Stephen King: Why 2025 is the Year of Master of Horror

Although adaptations of Stephen King prose appear at least as frequently as the author’s new books, the past year was particularly abundant in this respect—both in terms of quantity and the stylistic diversity of individual titles. Oz Perkins and Andy Muschietti focused on the “horror” side of King’s output, Francis Lawrence and Edgar Wright tackled the dystopian part of his work (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), while Mike Flanagan reminded audiences of the author’s more sentimental side (somewhere along the way there was also a TV adaptation of The Institute). It has been a long time since we last saw so many adaptations spanning such a wide thematic range, made by filmmakers from the top tier of Hollywood—even if in several cases the final result fell short of perfection.

Unfortunately, the biggest disappointments turned out to be the films that inspired the highest expectations (or perhaps simply those I was personally most eager to see): the adaptations of Richard Bachman’s novels. I have already written at length elsewhere about my issues with The Long Walk, so here I will only say that Francis Lawrence’s film is a solid production that nonetheless pales in comparison with its source material. A far more unpleasant experience was watching Edgar Wright’s The Running Man. Of course, the director set himself a rather thankless task—after all, in the collective consciousness The Running Man primarily exists as the cult 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The director of that earlier adaptation, Paul Michael Glaser, retained from the source material little more than the protagonist’s name and the concept of a deadly television show, treating the literary starting point as a pretext for shameless mayhem. Ben Richards, who in the novel enters the titular game in order to obtain money to save his sick child, became in Schwarzenegger’s version a soldier falsely accused of massacring protesting civilians; among his pursuers were figures such as Jesse Ventura in aluminum armor or a sweaty creep draped in Christmas lights. Glaser’s film is two hundred percent eighties excess—an endless marathon of fistfights, chases, and explosions, though it still found room for a satirical commentary on violence-based mass entertainment.

Against this background, Wright’s more faithful adaptation unfortunately comes off rather weak. The director does try to dilute the book’s deadly seriousness with a touch of satirical exaggeration and black humor, while relegating a few King-related Easter eggs and nods to the Schwarzenegger film to the background, but this strategy ultimately undermines the film’s overall tone. Unlike Glaser’s adaptation, the new film clearly lacks a distinct character of its own, which is especially surprising given Wright’s otherwise unmistakable authorial style. He also struggles to maintain momentum and drags the story down with a forced happy ending. And while the new The Running Man is not painful to watch, I would not predict it a place in the pantheon of King adaptations.

A certain disappointment was also the series It: Welcome to Derry. Andy Muschietti, the director of the two theatrical films featuring Pennywise the clown, approaches King’s work with evident fan devotion, yet the result of this affection is above all a massive narrative mess. The series certainly offers likable characters and imaginatively staged scenes, but the story of the dark force lurking in the town of Derry quickly falls apart into a sequence of more or less effective miniatures. The parallel plotlines get in each other’s way, and elements of social commentary—which in the novel were organically intertwined with the horror motifs—here feel awkwardly tacked on. Nor do the dizzying amounts of fan service help (one of the main characters is Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel cook known from The Shining), as they merely distract from the central threads.

Both Muschietti and Wright were also hurt by the fact that many of King’s recurring tropes and motifs have lost some of their freshness. The concept of a televised show in which participants fight for survival now sounds like a pale echo of The Hunger Games (never mind that the novel The Running Man was published in the 1980s), while the motif of a group of outcast kids confronting supernatural evil seems today to have been appropriated by Stranger Things (never mind that It was one of the Duffer brothers’ inspirations). One might be willing to overlook this if other elements of The Running Man and the TV version of It were stronger—but unfortunately, neither Wright nor Muschietti managed to overcome the impression of derivative repetition and reheated clichés.

The most successful of this year’s King adaptations, then, turned out to be films based on the author’s lesser-known works. Oz Perkins transformed the short story The Monkey into a blackly comic festival of grotesquery, while Mike Flanagan brought one of King’s more sentimental stories to the screen: The Life of Chuck. And although both films have their share of minor or major issues (Perkins loses control of his narrative structure at a certain point, while Flanagan is perhaps too eager to spell out some of the literary metaphors), they nevertheless seem to capture most fully the two dominant tendencies in the master of horror’s work—the “macabre” and the “emotional”—with all the strengths (convincingly drawn characters and social background, impeccable atmosphere-building) and weaknesses (a penchant for showiness or excessive sentimentality) of King’s style.

One can certainly complain about the uneven quality of this year’s adaptations, yet as a fan I must admit that I also have reasons to be satisfied. It is good that King’s prose continues to make its way regularly onto cinema and television screens, and good that filmmakers approach it with genuine fan respect—even if the result differs from the image we formed in our minds while reading. After all, even if one adaptation fails to meet our expectations, a whole lineup of new ones is already waiting on the horizon. And if those also disappoint—there is always the option of simply returning to the books.