Iconic horror novelist Stephen King has had a ton films tailored from his work — and that is not counting TV exhibits and miniseries. And there’s merely no signal of slowing down, what with the latest Salem’s Lot film, the brand new adaptation The Monkey, and extra diversifications within the pipeline.
With so many movies to select from, what are the very best Stephen King diversifications? We’ve whittled this large catalogue right down to 13 films. From ghosts to psychics to… ghosts desirous to feed on psychics, these are really the flicks that not solely captured the very best of King’s work, but additionally turned cinema classics in their very own proper.
Here are the highest Stephen King films ever, ranked from #13 counting right down to #1. Keep scrolling for the checklist or view the slideshow for a visible countdown!
How Many Stephen King Movies Are There?
There are 54 movie diversifications of Stephen King tales, in keeping with the writer’s official website. The first King adaptation was Carrie in 1976, whereas the newest is The Monkey.
The Best Stephen King Movies, Ranked
13. The Dead Zone (1983)
Director: David Cronenberg
Long earlier than Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone served as fodder for a TV sequence, it impressed a 1983 movie from director David Cronenberg. Cronenberg, who’d already made a reputation for himself with surreal horror movies like Videodrome and Shivers, introduced that signature contact to this gripping psychological drama.
The Dead Zone starred Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, a humble college instructor who’s injured in a automobile accident, trapped in a coma for 5 years, and awakens to find he can psychically glimpse into an individual’s previous, current, and future with a mere contact. Less grotesque and violent than a lot of Cronenberg’s horror efforts of the day, Dead Zone was a bleak and unsettling movie that made full use of Walken’s peculiar presence and gravity as an actor.
12. Gerald’s Game (2017)
Director: Mike Flanagan
For years it was thought King’s 1992 outing Gerald’s Game, which entails a girl handcuffed to a mattress preventing to free herself after her husband has a coronary heart assault, was un-adaptable. But then author/director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass) got here alongside and knocked it out of the park. Starring Carla Gugino because the trapped, determined Jessie, Flanagan’s Netflix horror film is excellent small-scale suspense and options an immensely fascinating efficiency by Gugino. Taking place largely in a single room, Gerald’s Game is a set of tightly wound gears that cranks out dread.
Read IGN’s assessment of Gerald’s Game.
11. The Monkey (2025)
Director: Osgood Perkins
A premise as deceptively easy as “for those who wind up the monkey, somebody brutally dies” leaves plenty of room for error, or for the gnarly kills to be the one issues anybody remembers. But from that setup, director Osgood Perkins builds a multifaceted rollercoaster of a midnight film that elicits as many laughs as shocks or gross-out gags, and succeeds at each animating and skewering the ability that dying holds over us all.
The Monkey marches to the beat of its personal bloodstained drum – and it’s an irresistible rhythm to groove to. Perkins and solid stability the horror and comedy inherent within the film’s foolish premise exceptionally nicely, and the surreal, absurd touches the Longlegs director provides to a world sketched out by Stephen King solely assist to set it other than much less imaginative, body-count-obsessed films. The evil affect of the titular, cursed toy ends in blockbuster showcases for implausible gore results that, when paired with the movie’s surprisingly light stance on the inevitability of dying, affirm how potent horror-comedy will be when executed with a robust perspective and a willingness to get bizarre.
Read IGN’s assessment of The Monkey.
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10. The Mist (2007)
Director: Frank Darabont
The Mist relies on a King quick story discovered within the 1985 assortment Skeleton Crew. Ostensibly a monster film, The Mist finds a bunch of individuals trapped in a distant grocery retailer after a wierd fog envelops the area and terrifying, dinosaur-like creatures start showing. But the core of this horror/sci-fi fusion is survival, and the lengths some will go to make sure theirs.
The film benefited from a strong solid (together with stars Tom Jane and Marcia Gay Harden) and director Frank Darabont — who’s one in every of three administrators on this checklist who’ve had essentially the most success with King’s work — really garnered reward with a revised ending that deepened the darkish tone of the story.
Read IGN’s assessment of The Mist.
