The 10 Worst Stephen King Movies Ever Made

Stephen King is one of those prolific writers whose scope of work is so vast, and whose better projects are so beloved, that it’s easy to forget about the stuff that isn’t so good. The same is true for all the movies based on his short stories and novels—so many of them, at this point, are so good, that we barely even think about the ones that didn’t quite hit. For every Dreamcatcher or Firestarter there’s a Carrie, a Gerald’s Game, a Shining.

Well, we think about it. We think about it so often that we’ve decided to collect the worst into a list of their own. For an author as beloved as King, whose work is, for the most part, pretty cinematic even in written form, there are tons of terrible movies based on his oeuvre of short stories and novels that almost make you wonder if the source material is bad, too. (It’s usually not.) That said, it’s always fun to look back at the bad stuff to see where it all went wrong and what could have been improved.

So, let’s take a look back at some of the true failures, the worst of what is, all told, a markedly bad cinematic universe. There are probably at least twice as many actually bad movies based on King’s work, but we’re looking back at ten of them, starting in the mid-’80s all the way to just a few years ago, stories that span everything from alien invasions to werewolves to werecats to cell phone zombies — and, yes, evil sentient killer machines. We don’t have a grand unifying theory of why these movies are so bad when others have been so good, but maybe there are some clues hidden within all the blood and guts and clown makeup.