Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked

The story is a peculiar kind of writing and publishing. The novelette, the vessel’s red-headed stepchild, is more than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, making it not really a novel but longer than a quick story. It’s a format that, unlike a little story, allows fantasy writers to discover a story and its characters in greater depth.[…]

The article Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared second on Den of Geek.

The book is a weird creature in writing and publishing. The novelette, the vessel’s red-headed stepchild, is greater than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, making it not really a novel but longer than a quick story. It’s a shape that allows fantasy writers to discover a story and characters in greater detail than a short history but doesn’t need the fundamental difficulty, historical blow, and multi-level plotting of a novel.

However, the novella also raises some marketing issues: publishers can struggle to persuade readers to pay for a thin volume that might not always reach even 100 pages with lengths ranging from 17 000 to 40 000 words ( another measure that is somewhat nebulous ).

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Despite all of this, Stephen King has long been a fan of the story, dating back to his first selection of four, the now-famous Unique Seasons. In fact, some of his best tales have fallen into this category, and it could even be argued that first King books like Carrie, The Working Guy, and The Long Walk are really romances. This difference has also marked the panel alterations of King &#8217, s work. Condensing his frequently hegemonic novels or extending his short stories to an appropriate working day for a function can be challenging, but the novella has consistently proven to be the ideal length for a movie.

With the glowingly received The Life of Chuck only released in theaters, now’s the time to take a look at the 15 videos and one minimal series based on reports by the artist that are publicly branded as novellas. As one might expect, some of them don’t do well and haven’t even been widely seen, while others are strong as independent films on their own, not just among the best King adaptations of all time. Here are all 16 of them, ranked from least to first.

16. Dolan’s Cadillac ( 2009 )

Barely released anywhere and sent directly to video in the U. S., this Canadian production is based on one of King’s more obscure stories. Before being included in his 1993 collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, it was initially published in his long-defunct official newsletter, Castle Rock. The story is a revenge tale in which a teacher named Robinson plots to kill a mob boss named Dolan, who had Robinson’s wife murdered. The scheme involves a highway construction site and a pit in which Robinson plans to bury Dolan alive inside his car.

The movie, which was directed by journeyman TV director Jeff Beesley, stars Wes Bentley and Christian Slater as Robinson and Dolan. Not widely reviewed, the film suffers from the two leads ‘ wildly divergent performances ( Bentley is lax while Slater chews the scenery ), a lack of suspense, and a needless fistful of subplots. Additionally, it lacks the psychological depth found in King’s original text.

15. Riding the Bullet ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The story itself and the movie based on it are probably more well-known than the way it was originally published, which is just over 40 pages in King’s Everything’s Eventual collection. King made the novella available in 2000 as the world’s first mass-market e-book, allowing fans to download it for$ 2.50. Hundreds of thousands of downloads were allegedly sold, but King did not do much more research into this kind of publishing.

As for the movie itself, it was directed by Mick Garris, a King specialist who also directed the 1990s miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining (among others ). He falls flat here with this limited release. A college student ( Jonathan Jackson ) has a spectral encounter while hitchhiking home to be by his mother’s side after she has a stroke, forcing him to make a terrible decision. Garris ( who also wrote the screenplay ) struggles to get this one to feature length, making for a rather dull experience.

14. A Good Marriage ( 2014 ) &nbsp,

This little-seen indie thriller was adapted by King himself ( a relative rarity in the 21st century ) and directed by Peter Askin, perhaps best known for directing the original Off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. After 27 years of marriage, a woman discovers that her husband is a serial killer. King’s story was published in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. The movie, which stars Joan Allen as the wife and Anthony LaPaglia as her secretly psychopathic husband, is very faithful to the novella, right down to the third act turn it takes.

The issue is that the story is only a small portion of a TV movie-of-the-week and Allen and LaPaglia fail to have the kind of chemistry needed to make a long marriage, even one that has settled into complacency in this tale. Sure enough, A Good Marriage was relegated to direct-to-video release after a very brief theatrical run, cementing its status as “minor” King.

