Children Of The Corny: The 15 worst Stephen King movies and miniseries, ranked

The first Stephen King story written expressly for the screen (according to the marketing tagline at least) bombed upon release and was critically demolished. Today, it’s not quite a cult classic, but it definitely deserves to be. Sleepwalkers is a prime cut of “so bad it’s good” pomp. Overacted and crammed with crummy effects, it’s about incestuous vampires who own invisible cars, eat virgins, and are weak against cats. King also wrote some of the most trite, insensitive, and incoherent dialogue of his career here. It’s a monstrosity that demands to be seen.

The Langoliers is this close to joining Sleepwalkers in the “so bad it’s good” bin. Despite being written and directed by Fright Night mastermind Tom Holland, this two-part miniseries about a plane flying through a wormhole is full of gloriously shitty performances. Bronson Pinchot (aka Balki from Perfect Strangers) overacts and then some as the insane baddie, while Dean Stockwell’s Twilight Zone tribute of a Shatner impression is unintentionally hilarious. The payoff of giant Pacmans eating the universe is also magnificent in its stupidity. However, clocking in at three hours, the joke wears thin and isn’t worth how long you’re stuck in your seat.

This remake was a dumb idea from the off. We get it: Chloë Grace Moretz was a rising star and making her the lead in a remake of the 1976 version of Carrie was an easy way to make audiences pay good money to see her. However, the Hollywood star-in-the-making is never believable as an abused loser. Director Kimberly Peirce revisits all the territory of Brian De Palma’s original—without the unbearable tension. Even the climactic prom scene feels flat and uninspired. Just watch the first one again instead, OK?

The setup of King’s 1972 short story The Mangler is one of his most far-fetched: an industrial laundry press is possessed by a demon! It’s a pitch that not even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper and Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, could turn into a compelling narrative. The movie has some adept camerawork and Englund again shines despite having a face full of latex, but the film can’t overcome the complete lack of scares. Efforts were made—just sadly wasted.

Thinner contains one of King’s most famous setups: an obese man runs down a Romani woman and is cursed with rapid, horrific weight loss. However, by failing to bring the terror to the big screen, director Tom Holland officially went 0 for 3 on King adaptations. He’d already tried translating The Tommyknockers and The Langoliers to TV, which might explain why this $8 million theatrical release is shot as flatly as a sitcom. Any other glory that could have been found here gets robbed by lame prosthetics and cultural stereotypes—neither of which have aged well.

The problem every It adaptation runs into is that the stuff with the kids is always better. After all, the idea of a killer clown stalking children is infinitely scarier than a killer clown going after grown-ups, right? As a result, Andy Muschietti’s It was a suspenseful horror, buoyed by its pleasing ’80s nostalgia. It Chapter Two, set in the present day, feels encumbered with subplots as it plods along for almost three hours. The climactic scene of a half-dozen adults name-calling their once-nightmarish tormentor to death will never not be a letdown.

King’s 1987 novel The Tommyknockers was his attempt to push himself into science fiction writing; however, he was facing so many addiction struggles at the time that he’s since disowned it, calling it “an awful book.” Not surprisingly, the miniseries based on an awful book was also awful. Boring and incoherent, it suffers from an overwhelmingly huge cast of characters, all of whom are either uninteresting or unrealistically “quirky.” The narrative crux of “aliens making people do inexplicable things” is both lazy and weird. And the ending, with the main character simply blowing himself and the spaceship into smithereens, feels lackluster after a three-hour buildup.

The first movie adaptation of Firestarter was meant to be directed by John Carpenter, but the auteur got dropped after The Thing bombed. Replacement Mark L. Lester sadly couldn’t create a thrilling big-screen narrative from the book, which is about a telekinetic child and her mind-controlling dad running from a government agency. Nor could he pull a top-notch performance out of a preteen Drew Barrymore. The 2022 version of Firestarter falls even flatter, its “little girl with powers” plot feels half-assed in the wake of Stranger Things. Carpenter returned to the franchise to compose one hell of a synth score, though.

