5 Forgotten Stephen King Adaptations That Still Hold Up Today

There was once a widely circulated joke that Stephen King was so prolific — and so long-winded — that he was forced to donate millions of dollars to tree-planting charities every time he released a novel. King has been publishing books pretty steadily since his debut “Carrie” in 1974, sometimes putting out multiple ones in a year. In 1987 alone, he published “The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three,” “Misery,” and “The Tommyknockers,” which, when collected, ran 1,268 pages. That’s even more than 1986’s “It,” which ran 1,138 pages unto itself.

Hollywood began mining Stephen King’s bibliography right away, starting with Brain De Palma’s film version of “Carrie” in 1976. Since then, King adaptations have become a genre unto themselves, and many, many films, TV shows, plays, audio dramas, comics, and video games have been derived from his work. Indeed, so many movies have been made from King’s work that some of them might have passed you by. There are a scant few of us on the planet, for instance, who have seen every single one of the “Children of the Corn” movies. Similarly, I would give you extra credit if you managed to track down and watch all 52 episodes of the Bollywood adaptation of “It” (i.e. “Woh”).

The five below films are all major studio pictures, and several of them were hits when they were initially released, but newer generations seem to be excluding them from the conversation. So, we here at /Film are here to remind you that King’s books have inspired some pretty great horror movies and/or dramas that are worth looking up. King obsessives may already know about them, so you can bring them along on your journey of discovery.

The 1985 triptych “Cat’s Eye” was written by Stephen King and directed by Lewis Teague, and it adapts two King stories previously published in his “Night Shift” collection in 1978. Meanwhile, its third story was written originally for the movie, although it might be the most memorable of the three.

The first segment, “Quitters, Inc.” stars James Woods (yeah, I know) as a smoker who is desperate to quit. He goes to a rehab clinic with a 100% success rate, eager to learn their secret. It turns out the clinic is run by Vinnie (Alan King), a former mob boss who threatens to do something terrible to his family if he ever has a cigarette again. The cat of the title is used as an example. Luckily, the cat gets away. Dick’s wife is a little less lucky.

In the second segment, “The Ledge,” Robert Hays plays Johnny, a dude who’s kidnapped by a rich a-hole named Cressener (Kenneth McMillan) for the crime of sleeping with his wife. Cressener forces Johnny to climb out on the ledge of a tall building and work his way around its perimeter as penance. The cat is there to witness everything.

Lastly, in the third segment, “General,” Drew Barrymore plays a young girl named Amanda who is stalked at night by a strange troll-like monster that crawls through a hole in her wall. Luckily, the cat (so beleaguered through the first two segments) gets to play the hero and battle the troll.

The second segment is a little thin, but the other two are memorable and bleak and unconventional for King. Said troll will give you nightmares, while Woods (a pretty terrible guy in real life) gives a great performance as a smug bastard who gets his comeuppance.

One might argue that Stephen King is directly responsible for the decade-long renaissance of EC Comics-inspired horror anthologies, as he penned Geroge A. Romero’s EC-inflected 1982 anthology feature “Creepshow.” One can then draw a direct line from “Creepshow” to the 1984 debut of the anthology TV series “Tales from the Darkside,” which was created by Romero. That series ran until 1988 and nearly overlapped with the 1989 debut of HBO’s salacious and violent TV series (and one of the best ever) “Tales from the Crypt” based directly on EC Comics of the 1950s. The paired popularity of “Darkside” and “Crypt” then led — spiritually, anyway — to the production of “Tales from the Darkside: The Movie” in 1990, which boasted cinematic adaptations of stories by Masaki Kobayashi, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and, yes, Stephen King.

The King segment is titled “The Cat from Hell” (always with the cats!), and it stars David Johansen, a.k.a. Buster Poindexter, as Halston, an assassin who’s hired by a doddering old man (William Hickey) to find and kill a black cat that lives in his house. Halston doesn’t think much of the old man, but he can kill a cat for $100,000. Of course, it seems the cat may be a demonic spirit of vengeance, here to kill the old man as revenge for all the test animals his pharmaceutical company killed. Thus, Halston finds that killing a single cat is the most challenging job of his career.

This segment is dark but bleakly hilarious. There’s even a disturbing scene where the cat exits from … well, you’ll have to watch it to find out.