13. In the Tall Grass ( 2019 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Cube and Splice director Vincenzo Natali helmed this Netflix film based on a novella written by King with his son Joe Hill ( the tale can be found in Hill’s Full Throttle collection, which also features a second collaboration between father and son,” Throttle” ). In the first scene, two siblings, a pregnant college freshman and her brother, pull over close to a large field of grass while driving across the country. When they hear a little boy calling for help from the grass, they enter the field and find themselves quickly lost in an eerie, ever-changing landscape.

The story contains some of the most disturbing imagery that either writer has ever dreamed up and continues the longtime King fascination with vast fields of tall vegetation that goes all the way back to stories like” Children of the Corn”. However, Natali extends the King boys ‘ relatively short story ( which runs about 46 pages in print ) by creating a 90-minute film by including all kinds of new characters and a time-lapse aspect, making the movie more and more difficult to understand.

12. Big Driver ( 2014 )

Another entry from King’s Full Dark, No Stars collection, this film ended up on the Lifetime cable network of all places despite its grim narrative. There are also King connections all over it: director Mikael Salomon helmed the divisive second miniseries based on’ Salem’s Lot a decade earlier while the teleplay was penned by Richard Christian Matheson, son of one of King &#8217, s idols, Richard Matheson. A hulking truck driver who was raped and tortured by a rural road after giving a reading at a nearby library is the subject of the mystery writer’s story. After learning that the woman who invited her to the reading is the mother of her attacker&#8212, and thus led her into a trap&#8212, Tess takes vengeance into her own hands.

Big Driver reads pretty damn dark on the page, which makes some of the movie’s attempts at humor jarringly out of place because it is somewhat reminiscent of the popular horror film Mother’s Day. The theme of female empowerment is well-meant, but the movie can’t really overcome its tired revenge-exploitation roots. Maria Bello stars as Tess, while Ann Dowd is the evil mom.

11. The Langoliers ( 1995 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Ironically, the one full-fledged television production on this list is proof that sometimes it’s not always the best idea to give a King story a wide berth in terms of running time. Originally published in King’s 1990 collection Four Past Midnight,” The Langoliers” is about a commercial airliner that gets flung several minutes into the past through a rip in time, with the passengers finding themselves in an empty, decaying reality that gets consumed by monstrous entities as time ineluctably moves forward.

One of King’s weirder excursions into that murky territory between sci-fi and horror,” The Langoliers” would probably have made for a tight, 110-minute movie. However, director Tom Holland’s faithful adaptation is overly long at three hours with commercials and two nights. Plus it’s hard to read King’s tale and not think of the time-eating monsters as Pac-Men, which is what they end up looking like onscreen thanks to some woeful’ 90s television VFX.

10. Silver Bullet ( 1985 ) &nbsp,

Based on King’s 1983 novella “Cycle of the Werewolf”, one of the earliest works by the author to be published in a limited edition, Silver Bullet was adapted for the screen by King himself, who jettisoned the story’s format of dividing the story into month-by-month chapters for a more straightforward narrative that preserves what’s ultimately a very simple tale of a small Maine town under siege from a werewolf.

The movie reflects that it is incredibly minor. There’s little suspense about who the werewolf is from the onset, and what tension or mystery there is gets diffused pretty quickly. Gary Busey and Everett McGill hammer it up in the adult leads while Corey Haim does believable work as the young paraplegic hero in Silver Bullet, which was directed by Daniel Attias ( a TV veteran helming his only feature film ). Less credible is the werewolf costume. In an era where movies like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London changed the game for this classic monster, the bear-like lycanthrope here is so 1960s.

9. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone ( 2022 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The protagonist of King’s most recent collection of novellas,” Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” is one of four stories in the 2020 film If It Bleeds. The two actors both happen to have their first iPhones at the same time. When the businessman dies and his phone is buried with him, the boy discovers that calling the mysteriously still-active number allows him to leave messages for Mr. Harrigan… messages that have repercussions.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, the movie, is one of a number of King-based works that have been subsidized by Netflix. The movie, which was directed by John Lee Hancock ( The Little Things ), stars It cast members Jaeden Martell and Donald Sutherland in one of his final roles as Mr. Harrigan. Hancock is a capable, competent director, and both Martell and Sutherland give deft performances, but the film is glacially paced. In reality, making a movie around leaving voicemails doesn’t seem like a good idea.

8. Secret Window ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Secret Window is based on” Secret Window, Secret Garden,” which was first released in the 1990 collection Four Past Midnight and was directed and written by David Koepp ( Jurassic Park ). Johnny Depp stars as Mort Rainey, an author who’s suffering from writer’s block and going through a divorce when a man named John Shooter ( John Turturro ) shows up at his house, claiming that Rainey plagiarized a story of his and quickly escalating his grievance to include violence and murder.

Fans are well-versed in King’s love of writing about writers and their struggles, and there are many similarities between this and King’s novel The Dark Half. But the problem with both this story and movie is that the twist&#8212, that Shooter is not real but a hidden aspect of Rainey’s own personality &#8212, can be seen coming before the first act even ends. Koepp also changes King’s ending and removes the supernatural aspect of the novella. The movie still has a stylish cast and is stylishly done, with Depp not opting for prosthetics or makeup.

7. Hearts in Atlantis ( 2001 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

This is an odd one. Hearts in Atlantis is not based on the collection of the same name, per se, but rather on the book’s centerpiece novella,” Low Men in Yellow Coats”. Anthony Hopkins stars in the film, which was directed by Scott Hicks of Shine fame and stars Bobby Garfield, an enigmatic boarder who moves in with his mother, Liz ( Hope Davis ), who is 11 years old. Although Ted and Bobby strike up a friendship, Ted is also on the run from the “low men” who want to capture him for his psychic powers.

Although Roger Ebert wrote,” Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time,” critics and audiences had mixed reactions to it. The film is atmospheric but slow-moving while the performances from Hopkins and Yelchin are excellent. The biggest problem is that the menace of the “low men” is rendered rather vague. This is because the movie version removed nearly all of the context that the original story had in relation to King’s Dark Tower mythos.

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The longest and darkest novella in King’s classic Different Seasons collection,” Apt Pupil” is about a high school student named Todd Bowden who discovers than an elderly man living in his town is actually a Nazi war criminal named Kurt Dussander. Fascinated with the Holocaust and its atrocities, Todd begins a parasitic, mutually destructive relationship with Dussander, one that brings out the sadistic qualities in both and ends with mass murder.

Unfortunately, the history of” Apt Pupil” onscreen is a troubled one, not to mention the pitch-black subject matter that matches its. An initial 1987 adaptation starring Rick Schroeder and Nicol Williamson was abandoned halfway through shooting when funding ran out. Bryan Singer chose to make the move in 1995 and filmed it as his follow-up to The Usual Suspects, starring Todd Renfro as Todd and Ian McKellen as Dustander. Both are chilling, as is the film itself, Singer also alters the ending, which is still dark but not nearly as violent as the novella. More disquieting, scandal erupted when three teenage extras accused Singer of making them strip naked for a shower scene, given later allegations surrounding Singer, this has only added an unsavory real-life aspect to an already deeply unpleasant movie.

5.1922 ( 2017 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Thomas Jane has the distinction of starring in three Stephen King productions, and two of them are actually damn good ( the third is, uh, Dreamcatcher ). This Netflix adaptation of a Full Dark, No Stars novella is actually the most recent of the three. It stars Jane as Wilf James, a farmer who plots to murder his wife ( Molly Parker ) and coerces their own son ( Dylan Schmid ) into helping him. Although they’re successful, things go decidedly south for Wilf and his boy not long after. It&#8217, s a grisly narrative involving rats and the spirits of the vengeful dead.

