Readers' Poll: The 10 Best Stephen King Movies
Stephen King would be the first person to say that Hollywood hasn't always done a great job with his books. For every brilliant film like Misery and The Shining, there's a dog like Dreamcatcher or Children of the Corn and its many, many sequels. There's also Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, two irrefutable classics that many don't even realize are based on Stephen King novellas. Three of his best works – The Stand, It and the Dark Tower saga – are now in various stages of development, and everyone is praying none of them get mucked up. We asked our readers to select their favorite Stephen King movies. Here are the results.
Just two years after winning a Best Actress Academy Award for her chilling portrayal of obsessed fan Annie Wilkes in Misery, Kathy Bates returned to the land of Stephen King by starring in Dolores Claiborne. This time around, she played a maid that police believe killed her wealthy boss. She denies committing the crime, but does tell police her twisted life story that includes offing her husband after he molested their daughter. While it didn't quite rack up the same box office and acclaim as Misery, it was more than a worthy follow-up.
John Carpenter was one the hottest horror directors in the industry in the early 1980s. His Halloween series basically invented the slasher films of the era, though his 1982 remake of The Thing struggled when it opened up against E.T. He followed that up with a big-screen adaptation of Stephen King's 1983 book Christine. It's the story of a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury that many King fans see as one of his lesser works, but Carpenter assembled the awesomely Eighties cast of Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul and Harry Dean Stanton and made it into a surprisingly watchable film.
Frank Darabont is best known these days for developing The Walking Dead, but prior to that he had a whole career of adapting Stephen King books for the big screen. In the 1990s, he directed the King prison works Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and in 2007 he turned the 1980 novella The Mist into a movie starring Marcia Gay Hayden, Thomas Jane and Laurie Holden. It's the tale of a haunted mist that spreads across a New England town following a thunderstorm. It traps a group of people into a grocery store, a situation that eventually devolves into a Lord of the Flies–type mess where they all turn on each other. The film was hailed by critics, though it only grossed $57.2 million.
Stephen King was living in a trailer park and barely able to afford diapers for his kids when he dreamed up a tale of a bullied teenage girl with telekinetic powers that unleashes a brutal revenge against her tormenters. The 1974 book was an instant hit, and just two years later Brian De Palma turned it into a movie starring Sissy Spacek. It became one of the most beloved horror films of the decade, though the subsequent sequels and remakes have all been quite disappointing. There was even an ill-advised Broadway version, and a remake starring Chloë Grace Moretz just two years ago. Ignore all of those and check out the original.
Many of Stephen King's best books come straight from his own fears. After all, what would be worse for an author than getting kidnapped by an obsessed fan and forced to write a book while undergoing horrific torture? (Years later, King confessed that the fan was really a metaphor for the cocaine that was ruling his life at the time.) Rob Reiner turned Misery into a masterful (though sometimes hard to watch) film starring Kathy Bates and James Caan in 1990. It's coming to Broadway with Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalf later this year. They have a lot to live up to.
Stephen King's epic 1978 novel about a disease that wipes out 99.9 percent of the earth was so long when he first filed it that he cut out 150,000 words and it still ran at over 820 pages. The cut passages were restored 12 years later in a new edition that fans loved even more than the original, so it was no surprise that the ABC miniseries ran over four nights in May of 1994 and still had to cut out big chunks of the plot. The team behind it still get a lot of points for trying, and assembling a humongous cast that included Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Jamey Sheridan and Ruby Dee. Rumors have been flying for a while that a big-screen version, possibly preceded by a Showtime miniseries, is in the works, but so far nothing has been confirmed.
If Stephen King himself had voted in this poll, he would likely have picked Stand by Me, which was based on his 1982 short story "The Body." In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, King fondly recalled watching it on Rob Reiner's request in a Beverly Hills screening room. "It was moving," King said. "I think I scared the shit out of Rob Reiner. When the movie was over, I hugged him because I was moved to tears, because it was so autobiographical."
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of The Shining is a modern-day horror classic whose reputation only grows as the year pass. The biggest dissenting voice, however, is Stephen King himself. "Obviously people absolutely love it, and they don't understand why I don't," he told Rolling Stone last year. "The book is hot, and the movie is cold; the book ends in fire, and the movie in ice. . . And it's so misogynistic. I mean, Wendy Torrance is just presented as this sort of screaming dish rag."We gently suggested that perhaps it's a great movie even if it's not a great adaptation of his book, but King wasn't having it. "I never saw it that way at all," he said. "And I never see any of the movies that way. The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium."
Just five years after directing Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont returned to the world of Stephen King prison stories set in the past. This one, however, featured a bit of the supernatural. It's the story of an enormous African-American man named John Coffey (note the initials) sentenced to death for the rape and murder of two little white girls. Coffey is completely innocent, and he befriends a gentle prison guard (played by Tom Hanks) who learns that the convict has amazing healing powers. It's a grim story with a tragic ending, but audiences loved it and it earned $290 million at the box office.
The movies on the IMDB's Top 250 chart fluctuate quite a bit, but the top film never seems to budge. For just about as long as the IMDB has ranked movies, Shawshank Redemption has been Number One. That's a pretty remarkable feat for a film that absolutely tanked when it hit theaters 21 years ago, though it since found a huge, adoring audience on cable and home video. It's based on a 1982 novella by Stephen King called Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, though the filmmakers have expressed regret over not changing the title even more. After all, it's hard enough to market a small-budget prison movie without any major stars, but throw in a title that seems like gibberish to most people and the task is nearly impossible. Oddly enough, the fact it bombed may have actually helped the film in the long run because many people feel they discovered it on their own over the years.
