Stephen King Movies, Ranked from Worst to Best
and Joal Ryan, for Metacritic – August 2, 2017
Last updated May 2023 to add The Boogeyman
Recent releases It and The Dark Tower have been erected on the most fertile, if haunted, of Hollywood grounds: Stephen King territory.
While conventional wisdom says King's horror tales "don't translate well to film," a Metacritic look at his theatrical releases shows that the vast majority of them received, at worst, mixed-to-average critical notices. Nine films, or about one-quarter of the titles, are in the green.
Finally released (both in theaters and on the Shudder streaming service) in early 2023 after first screening in 2020, writer-director Kurt Wimmer's reboot is actually the 11th film to be based on Stephen King's 1977 short story about a cult of demon-worshipping Nebraska children (dating back to the 1984 adaptation from Fritz Kiersch which we'll get to in a moment), but only the third to receive theatrical distribution. The score speaks for itself: Critics hated it.
“Children of the Corn is clearly one of the worst Stephen King film adaptations ever made — if anything, it seems unfair that it’s included in a category with so many good movies by the grace of a technicality.” —Christian Zilko, IndieWire