One of the sturdier recent King-based films, it &#8217 is a macabre tale that Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch nails in terms of atmosphere and faithfulness. Jane is excellent as the tormented, sociopathic Wilf, and the movie’s overall feeling of rot and dread effectively echoes what happens to Wilf both mentally and physically. This is a little sleeper hit, though.

4. The Life of Chuck ( 2025 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Life of Chuck is not just the most recent adaptation of a King novella; rather, the story itself is one of the more recent King tales to appear on screen. Published in 2020’s If It Bleeds &#8212, the author’s fifth collection of novellas to date &#8212,” The Life of Chuck” is a tale in three acts, told in reverse order. As the world teeters on the brink of apocalypse, an ex-husband and ex-wife are desperate to reconnect, and the teenager has a vision of his ultimate fate who is determined to live life as fully as possible. And there’s a wild dance number in the middle.

Adapted by King specialist Mike Flanagan ( Doctor Sleep), The Life of Chuck is not really a horror tale at all despite some eerie touches throughout. Instead, it offers a rebuke to the idea of soaking up every moment of your life, no matter how minor they may seem. It’s also King at his most compassionate and humanist, which is something this planet could use right now. Flanagan perfectly captures the mood of King’s story, and the ensemble cast, which features Mark Hamill as his sour grandfather and Tom Hiddleston as the adult Chuck, is fantastic.

3. The Mist ( 2007 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Based on King’s 1980 novel, the adaptation of this pulp horror shocker, director-writer Frank Darabont switched from producing Stephen King prison dramas ( like The Green Mile and another that will appear later on this list ) to adapting the film. Darabont’s film is similarly lean, following a group of people who take refuge in a supermarket after a mysterious fog containing nightmarish monsters descends on their small town and possibly the rest of the world.

The survivors split into two camps representing reason and fanaticism, which is frequently the case with King stories. As is often the case with King stories, the people are just as dangerous as the monsters. But even the good guys are prone to making mistakes, which is what protagonist David Drayton ( Thomas Jane again ) does when he makes a final decision that ends the movie on an even bleaker note than King’s story. The Mist is straight-down-the-middle horror, which Darabont proves he’s equally effective at.

2. Stand By Me ( 1986 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Body, a classic novella by Stephen King, was first published in Different Seasons, along with &#8220, Apt Pupil&#8221, and the plot that served as the inspiration for the upcoming film on this list. ” The Body” became the first of the three to arrive on the screen, as Stand by Me, giving it the distinction of being the first film adapted from a King story that was n&#8217, t horror. The film is a poignant, nostalgic coming-of-age tale about four young boys who hike along a railroad track one endless summer day on a mission to see the dead body of another boy killed by a passing train.

Inarguably one of the best adaptations of the author’s work, director Rob Reiner captures the tone of King’s novella in The Body, which is a meditation on youth, growing up, and memory. The four boys &#8212, a painfully young River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, JerryO’Connell, and Corey Feldman&#8212, are all magnificent while Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack are also effective in important supporting roles. Stand By Me continues to be a moving tribute to the fleeting innocence of childhood.

1. The Shawshank Redemption ( 1994 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

You presumably had a suspicion that everything would lead to this, right? The Different Seasons novella” Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” was faithfully transferred to the screen in 1994 by The Mist director and future The Walking Dead series creator, Frank Darabont. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office failure upon release, barely recovering its$ 25 million budget, despite positive reviews, top actors like Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and a deliberate attempt to downplay the King connection.

A second life on home video and cable television began to turn the tide, however, and The Shawshank Redemption is now considered not just one of the best King adaptations ever, but a beloved classic in its own right. Which it is: the movie is a beautifully acted, moving, and superbly told tale of both one man’s ( Robbins ) refusal to give up on himself as he spends a potential life sentence in prison on false charges, as well as the friendship he forms behind bars with another lifer ( Freeman ) who finds his own hope restored by their bond. It’s dark and harrowing in some places, with rape, savage violence, and murder all being incorporated into the plot, but it still ranks as a strong achievement in the King filmography.

The Life of Chuck is in theaters now.

The article Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared second on Den of Geek.