Oo ee oo....10 Best (Mostly Horror) Stephen King Movies
Jul 31 '07
The Bottom Line All right, so two films in the list aren't "horror films," but these are the 10 Best "Stephen King" flicks of all time.
Ever since the beginning of the motion picture industry at the tail end of the 19th Century, filmmakers have relied upon all the various literary genres in existence - from children's books to Shakespeare's plays - as a veritable treasure trove from which to adapt screenplays for films dependent on the brand name appeal of "hot authors" such as L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz,), Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind), Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls), Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers, Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October), and J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone).
Although "horror" as a genre tends to have "spikes" in popularity that come and go as audiences' tolerance levels for the "ick" factor evolve in tandem with filmmakers' attempts to push the envelope as far as gore and goo are concerened, ever since Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, Maine's best-known literary figure has been Hollywood's biggest source of goosebump-inspiring films by sheer virtue of the huge number of novels, novellas, and short stories "Steve-O" has written since he was a college student in the 1960s.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there were so many screenwriters, producers, and directors who wanted to cash in on the popularity of novelist King’s tales of horror and the macabre that it seemed quite possible that if someone got his or her hands on King’s grocery list, there would be a filmmaker begging for a studio’s board of directors to “green light” a movie adaptation of it. In fact, as of this writing, there have been over 100 movies – many of them made-for-TV miniseries – based on novels, novellas, and short stories by one of the most popular authors in American literature.
Of course, in such a huge body of cinematic works, there seems to be a preponderance of really awful films, because for every true classic like Carrie, there are at least five really bad films along the lines of Children of the Corn, Firestarter, Pet Sematary, and Maximum Overdrive.
As easy as it is to rant about all the awful films based on King's literary output, there are, of course, some really great theatrical and made-for-TV films inspired by the works of "the master of modern horror."
1. Stand By Me: Based on Stephen King's novella The Body, four boys go into the Oregon woods near the small town of Castle Rock in search of the corpse of a kid who was hit by a train in this touching coming-of-age story directed by Rob Reiner. Featuring fine performances from River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Jerry O'Connell, Wil Wheaton, and Keifer Sutherland, Stand By Me is pretty faithful to King's story; the voice-over narration by Richard Dreyfuss is in turns witty and nostalgic.
2.Misery: Also directed by Rob Reiner, this is the "Meathead's" first venture into out-and-out horror-suspense in a very good adaptation of King's claustrophobic tale about a famous (and badly injured) author (James Caan) being kept captive in a Colorado home by his "rescuer," a former nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Infused with suspense broken up at crucial spots by moments of warm humor, Misery is a good example of to do a "Stephan King Movie" right.
3. Carrie: Sissy Spacek, William Katt, Amy Irving, Piper Laurie, and a young John Travolta shine brightly (and darkly) in the first adaptation of a King novel ever. More focused (and gorier) than the novel that inspired it, Brian De Palma's film depicts the tragic "coming of age" of Carrie White, a veritable high school outcast with a terrible supernatural ability called "telekinesis."
4.The Shawshank Redemption: Although it's a bit too long, Frank Darabont's 1994 adaptation of Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is definitely one of the best serious "based on a work by Stephen King" films ever made. Starring Tim Robbins as a banker framed for the murder of his wife and her lover and Morgan Freeman as Red, another inmate in Maine’s fictional Shawshank State Prison. Covering an almost 20-year span, Darabont's film harkens back to other prison-movie classics (such as Birdman of Alcatraz and I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) and is an exploration of the triumph of the human spirit over injustice and adversity.
5. The Dead Zone: Directed by David Cronenberg, this 1983 chiller stars Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, a high school teacher whose life unravels after a car accident sends him into a five-year coma.
When Johnny wakes up from his five-year coma, he is saddened when he discovers his former fiancee Sarah (Brooke Adams) is married and has a son, but he’s in turns shocked and mystified to discover that he has, in essence, a sixth sense. By touching another person’s hands, Johnny Smith can somehow get vivid glimpses into his or her future. And, of course, by knowing what the outcome of certain events will be, the reluctant clairvoyant can also alter the future, if need be.
6. The Shining All right, so director Stanley Kubrick and his co-writer changed so many things in this atmospheric 1980 chiller that King later re-visited the haunted Overlook Hotel and remade it for ABC-TV as a miniseries, but I still think you can't beat Jack Nicholson's star turn as the tortured and eventually murderous Jack Torrance as he pursues his mousy wife and psychic son in a murderous rampage.
7. Thinner: Not as great as Carrie or The Shawshank Redemption, this 1996 film more or less captures the essence of King’s slim and unusually focused novel that pits William “Billy” Halleck (Robert John Burke) against the apparently insignificant yet lethally revenge-seeking Tadzu Lempke (Michael Constantine), a wizened Gypsy chieftain after a tragic incident becomes a miscarriage of justice.
8. Christine: John Carpernter’s Christine is a twisted tale of a foursome involving a nerd (Keith Gordon), a hot cheerleader (Alexandra Paul), the nerd’s best friend (John Stockwell) and Christine, who isn’t another hot girl but rather a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury with a murderous mind of “her” own. (In short, think of an evil version of Disney’s Herbie the Love Bug…)
9. Stephen King's Storm of the Century: The story and screenplay, which King wrote as an original "Novel for Television" rather than as an adaptation of an existing published work, tells the story from the point of view of Mike Anderson (Tim Daly), a grocery store owner and constable on Little Tall Island, which lies off the coast of Maine. It's some time in the late 1990s, and Mike is clearly recalling the traumatic events of the fateful arrival of Andre Linoge (Colm Feore) on the island just as a series of weather systems converge off the East Coast to form a Perfect Storm type of natural disaster.
For the residents of Little Tall, the so-called Storm of the Century is the least of their worries, because the mysterious Linoge isn't as unassuming as he looks.
10. The Stand: Of all of Stephen King's novels, The Stand is the one most of his readers ask about or comment on, and until 1994, when ABC commissioned a miniseries based on this sprawling opus, one question always was "Will there be a movie based on this one?"
This miniseries, despite necessary constraints and compromises, is one of the best adaptations of a King novel. It is a nifty end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario with a classic good vs. evil conflict that pits a demon-like Randall Flagg (Jamey Sheridan) and his followers against the good Mother Abagail (Ruby Dee) and a handful of decent if humanly flawed survivors of a superflu pandemic that makes the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 look puny by comparison.
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Member: Alex Diaz-Granados
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Rest in Peace, Mrs. Barbara Axler Fields. I will miss you lots!
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