Every Stephen King movie, ranked from worst to best
Warner Bros.
Stephen King’s work has been adapted so many times — sometimes by King himself — that it’s impossible to find a single unifying thread in all of the film adaptations.
Sure, a lot of them are horror (certainly a lot of the worst are horror), but that’s largely because the boom period for King movies was the 1980s, when he was known solely as a horror writer. As his canvas (and reputation) has expanded over the years, his work has been turned into dramas, comedies, musicals, and even a Bollywood movie.
Because of this dissonance, ranking King movies is particularly difficult: The Mangler and The Shawshank Redemption barely seem to exist on the same plane of dimensional existence, let alone on the same list of movies.
But nonetheless, with the latest King adaptation, It, opening this week, we gave it the old college try. (For the purposes of this list, we looked at theatrical releases only, and excluded Lawnmower Man, an “adaptation” so vastly different from the original that King sued to get his name off it.) With one notable exception, you’ll find the adapted movies turned out much like King himself: They got more serious and substantial with age.
40. "Maximum Overdrive" (1986)
The one movie King ever directed, and … well, you know, Stephen King is a wonderful writer who should probably stick with writing. The movie’s tone is set in the opening scene, in which a man (played by King) tries to take money out of an ATM, and the ATM calls him an asshole. Apparently, a comet has passed by Earth and given mechanical objects sentience, and once they attack humanity, Emilio Estevez helps lead a human resistance.
The movie isn’t even absurd enough to have fun with this lunatic premise, and King has zero skills as a director — visually, narratively, or in any other sense. King has called it the worst adaptation of any of his works, and we are not about to disagree. Though, according to King: “I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing.”
39. "The Mangler" (1995)
Of all the Stephen King adaptations, we must confess that this one has our favorite title. Boy, though, is this thing ridiculous. What, exactly, is “the Mangler,” you ask? Well, the Mangler is a demonically possessed … laundry press! This setup leads to hilarious scenes of an angry laundry press pressing up and down, like a hungry, hungry hippo.
Eventually the Mangler develops legs and starts chasing people. It’s all terrible, but, you never know, it might be your thing. Maybe you’re into laundry-press cosplay. You do you.
38. "Graveyard Shift" (1990)
Graveyard Shift is as schlocky as low-budget horror films get. Its premise: Overnight workers at an abandoned-then-reopened textile mill keep dying, and no one can figure out why. Wanna guess why? We don’t want to give it away. All right, they’re being killed by … a giant bat! Because bats hunt at night, you see. (In the short story, it’s a giant rat. Bats are much more cinematic.) This movie looks like it was made for about $35, but it does feature a truly insane closing credits song.
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