who, with family in tow, becomes barricaded in a supermarket as a mysterious vapour envelopes the surrounding area. This is one of several King adaptations that revels in throwing clashing personalities together in claustrophobic circumstances. Marcia Gay Harden is characteristically off the scale as a religious maniac who believes the visitation is a punishment from God. For fear of spoilers, we will say no more than the ending is something else.
6. The Shawshank Redemption
Frank Darabont, 1994
It’s not quite correct to say Darabont’s prison drama landed to little fanfare. The film got strong reviews and secured seven Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. But, released in the same season as Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, Shawshank did not set the box office alight. It was a sensation on VHS, however, ending 1995 as the most rented film of the year. It subsequently became the highest-rated film ever at the Internet Movie Database and, with occasional challenges from The Godfather, has remained there ever since. What makes so many think it the best film of all time? Humanity, wit, generosity and an appeal across all demographics. Even in 1994, it was “the kind of film they don’t make any more”.
5. Misery
Rob Reiner, 1990
Famously, every actor in Hollywood was offered the role of Paul Sheldon, romance author taken captive by Kathy Bates’s superfan, before each decided they didn’t want to spend an entire film in bed. William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro are just a few who said no. Reiner eventually settled on a then-underemployed James Caan and delivered an economically unsettling chamber piece that positions its beats with near genius. Once again, the cliche “more relevant than ever” seems apt. In the internet age we are more aware than ever of how many have been driven insane by fandom. Bates deservedly won an Oscar for her turn as Annie Wilkes. “He didn’t get out of the cockadoodie car!”
4. Stand by Me
Rob Reiner, 1986
Rob Reiner again! Back in 1986, audiences were surprised to discover that King wasn’t just in the business of scaring you to death. This painfully nostalgic piece – the author is forever looking back at troubled childhoods in compromised Arcadia – stars a first-rate juvenile cast in the tale of four chums searching out a rumoured dead body. It is 1959, and the film seems aware that a certain version of the United States is about to be annihilated in the coming turbulent decade. Notable for giving a prominent role to the electrifying River Phoenix. Also notable for Reiner moving to the third stage of an incredible seven-film run that lasted from This Is Spinal Tap, in 1984, to A Few Good Men, in 1992.
3. Dolores Claiborne
Taylor Hackford, 1995
Kathy Bates again! Surely the most underrated adaptation in the list, Hackford’s take on a 1992 King novel rediscovers the melodramatic energies of great “women’s pictures” from Hollywood’s golden age. The title alone points back to classics, named for their dogged heroines, such as Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce. (Both those earlier films also have much to do with mother-daughter tensions.) Bates stars as an ill-tempered woman accused of murdering her disabled employer. Jennifer Jason-Leigh is her troubled journalist daughter, returning from New York to grudgingly support Mom in an hour of need. Hackford layers on the fan-your-armpits theatrics with a solar eclipse in the film’s later stages, but committed performances from the women leads just about keep it grounded. A supreme entertainment in a grand tradition.
2. The Shining
Stanley Kubrick, 1980
There has been much exaggeration of Kubrick’s supposedly abusive behaviour towards Shelley Duvall on set. “He was very warm and friendly to me,” she later clarified. But it is true the film received many stinky reviews on release and garnered a “worst director” nomination at the inaugural, always-idiotic Razzie Awards. It is also true that King objected strongly to the adaptation – later making his own silly TV version – and never fully recanted that view. All of this seems baffling now. Unique in its dedication to grandiose manifestations of insanity, the picture is pored over for hidden meanings and subversive subtexts. Steven Spielberg remembered questioning the hugeness of Jack Nicholson’s performance to Kubrick and being told that is how Jimmy Cagney might have done it. Fair point.
1. Carrie
Brian De Palma, 1976
After all that, we end up back where we started. King’s first novel. The first feature adaptation of a King story. De Palma was already greatly celebrated among cineastes, but it was not until Carrie, his ninth film, that he secured a genuine box-office hit. The film is most remembered for its phantasmagorical finale, but, to that point, it has, as much as anything else, been a psychological drama about the cruelties of family and of the American high school. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie were transcendent as troubled introspective teen and deranged religious mother. Even Roger Ebert, often cool on horror cinema, was evangelical in his praise. He raved it was no manufactured horror but “a real one, in which the horror grows out of the characters themselves”.
Favourites that missed out?
The Green Mile greatly outstays its welcome. Christine can’t get past the silliness of its high concept. Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, exists only to remind you of the original’s brilliance. The recent Life of Chuck is mawkish nonsense.
