Steven King Movie Adaption

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bobrpggamer

Survivor
I was wondering what your favorite Steven King movie adaption is. I am watching "Pet Cemetery" right now and its OK so far. I just think that so many of his movies seem like "made for TV movies" (not in a bad way of course).

My favorite Steven King movie adaption, is the one he dislike the most, "The Shining". Now am I the only one who believes that The Shining is one of the best horror movies ever made? He should be proud that his novel has had a movie adaption that is so iconic and unforgettable, but I guess he still hates it anyway. He has even been quoted saying "The Shining is like a Lamborghini without an engine" Strange, really.
 
I'll be honest, I can't get through a single modern Stephen King adaptation without feeling like I'm being force fed soilent green. Growing up I tried reading a few of his books and while some were good enough to not feel like I tossed money out the window to buy them, most were unremarkable. About the only things I liked where The Shining, Shawshank and Carrie. To me, everything else was no different than anything else being written or adapted at the time.
 
bobrpggamer said:
I was wondering what your favorite Steven King movie adaption is. I am watching "Pet Cemetery" right now and its OK so far. I just think that so many of his movies seem like "made for TV movies" (not in a bad way of course).

My favorite Steven King movie adaption, is the one he dislike the most, "The Shining". Now am I the only one who believes that The Shining is one of the best horror movies ever made? He should be proud that his novel has had a movie adaption that is so iconic and unforgettable, but I guess he still hates it anyway. He has even been quoted saying "The Shining is like a Lamborghini without an engine" Strange, really.
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I think the Shining is the best "scary" movie ever made and while I hadn't heard his quote before, I get it. Looks good on the outside but there's nothing of substance on the inside? Makes sense since the acting in the Movie is what made it perfectly suspenseful, the story was just a haunt and before the acting it came down to casting. That movie was the pinnacle example of the greatest casting performance ever. Every actor fit every role perfectly and played their roles perfectly and while I do not ordinarily praise Kubrick, in fact I usually go out of my way to bad mouth him, what he did in the shining was brilliant. So, as for King's part, he wrote a snoozer that was raised to iconic status by the individual parts.
 
Lax said:
I'm more of a John Carpenter kinda guy.
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I love John Carpenter. I have 4 of his movies on my drive. Prince of Darkness, They Live, The Fog and The Thing. I think he is more of a director for his movies though, where as Steven King wrote the screenplay on (I guess) most of his film adaptions.
JustBrowsing said:
Growing up I tried reading a few of his books
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I read the Shining while in a bad place, but could not get into it very much. I have read much more Clive Barker than Steven King. Barker was far more into body horror and gore and Steven King, King was more into ghost movies and supernatural. Although I really do not like slasher gore movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street. I just think Clive Barker may have mixed the supernatural and the occult with the gore in his work.
 
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Shawshank Redemption, hands down. (And, yes, the movie is better than the novella. In fact, the movie is probably why it's taken top spot.) But you probably meant supposed "horror," in which case I'd have to say The Dead Zone followed by The Stand, though King obviously didn't know quite how to end that last. Can't say I much care for the ending.
 
I really enjoyed the Dark Tower series of what I read. I never finished it as he took so long to write it and I never picked back up on the series. I also really liked his fantasy book "The Eyes of the Dragon" which was somewhat of a prequel to The Dark Tower. It seemed to me to be more directly connected to the series than any of the other books that had some crossover aspects.

It helps that the main protagonist shares my name. :)
 
The sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep was excellent. I think I've watched it about 4 or 5 times already.

Also the vamp movie Let Me In or Let the Right One In was good too.

I'm also more a fan of terror, intense suspense vs the slasher/gore movies 🎬.

Not sure if King did it or not but The Mist was excellent I think, with Thomas Jane.
 
Lax said:
The sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep was excellent. I think I've watched it about 4 or 5 times already.

Also the vamp movie Let Me In or Let the Right One In was good too.

I'm also more a fan of terror, intense suspense vs the slasher/gore movies 🎬.

Not sure if King did it or not but The Mist was excellent I think, with Thomas Jane.
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The Mist is up there on my list of best King novellas, but I can't say I've enjoyed any adaptations of it. What you imagine while reading it will always be worse than anything they could show on a screen. :)
 
Lax said:
The sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep
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I watched Doctor Sleep for a while and thanks to ADD, I do not think I finished it, also, short term memory loss is the reason I do not know how far I got through it. The short term memory loss is the reason I can watch a lot of movies recently and forget what happened in the movie making it easy to re-watch. This does not effect a lot of my favorite movies just some in a year or two space in between watching them.

