Stephen King Movies: Why Can't Hollywood Get Them Right?
Why Are Stephen King Adaptations So Often SO BAD
Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re exploring the distinctive writing style of the immensely popular Stephen King, and why so few film and TV interpretations live up to it.
We all know that the “King of Horror” is an overall literary legend. The astonishingly prolific Stephen King has earned almost unparalleled success across many genres, formats and media. He’s also an avid film buff with deep ties in the industry. And yet, many don't realize how unflattering most screen interpretations of King’s work have been. The duds are overshadowed by gems like Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me” and Frank Darabont’s “The Shawshank Redemption.” Incidentally, one of the most celebrated takes, Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” is one of King’s least favorite. That says a lot about how hard it is to capture his highly experimental and dense storytelling style. Let’s come at the King to see why there are several dozen cinematic misses to his name.
Narrative Scope
The most obviously challenging Stephen King trend can be spotted by the spine of a book. He’s notorious for writing extremely long novels on a relatively short timeline. “Under the Dome,” “It” and the uncut edition of “The Stand” span over a thousand pages! Many attempts to compress only slightly shorter epics into standalone films have done them a disservice. Where the 1979 miniseries “Salem’s Lot” had two 90-minute episodes to flesh out its layers, the 2024 feature adaptation is stripped down to a generic vampire and spookhouse flick. Even more egregious were the takes on “Needful Things” and “Desperation,” which each covered around 700 pages in around two hours. It’s no wonder these films were criticized as disjointed and convoluted. Beyond his pedantically detailed writing, King often places worldbuilding as the true focal point of narratives. He also knows the importance of emotional investment in such unforgivingly imaginative lore.
Deep Storytelling
What sets Stephen King apart from many genre writers is that he has something to say, and wants you to care about the people saying it. Hailing from the small town of Durham, Maine, he uniquely approaches ensemble casts as communities of complex individuals. Their subplots often represent morality, mortality, and the very natures of humanity and fear, with vivid descriptions of psychological tension. So, many adaptations that loosen pathos feel heavy-handed and hollow. With 1987’s “The Running Man,” pathos is thrown out entirely to capitalize on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campy action stardom. The film’s critics, including King himself, see this as a fatal flaw in the story’s core commentary against violent consumerism. That’s nothing compared to 2017’s catastrophic “The Dark Tower,” based on a series consisting of eight King-sized novels. After just over an hour-and-a-half of clunky exposition and incoherent action, nobody was interested in any sequels. Maybe it’ll work better as the TV show long envisioned by developers, but there’s no guarantee.
Film vs. TV
Given the scope of King’s storytelling, it’s natural to assume that it works better on TV. And yet, for all his disdain for Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” a 1997 miniseries that King wrote himself was heavily panned. It’s less about telling the whole story than about having the adequate production values and subtle nuances to translate the material properly. Why even bother remaking “Carrie” and “Children of the Corn” as small-screen features? But when ABC made “It” and “The Stand” in the ‘90s, they were blockbuster events praised for their ambition and concise, character-driven writing. “It” eventually hit big screens in the late 2010s in two parts, coming out longer and more acclaimed than the miniseries. Paramount+’s “The Stand,” on the other hand, was more fixated on spectacle than cohesive character and plot development. CBS’s “Under the Dome” and Audience Network’s “Mr. Mercedes” show that there is virtue in loosening adaptations to develop the finer points across multiple seasons. Despite HBO’s “The Outsider” also achieving pause, it seems that no amount of dramatic and artistic breadth can sell certain supernatural twists.
Genre-Bending
King shouldn’t be strictly categorized as a horror writer. Even within that genre, he often uses more fantastical elements as metaphorical complements to grounded drama. Even if filmmakers can logically plot the often drastic shifts in genre and tone, viewers must ultimately be able to buy the new direction. Take Frank Darabont’s “The Green Mile,” a jarringly spiritual prison drama that is seen as a masterpiece by some, and bloated cheese by others. Everyone agrees that Lawrence Kasdan’s “Dreamcatcher” was rendered inaccessible by its blend of character tragedy, telepathy and alien invasion. All in all, it’s a daunting task to replicate fans’ subjective experience with King’s experimental style. It’s daunting even for King.
King Behind the Camera
In 1986, Stephen King made his directorial debut with a loose adaptation of his short story “Trucks.” Who else could be trusted to pull off a filing station being besieged by sentient semis? But even with a comedic tone, “Maximum Overdrive” was almost universally panned, earning King a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Director. He himself disowned the film as a byproduct of his severe substance use struggles at the time. King saw first-hand the difficulties in writing his work for the screen, but went on to self-adapt “Pet Sematary,” “A Good Marriage” and “Cell” to crushing reviews. Even the original scripts for “Sleepwalkers” and “Rose Red” were fundamental messes. If Stephen King can’t successfully adapt Stephen King, then who can?
The Reliable Interpreters
King’s work has been translated by renowned directors like David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and Pablo Larraín. The results have been mixed based on filmmakers’ willingness to compromise their personal aesthetic. Tobe Hooper and George A. Romero found hits in “Salem’s Lot” and “Creepshow,” only to bust with “The Mangler” and “The Dark Half.” As selective as King must be with the filmmakers he trusts, some have built careers on adaptations. Such is the case of Mick Garris; and even the director of “The Stand” is responsible for making “The Shining,” “Desperation” and “Bag of Bones” for TV. Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont delivered outright masterpieces through Castle Rock Entertainment, named by Reiner after the fictional town in several of King’s stories. But “Stand by Me,” “Misery” and “The Shawshank Redemption” are more about human drama than fancy genre-bending. More recently, Mike Flanagan has been called the Stephen King of horror cinema for his dramatic and philosophical motifs. He turned the short stories “Gerald’s Game” and “The Life of Chuck” into high-concept triumphs, while making a sequel to “The Shining” that finally satisfied King. Though “Doctor Sleep” was indeed acclaimed, this raises questions about what the author actually knows about good movies.
Questioning the King
Stanley Kubrick’s intensely abstract and atmospheric interpretation of “The Shining” is considered one of the greatest horror films ever made. But Stephen King was livid about the liberties taken in his work, particularly the nihilistic reduction of a central conflict between good and evil. His praise of Brian De Palma’s more faithful “Carrie” was more consistent with the glowing critical reception. In fact, King said the film was even better than his debut novel based on its creative style. He also sided with the consensus that Darabont’s tragic twist ending for “The Mist” was more satisfying than his book’s ambiguous conclusion. King understands that the key to a good book-to-screen adaptation is logical reconciliation between the source material and the filmmakers’ vision. For almost 50 years, his “Dollar Baby” program licensed his short stories to film students for just $1. King admires film and the general flexibility of art, but as he rarely has a kind word about adaptations of his work, and as infrequently as they’ve succeeded for audiences, his own art isn't very flexible off the page.
How do you feel about the track record of Stephen King adaptations, and why? Give us your interpretation in the comments.