The 10 Best Stephen King Movies

[Mysterious Benefactor]

The 10 Best Stephen King Movies

King isn't the only one who vocally hates the movie they placed at #1...

[Gerard]

I, too, am no fan of Kubrick's attempted adaptation of The Shining.  Kudos, yes, to the performances.  But that's about it.  The film was a mish-mash mess with no resolve.  That's not to say there isn't something that is frightening about a tale concerning people stuck in something unexplainable.  The original The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson's classic ghost novel, shows how it can be done.  This one didn't achieve that.  The Simpsons' Halloween spoof of it was better. 

King recalled that one morning, while he was shaving, the phone rang and he answered it.
Voice:  "Is this Stephen King?"
King:  "Yes."
Voice:  "This is Stanley Kubrick.  Do you believe in god?"
King:  "Um, yes, I guess so."
Kubrick:  "Okay."  Click.
King said his immediate thought was:  "Oh, my god, what is he doing to my book?"

Gerard

[patrickm]

Not really a huge Stephen King movie fan - but I think my favorite movie wasn't on the list... The Dead Zone.

[Uncle Roger]

The Shining is one of my favorite books. The movie was a major disappointment. The book chronicles Jack Torrence's slow descent into madness but in the movie, it seems like he's more than halfway there to begin with. There's not a lot of suspense watching Jack Nicholson go crazy when his characterization seems Walter Brennan on acid. The Wendy character is a much stronger and resouceful character in the book.
Worst of all, for me, the screenplay jettisons almost all of the supernatural elements and seems to revolve around a very severe case of cabin fever. A lot of arbitrary changes are made in the transition from book to film. Too many of them were pointless.
Stephen King's stories are very vivid in description but, for some reason, few of them have adapted well to the screen.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I suspect one of the reasons King is hard to adapt is that his characters all seem to have very healthy inner dialogues going on and that's often hard to translate to the screen because it's a visual medium.

And, yes, The Dead Zone is quite good (though I never read that book before I saw it). I also enjoyed the TV series. In fact, I own all of it on DVD...