Top 30 Stephen King Movies, Ranked
Top 30 Stephen King Movies, Ranked
From haunted hotels to prison-yard blues, ‘Carrie’ to ‘Christine’ — the major adaptations of the iconic author’s work, from worst to best
Back in 1973, when Stephen King sold his first book Carrie to a publisher (the manuscript of which he’d originally thrown away, and was rescued by his wife Tabitha), the up-and-coming, already published author might have thought: I may actually be able to make it as a professional writer. He probably didn’t think: I will also eventually end up one of the big bestselling authors of the next few decades, a highly decorated man of letters, a brand-name – and a one-man cottage industry for the movies. So many of his now-canonical horror novels, as well as his non–spooky-story output, have been fodder for filmmakers far and wide; the phrase “a Stephen King movie” carries with it it’s own expectations, parameters and conventions. And with not one but two big films coming out in the next month – the long-awaited blockbuster take on The Dark Tower hitting theaters on Friday and a reimagining of the kids v. evil clown epic It coming on September 8th – the King movie remains a bankable category unto itself.
And like any genre, there is the good, the bad, and the ugly. Originally, we’d planned to do a comprehensive worst-to-best ranked list, but the “ugly” proved to be too much for us – the last 10 years alone seem to have brought a wave of adaptations that run from questionable to “Unclean! Unclean!” There’s rewatching The Mangler, and then there’s straight-up masochism. Life is really too short for Dolan’s Cadillac.
So we’ll leave those completist lists for other folks. Meanwhile, we’ve gathered 30 of the best-known, most notable Stephen King movies, and ranked them from worst to best. A few things to note: We’re not including TV shows, TV miniseries or TV movies, so a hearty “sorry” to Salem’s Lot, the best of the latter by a longshot. We’ve concentrated primarily on adaptations of his work, though there is one entry that fudges that notion a bit … but that we could not bear to leave out. And finally, we ranked these movies on a dual scale of the quality of the movie itself and how well it worked as an adaptation of King’s work. (Please keep this in mind when you get to Number Five. Don’t @ us, people.)
Get busy readin’ or get busy dyin’.
Music
via https://www.DMT.NEWS
Rolling Stone, Khareem Sudlow
