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.
An adaption of the same-titled novella about a boy (Brad Renfro) who falls under the spell of a Nazi war criminal, director Bryan Singer's 1998 follow-up to The Usual Suspects was a box-office disappointment that "borders on the brilliant," but "offers little insight" into the nature of evil.
“In the end, artifice overwhelms art. Apt Pupil is too serious to work as a genre movie, and too contrived to be taken seriously.” —David Ansen, Newsweek