I watched Room 237 a couple of days ago and I have to admit I am really not into picking apart The Shining trying to find some sort of special meaning to certain parts of it. This would ruin the enjoyment of re-watching the movie, for me anyway. I do not tend to overthink very many movies due to ruining the enjoyment of it. The movie (Room 237) itself was very interesting but dove far to much into conspiracy theories and the sort of Illuminati garbage that was a big thing back in the 2010s on YouTube.
 
Not a horror fan in the least so never been a big fan of Steven King novels or the various movie adaptions. Read the first two or three of the Dark Tower series.

FWIW, I do recall enjoying "The Stand" the 1990's TV mini series.
 
8_Hussars said:
Not a horror fan in the least so never been a big fan of Steven King novels or the various movie adaptions. Read the first two or three of the Dark Tower series.

FWIW, I do recall enjoying "The Stand" the 1990's TV mini series.
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For me, being a horror fan is an overstatement. I don't like bloody gore horror at all, I do like suspense and the occasional jump scare.
 
8_Hussars said:
FWIW, I do recall enjoying "The Stand" the 1990's TV mini series.
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I remember this in the mid 90s, thought it was good, but that's about it. He has had a lot of TV movie and series type things like the The Langoliers, which was also good.
JustBrowsing said:
For me, being a horror fan is an overstatement. I don't like bloody gore horror at all, I do like suspense and the occasional jump scare.
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I have been into psychological horror a lot recently, both game wise and movies. Not into jump scares or extreme amounts of gore either. Slasher films just bore me really, like Friday the 13th part 20 or Halloween part 16 or similar.

The undisputed king of Thriller / Suspense: Alfred Hitchcock. Imagine trying to pick the best Hitchcock movie. Not easy.
zztong said:
IIRC, @KatsPurr had made a custom POI out of the hotel in The Shining, but I don't know if she ever finished it.
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This would be really cool. The size of the poi would have to be massive. If you can have custom spawns in a POI I wonder what you would want to spawn in room 237? Maybe a irradiated screamer would be best I guess.
 
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Any movie adaptation is 99% going to be subpar compared to any book. I never understood why people think their favorite story/book/comic needs to be a movie as if by becoming a movie it's somehow better.

That being said, Stephen King cannot for the life of him end a story. I've read all of his old stuff, until I read a Clive Barker book (Imajica) and realized Stephen King was just a schoolboy compared to his imagination. I remember enjoying 2 of King's books, "Insomnia" and "The Regulators". Weird and interesting stuff. Too weird to probably make into movies anyway.

8_Hussars said:
FWIW, I do recall enjoying "The Stand" the 1990's TV mini series.
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I agree with this one. Although we have the typical Stephen King ending yet again.
 
RyanX said:
Any movie adaptation is 99% going to be subpar compared to any book. I never understood why people think their favorite story/book/comic needs to be a movie as if by becoming a movie it's somehow better.

That being said, Stephen King cannot for the life of him end a story. I've read all of his old stuff, until I read a Clive Barker book (Imajica) and realized Stephen King was just a schoolboy compared to his imagination. I remember enjoying 2 of King's books, "Insomnia" and "The Regulators". Weird and interesting stuff. Too weird to probably make into movies anyway.
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The reason I was talking about movie adaptions is because I love film and really do not like to read. When I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy I had to read a page up to three times because my mind wanders and I have terrible short term memory, maybe even dyslexia, so I forget what I just read. I have always loved movies over books even as a kid, its just looking at a scene in a movie can be visually beautiful or interesting where as I sometimes I just think of a book as a page of text with no visual stimulation.

I did read a lot of Clive Barker and I agree with you with that. The first book I think was Weaveworld and it was very interesting, whereas Steven King can be a bit boring at times. I tied to read the Shining because I loved the film so much, But It was no where near the same as the movie and I kind of got bored with it. The only reason I was reading so many books was the simple fact that I was in a place for a while where reading is about the only thing you can do.
 
I love reading, but at heart, I'm a visual person, one of those "a picture is worth a thousand words" people.

I read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons multiple times. I got very excited when I heard they were making a movie. I enjoyed the movie but the book 📖 is still king. The movie I really wanted them to make was his novel The Lost Symbol.
 
I saw Christine years before I read the book, Huge difference, the book paints Arnie and the inside
of that car, way darker than the movie. I just found out Stand by Me was a part of Stephen King's
childhood.
 
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