9. Creepshow (1982)
Director: George A. Romero
Horror legends Stephen King and George Romero teamed up for 1982’s Creepshow, which was conceived as an homage to the Golden Age of horror comics within the 1950’s, together with E.C. Comics’ notorious releases and DC books like House of Secrets and House of Mystery.
That anthology legacy is mirrored within the execution of Creepshow, which revels in its juvenile, B-movie standing. The movie additionally has the excellence of that includes authentic materials written by King, relatively than a script wholly tailored from his prose work. While two of the 5 vignettes are primarily based on his quick tales, the remaining three are distinctive to Creepshow. These vignettes are cleverly glued along with animated sequences and a framing sequence starring King’s son, Joe (now an achieved horror author in his personal proper).
8. The Green Mile (1999)
Director: Frank Darabont
Because director Frank Darabont had crafted what many think about to be the definitive Stephen King film with The Shawshank Redemption (extra on that movie later) some feared he was revisiting overly acquainted territory when he returned to adapt one other of King’s jail dramas, The Green Mile.
Like Shawshank, The Green Mile is a interval piece set largely inside a jail and centered on a wrongly convicted felon. In this case, the jail is the Depression-era Cold Mountain Penitentiary, and the felon is John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan). The corrections officer answerable for the dying row inmates (Tom Hanks) is enthralled by Coffey’s light nature and apparently supernatural therapeutic powers, inflicting nice emotional turmoil as he debates whether or not he can permit such a wonderful and clearly harmless man to be executed. The Green Mile is definitely one of the crucial emotionally gripping King movies (or books, for that matter) and additional proof that his non-horror tales are sometimes those most ideally suited to movie.
Read IGN’s assessment of The Green Mile.
7. Stand By Me (1986)
Director: Rob Reiner
Frank Darabont is not the one director with an actual knack for bringing Stephen King tales to life on display. Before Misery, Rob Reiner additionally directed this coming-of-age story primarily based on King’s novella “The Body”, collected within the 1982 ebook Different Seasons.
Stand By Me featured narration by Richard Dreyfuss and a “who’s who?” lineup of up-and-coming teen actors on the time – together with Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell. This quartet performed a bunch of buddies who hear a rumor a few lifeless physique being found and enterprise out to trace it down and discover small-town glory. Along the way in which, they battle some ruthless bullies and be taught a factor or two about one another. This was one other King movie with a deceptively easy system that basically thrived on the power of the performances. King himself even labeled it as the primary really profitable adaptation of his work.
6. It: Chapter One (2017)
Director: Andy Muschietti
Fittingly, one in every of King’s most iconic novels can also be one in every of his most profitable diversifications, shattering field workplace data. But extra than simply being a moneymaker, IT is a really efficient horror movie that pits a bunch of intrepid center schoolers towards the terrifying, inhuman killer lurking beneath the streets of an idyllic Maine city. It’s stuffed with ample spookiness, devilish scares, and a horrifying efficiency by Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
It’s first chapter works nicely not simply because it is horrifying, however as a result of it does one thing that so few horror movies ever handle – it makes audiences look after these heroes as they face down the unimaginable. Just just like the ebook, the half of the story that includes our essential characters as children is the extra engrossing half, which is why solely Chapter One is right here on our checklist.
Read IGN’s assessment of It: Chapter One.
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5. Doctor Sleep (2019)
Director: Mike Flanagan
Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is a contemporary horror miracle. Adapting King’s sequel novel to The Shining, a few grown-up Danny Torrence (Ewan McGregor), Flanagan needed to merge the world of King’s prose and Kubrick’s cinematic imaginative and prescient. Since Kubrick’s The Shining took many liberties with King’s ebook — a lot in order that King himself disavowed the movie — Flanagan needed to carry each worlds collectively in a method that felt real, gripping, and scary.
Visually, most every little thing we affiliate with The Shining comes from Kubrick (the hedge maze, the “twins,” the varied ghouls, and so on) and Doctor Sleep is a lovely, brutal mix of all of it. On prime of that, it is a implausible movie created by top-of-the-line new masters within the horror recreation. Also see our video for Doctor Sleep: How the Shining Sequel Handles the Legacy of Jack Torrance
Read IGN’s assessment of Doctor Sleep.
