TOP 10 films from King's cinematic universe

Over his 50-year career, Stephen King has published 65 novels (66th coming soon) and over 200 short stories. His books have sold over 400 million copies worldwide and are regularly snapped up for film and television adaptations.

1. Cujo (1983)

A friendly St. Bernard named "Cujo" becomes infected with rabies and terrorizes a small American town. "Cujo" is more than just a terrifying dog, it's also a story of betrayal and family breakdown. This is what sets it apart from other animal attack movies.

The New York Times called the film "predictable" and said, "Cujo is not as scary or terrifying as other adaptations of King's popular stories, and especially not as good as 1976's Carrie..." Almost everyone, whether they've seen the film or not, knows what the word "Cujo" means... much better than, say, "Christine." So this is one of King's most memorable films, even if it's not his most creative.

 

2. It (2017)

Few fictional villains inspire real-life, true-crime antics. But in the early 2010s, the UK and US were plagued by mysterious creeps imitating Tim Curry's grease-painted ghoul Pennywise in the original It miniseries. That's how strong Pennywise's cultural memory was, and the extent of Bill Skarsgård's work to make the role his own. His long-legged, maniacal clown conveys a bit of Joker Heath

Ledger and a little bit of Jack Torrance from The Shining, but there's also something very Skarsgård-esque here. It's a heavy touch scare - there's a limit to how many times the oh-bah-CLOWN-bah recipe works - but the very charming "Stand With Me"-esque gang of kids trying to fend off bullies, find the body of their dead brother and deal with an evil shape-shifting entity is what makes it all fly.

3. "Gerald's Game" (2017)

The novel was considered by many to be unsuitable for film for decades after its publication in 1992, but Gerald's Game was finally picked up by avid King fan, director Mike Flanagan. The imagined complexity was the premise of the entire story: Jessie Burlingame reluctantly endures a sexual bondage game with her husband Gerald, who promptly dies of a heart attack, leaving her handcuffed to a bed in their remote cabin on

by a lake. One location, very few characters, and the main character can barely move. It all depends on the central role, and the director's great success was the casting of Carla Gugino ( pictured ) as Jessie, whose career-best performance expresses every emotion as her predicament becomes increasingly desperate, confusing, and surreal. She has been a mainstay in Flanagan's work ever since ("The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor," "Midnight Mass," "The Fall of the House of Usher").

4. Christine (1983)

If someone wants to adapt a story about a machine that keeps killing people,

It's John Carpenter, of The Thing fame. Arnie is a bully who gets bullied and beaten up, but when he starts restoring an old Plymouth Fury named Christine, he becomes more confident and attractive. As Arnie becomes attached to the car named Christine, it becomes clear that she has dark secrets hidden under her bonnet. Extremely creepy and incredibly funny, Christine is a kind of mirror image of American graffiti on the fairgrounds. Where George Lucas's Cruise memoir is a wistful portrait of a more innocent time, Christine warns that too much nostalgia can consume you.

5. The Green Mile (1999) #27 IMDb

Did you rate The Shawshank Redemption? For director Frank Darabont, the answer was yet another prison film of the era, with a three-hour runtime and Tom Hanks. The film centers on the lime-green death row of Cold Mountain Penitentiary in the 1930s, where the mystical gentle giant Michael Clarke Duncan is imprisoned for the alleged murder of two girls. Hanks is an officer who has come to believe that Duncan's miraculous healing powers mean he can't be a murderer. There's horror in some of the most unpleasant

moments with the electric chair (“Old Sparky”), but like “The Shawshank Redemption,” it is essentially a solid melodrama, this time with fantasy elements. Darabont’s direction is meticulous, and his adaptation is thrilling: hence the leisurely length. If this style seems episodic, it only reflects the nature of King’s original – an experiment in Dickensian references, as the first publication consisted of six separate parts.

6. Salim's Lair (1979)

One of King’s earliest novels was this three-hour miniseries, adapted by Tobe Hooper from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (although it was cut for theatrical release in some countries). Certainly limited by what was allowed on 1970s American television, it’s still surprisingly powerful. And since King himself always described it as a horror version of the soap opera Peyton Place, perhaps television was his natural home after all. The core of the tale of a town gradually turning into vampires until there’s no one left remains intact, and there’s an indelible fear in scenes like Ralphie Glick (Ronnie Scribner) floating in a window, or Mike Ryerson (Jeffrey Lewis) just sitting in a rocking chair. The book's chatty Mr. Barlow becomes Reggie Nalder's silent Nosferatu, but even that works in a strange way; Barlow's devious acquaintance, Straker (an old James Mason), does the hard work for him.

 

7. Fog (2007)

After making The Shockshank Escape and The Green Mile, Frank Darabont scored a hat trick in King adaptations, creating a very different kind of movie. Namely: a big old creature, where a tentacled crawler, huge insects, and giant spiders terrorize small-town America. Yeah, that’s not how the popular uprising is. Darabont said that The Mist “isn’t about the monsters on the outside, it’s about the monsters on the inside: the people you’re stuck with, your friends and neighbors who are breaking down under the strain.” That’s right. But it’s also very, very much about people being eaten by praying mantises, and there’s no shame in that. And while the Hostel and Saw franchises were big horror draws, The Mist’s incredible ending showed that you could crush an audience without crushing their skulls.

8. The Dead Zone (1983)

When Johnny (Christopher Walken) wakes up from a coma after crashing his Beetle into a truck, everything has changed. Five years have passed. His girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams) has moved on and has a husband and child. And now he can see the future of the people he touches. It's a big responsibility, especially

when he sees the destruction of all humanity in the future of a local politician. Along with The Fly, this tense thriller is just as large-scale and impressive.

9. Misery (1990)

This movie is truly one of the best horror movies. Simply because it's so honest, and Kathy Bates' performance in it was truly incredible. The story is about a writer who's driving home (James Caan) in a blizzard and his car flips over in the snow, and he's taken in by his number one fan, as she says (Kathy Bates), but she's a little more sinister than she seems at first glance.

10. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) #1 IMDb

Sadistic guards, brutal inmates, bullying prison guards, and the horror of being stuck in prison for a murder you didn't commit: yes, The Shawshank Redemption is undoubtedly one of the most iconic events in cinema. King's story follows Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker who is thrown into a bear pit with a double life sentence when he is found guilty of murder. Dufresne gets back on his feet with the help of old Red (Morgan Freeman, using all his

his battered street smarts and sparkling charm) and bides his time before planning his escape, trusting the warden (an extremely aggressive Bob Gunton). The Shawshank Redemption was not a huge success upon release, but the film eventually became a smash hit. Its strength lies in its genuinely simple worldview: it's a call to stick to your purpose, to keep moving, with the promise that crawling through five hundred yards of stinking filth is worth it if you find freedom, clean air, a beach, and an old friend.

Read also "Stephen King: The Essentials" and "King. Where to Start?"