Stephen King Movies, Ranked from Worst to Best
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.
John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) directed this straight-to-Netflix 2022 adaptation of the novella by Stephen King that finds a lonely teen (Jaeden Martell) in a small town befriending an elderly neighbor (Donald Sutherland) shortly before the latter's death. The boy makes sure that the man is buried with his iPhone, and he sends the dead man a text after the funeral out of sentimentality. When he receives a reply from his dead friend, well, that's when things get weird. Unfortunately, "weird" is not "scary," and reviewers felt the psychological horror film failed to make much of an impact, though some found that its slow-burn unease and overall polish made it fairly effective nevertheless.
“Unfortunately, despite its intriguing premise, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone lacks the necessary ingredient to make it truly memorable; it simply isn’t very scary.” —Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
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