Few living storytellers in any medium can claim to have impacted popular culture as consistently—and with as massive, rich and varied a body of work—as Stephen King. For over 50 years, the American author has shaped readers’ understanding of horror, science fiction and fantasy while expanding the creative possibilities of these genres by bringing together the supernatural, miraculous and otherworldly with realistic, poignantly realized human drama.
Given the sprawling and diverse nature of his bibliography, no one book is universally agreed upon to be his best; everything from post-apocalyptic epic The Stand to fantasy franchise The Dark Tower and small-town horror opus It is invoked in such discussions, though more recent works like time-travel yarn 11/22/63 and supernatural mystery The Outsider stay in the conversation.
Similarly, translating King’s singular sensibility to the screen while satisfying readers—and the author himself—has been an irresistible challenge for many filmmakers over the years. (To wit, while Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is regarded as one of the greatest psychological horror movies of all time, King himself was famously not a fan.) Many adaptations of the his work, from Misery to The Green Mile, have been long since enshrined in cinema history, while new ones continue to emerge (including five—The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk, The Running Man and HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry series—released just last year).
After previously helming four film adaptations in this storied lineage with Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep and the aforementioned Chuck, writer-director Mike Flanagan is taking yet another shot at King with Carrie, a new limited-series retelling of one of the author’s most iconic novels. With all eight episodes of Carrie streaming on Prime Video now, let’s count off twenty adaptations of King’s writing—including both films and miniseries—that truly capture the spellbinding essence of his style.