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4. Carrie (1976)
Director: Brian De Palma
“If you’ve got bought a style for terror… invite Carrie to the promenade!”
That was the Grindhouse-worthy tagline for Carrie, and it stated all that wanted to be stated about this teen horror drama. Carrie was King’s huge break as a author in 1974, and a mere two years later, it additionally turned fodder for top-of-the-line movies primarily based on his work. The titular character — Sissy Spacek — a prototypical awkward teenage woman who suffers from bullying in school and an overbearing, fanatically non secular mom (Piper Laurie) at residence. She additionally occurs to manifest harmful, psychokinetic powers when she’s upset, so you may think about what occurs when Carrie turns into the sufferer of a merciless prank at her promenade.
Carrie was praised each due to its terrifying qualities and its critical exploration of a really troubled character, simply nonetheless rating as one of many best of the normal Stephen King horror films.
3. Misery (1990)
Director: Rob Reiner
Misery operates on a quite simple system. It options solely two essential characters who spend many of the movie locked away in a distant cabin in winter. But each the 1987 novel and Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation actually made essentially the most of this system.
As with so a lot of King’s tales, Misery incorporates a troubled author because the lead protagonist. James Caan starred as novelist Paul Sheldon, a person who’s rescued from a automobile crash by a nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Unfortunately, as Sheldon’s “primary fan” Wilkes makes use of her distinctive alternative to lure Sheldon in her cabin and power him to write down a brand new ebook that may resurrect his most well-known character, Misery Chastain. It was a fantastic premise that allowed for Hitchcock ranges of rigidity as Sheldon struggled to placate his demanding host and discover a option to escape her clutches. Bates gained the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Wilkes, a personality who nonetheless ranks as one of many all-time nice horror villains.
2. The Shining (1980)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was born from what is perhaps King’s most well-known novel, which instructed the story of a person named Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) – one other of King’s struggling writers with a pronounced darkish facet. Torrance serves as winter caretaker for the distant, luxurious Overlook Hotel in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. A mixture of cabin fever and a robust supernatural affect compels Jack to attempt to homicide his household and be part of the various stressed souls trapped inside the Overlook’s partitions. The solely factor standing within the resort’s method is Jack’s younger son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), whose psychic items the resort each craves and fears.
In a twist, King has all the time been very adamant in his dislike of this adaptation, which he chalks as much as Kubrick downplaying the household themes and the supernatural nature of the resort, however each components at the moment are among the many movie’s extra praised qualities. The Shining is a technically sensible movie, with modern digicam work (notably the monitoring pictures of Danny on his tricycle) and using bodily unimaginable constructing layouts to create a refined however very unsettling feeling. The Shining is so good that it manages to nearly stay separate from King’s title, rating merely as one the very best horror films of all time.
1. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Director: Frank Darabont
The first of Frank Darabont’s feature-length Stephen King diversifications, The Shawshank Redemption additionally stays his greatest. The film was tailored from the lesser-known novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (additionally Different Seasons assortment that spawned Stand By Me). The film starred Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a banker convicted of murdering his spouse and her lover primarily based on circumstantial proof and doomed to spend the remainder of his days inside the chilly partitions of Shawshank Penitentiary. Morgan Freeman co-starred as Red, the smart, world-weary smuggler of contraband.
While Shawshank typically veered into darkish territory, the film was in the end an uplifting story about one man’s refusal to surrender hope in even essentially the most miserable circumstances. Robbins performed a succesful everyman hero, however typically it was Freeman who stole the present, each in individual and thru his now iconic narration.
Upcoming Stephen King Movies
We love the classics, however chances are you’ll be anticipating what Stephen King releases are coming subsequent. For films, you may sit up for:
- The Running Man – Release Date: Nov. 7, 2025
- The Long Walk – Release Date: TBD
What are your fav Stephen King films ever? Let us know within the feedback.
This article has been up to date with streaming data and upcoming Stephen King launch data for 2025.