Fraser C. Heston’s 1993 film “Needful Things” feels like an ancient fable. It centers on Leland Gaunt (Max Von Sydow), a mysterious shopkeeper who opens an antique shop in the middle of the sleepy town (and regular Stephen King locale) of Castle Rock, Maine. His store, called Needful Things, seems to have exactly what everyone is looking for. But his prices are high. At the start of the film, Leland sells a local kid a Mickey Mantle baseball card. All it will cost is a dollar … and a promise that he’ll play a prank on a neighbor.

Gaunt soon emerges as a Mephistophelean figure, and the favors he asks for in exchange for antiques become increasingly dark. Notably, he begins to exploit a lot of the town’s seething resentments, using acts of light vandalism to bring suspicions and paranoia to light. It’s not long before fights are breaking out, animals are being killed, explosives are being planted in churches, and outright murders are being committed. Meanwhile, Leland Gaunt watches with a calm glee at the chaos he’s creating.

“Needful Things” is presented as a horror movie, but the terror comes from the fact that Castle Rock seems too far gone into its small-town resentments to wriggle free of Gaunt’s grasp. Some of the characters, notably Ed Harris’ Sheriff Alan J. Pangborn, figure out what’s going on, but this is not an optimistic film. The devil knows your inner hate, and the small-town U.S. is doomed. The movie’s ending even implies that Gaunt is an immortal character who has been sowing discord throughout his existence.

And all it took to unlock our hate was nostalgia for a “simpler time” and objects from our past. That’s a thought worth pondering in 2026.

It’s sort of astonishing how rarely people refer to Taylor Hackford’s 1995 Stephen King adaptation “Dolores Claiborne” anymore. The film stars Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Christopher Plummer, and David Strathairn, and it’s a downbeat and thoughtful drama about the echoes of domestic abuse. The story involves Dolores (Bates), who stands accused of murdering the elderly woman she was taking care of. Dolores is particularly suspect because of the circumstances surrounding the death of her abusive husband, Joe (Strathairn), back in 1975. In flashbacks, we see that Joe was not only physically abusive but also an alcoholic who stole money from Dolores and committed other unspeakable acts. Dolores then took a job caring for an older woman (the same one she stands accused of murdering in the movie’s present), and their conversations reveal that, well, sometimes it’s okay to murder abusive husbands. Just sayin’.

Suffice it to say, Dolores’ grown-up daughter Selena (Leigh) doesn’t know what to make of this, but then she, too, begins to recover disturbing, repressed memories from her childhood. What was the moral thing to do?

“Dolores Claiborne” is a downbeat, personal drama with no supernatural wrinkles and only a few salacious crime story elements. More so, it’s a tale about what women need to do to survive in a world that produces wicked men who are never punished. The film’s ending is satisfying and morally ambiguous, and its performances are great across the board. There was some Oscar buzz for “Dolores Claiborne,” but it was ignored by the Academy. A pity. It could’ve easily been nominated for several awards, notably for Bates and for Leigh. On top of all that, the movie was written by Tony Gilroy of “Andor” fame.

Many might’ve forgotten that David Koepp’s 2004 film “Secret Window” is a Stephen King adaptation, derived from the short story “Secret Window, Secret Garden” from the 1990 anthology volume “Four Past Midnight.” The film stars Johnny Depp (yeah, yeah, I know) as Norton Rainey, a successful author whose days are filled with tatty robes, long naps, and procrastination. He’s poised to divorce his wife (Maria Bello) and clearly depressed. Then, one day, Norton crosses paths with John Shooter (John Turturro), a mysterious man who claims that Norton plagiarized one of his stories. Norton doesn’t know what Shooter’s talking about, but he’s on his back foot, as he once committed a brazen act of plagiarism in the past.

The interplay between Norton and Shooter fills the film, with Shooter doing creepy things both on- and off-screen, including a few violent acts. How will this depressed author deal with a sadistic accuser? “Secret Window,” one can see, has echoes of “Misery” about it. (Fun trivia: “Misery” is the only Stephen King adaptation to have won an Oscar.)

There is a twist in “Secret Window” that some may roll their eyes over. It’s the kind of twist one might see coming, and even if they don’t, it’s the kind of twist that has been used in multiple horror stories in the past. “Secret Window” may not be terribly clever in that regard, but the interplay between Depp and Turturro is excellent (it’s a “The Source” reunion!), and the screenplay (also by Koepp) is impeccable. We all know that Depp is (yes, allegedly) an abusive alcoholic in real life, of course, so one must follow their conscience over whether they want to watch him in any movies anymore.