Stephen King’s opinions on movies normally suck. After all, he openly loves Deep Blue Sea, Event Horizon, and the Last House On The Left remake. However, he nailed it when he called Graveyard Shift “a quick exploitation picture.” Director Ralph S. Singleton’s adaptation of King’s 1970 short story is a creature feature whose lame mutant rats tried to emulate the Xenomorphs from Aliens. The oddball acting and overwhelming effects leave this schlockbuster without a shred of hope, especially since this came out in 1990. A few years earlier and it may have at least had the camp ’80s horror factor going for it. But no.

It should be so easy to get Pet Sematary right. It’s a book about a cemetery that resurrects whoever’s buried in it, but brings them back … different. Everything’s already there, yet both adaptations somehow flubbed it. The 1989 version, penned for the screen by King himself, buckles under the weight of a criminally uncharismatic lead actor and its host of horror cliches. Thirty years later, directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer packed their remake with incessant, cheap jump scares. At least Fred Gwynne—in the original—and John Lithgow—in the remake— nailed the role of next-door neighbor Jud Crandell.

King’s decades-spanning dark fantasy myth The Dark Tower was long deemed unfilmable. In 2017, writer/director Nikolaj Arcel proved everybody right. This wannabe blockbuster confusingly adapts early portions of the series while trying to serve as a standalone sequel to the books, making for a rushed narrative that neither King acolytes nor newcomers could follow. Confounding the awfulness is the horrendous editing and erratic cinematography, making the action sequences cut-a-second messes. The sole redeeming factor is Idris Elba, who’s charismatic as Roland Deschain. But Elba’s always charismatic, so that barely counts.

Stephen King loves to make the mundane terrifying, which worked wonders in It, Cujo, and Christine. Meanwhile, Children Of The Corn tried to make cornfields scary and just … didn’t. The 1984 adaptation, to its credit, had some deliciously hammy acting to sustain it (and the sequels aren’t really King movies), but this remake has nothing. It premiered in 2020 yet wasn’t officially released until 2023, and it should have stayed in purgatory. The acting, effects, direction, pacing … all of it is horrible. Somehow, crops still aren’t freaking us out.

In 2006, as mobile phones grew more commonplace, King’s 2006 novel Cell felt like a prescient statement on how the hunks of plastic in our pocket could turn us into mindless drones. The movie version took 10 years to get off the ground and, once it did, that commentary felt well-trodden, pummeled into the ground by everyone from stand-up comedians to conspiracy theorists. The project’s failure was secured by a generic twist ending and the clumsy direction of Tod Williams, who hadn’t stood behind a camera since Paranormal Activity 2 in 2010.

The mission statement for Dreamcatcher was simple: King wanted to do for the toilet what Psycho did for the shower. But with a story that involves aliens coming out of people’s asses, the resulting novel was so crap that even the author now hates it. The movie’s arguably worse, sullied even further by an insanely eyebrowed Morgan Freeman, overacting from Homeland’s Damian Lewis, and a bloated 135-minute runtime. And let’s not get into the problem of depicting a mentally disabled man as secretly being an alien. Both King and director Lawrence Kasdan (screenwriter of Raiders Of The Lost Ark and co-screenwriter of The Empire Strikes Back) have dreamt up better.

King hated Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie adaptation of The Shining so much that in 1997 he pulled a Thanos and said, “Fine, I’ll do it myself.” The author penned the screenplay for this three-episode, five-hour Shining miniseries, hoping to portray the themes Kubrick disregarded—primarily, the fall of a good man to his personal demons. In trying to counterattack against one of the greatest horror pictures ever made, though, the script was too hyper-literal: its 280 minutes are full of all the extended dialogue and exposition usually trimmed for the screen.

As a result, TV’s The Shining is a boring slog. And everything feels downgraded even when it does get going: how is Jack (here played by Steven Weber) stalking Danny (Courtland Mead) with a croquet mallet an improvement over the ax chase that Kubrick directed? Not only is this a slap against a horror masterpiece of a novel and a movie; the fact that it was King himself who masterminded it makes it all feel especially egregious. Perfect proof that basically transcribing a book page for page for the screen does not guarantee a great translation.