5 Stephen King Movies That Need the ‘IT’ Treatment

Eric Fuchs
Movies Horror
Movies Horror

FANDOM’s Entertainment Editor, Drew Dietsch loved the IT remake. He’s been talking about IT non-stop for months. IT will be the movie of the weekend, if not the year. I won’t miss IT, and neither should you. In 1990, Stephen King’s novel was adapted into a miniseries. While the miniseries has a place in my heart — a Tim Curry-shaped place, to be precise — it looks like the new version is far superior to the original.

Remakes are not always bad. Stephen King has a long history in film and television adaptations. Some of those adaptations are masterpieces, like The Shining or The Shawshank Redemption, while others just couldn’t do King’s work justice. Here are five other Stephen King adaptations that need the IT treatment.

The Stand

1994's 'The Stand' is trying its best, but the story was too big for ABC.

The ’90s were crazy with King miniseries’. There was nearly a dozen that came out in the decade, both good and bad. In 1994, ABC adapted The Stand based on Stephen King’s apocalyptic novel of the same name. At four episodes and 366 minutes, the miniseries adapted most of the 823 pages of the massive book.

The Stand tells the story of modern America destroyed by a government super virus that eliminates 99.4% of the population. The survivors then must choose between the powers of the evil Randall Flagg and the good Mother Abagail.

The miniseries featured a large cast including stand-outs like Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, and Miguel Ferrer. It also does a half-decent job covering a story that takes place across the breadth of the US. For a ’90s miniseries, The Stand is perfectly fine. But the budget limitations show and Jamey Sheridan doesn’t quite pull off Randall Flagg.

In an age of TV epics like Game of Thrones and Westworld, The Stand deserves better. The Stand is a novel of paranoia, government mistrust, and a battle of faith. It’s only more important today.

Sleepwalkers

'Sleepwalkers' is bad. Really bad.

1992’s Sleepwalkers was not adapted from a Stephen King book. Rather this was an original film that Stephen King wrote. It also is one of the worst King-related films ever made. The movie is somewhere on that fuzzy line between so-bad-it’s-good and just plain bad.

The titular Sleepwalkers are a mother-son team of immortal cat demons who hunt teenage girls. Their kryptonite is coincidentally regular old cats. This leads to hilariously bad scenes. Think really cheap costumes fighting off an army of cute house cats.

However, while the movie is a disaster, it does have legitimately creepy potential. The plot is basically Twilight but with a nasty twist. And for extra gross-out factor, the mother and son Sleepwalkers are incestuous. There’s something here for all the camp and bad choices.

Few mainstream horror movies dare tackle sexually charged subjects anymore, so an updated Sleepwalkers adaptation would be a disturbing change of pace. A more serious take with less awful special effects could also take advantage of the eeriness of this premise. (Or instead, you could watch the far better and far sexier 1982 film Cat People, which is almost the same thing. David Bowie sings the theme song.)

The Running Man

Great movie, but not a good adaptation.

Make no mistake here: 1987’s The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is awesome. Arnold fights his way through a lethal game show full of over-the-top villains and saves the day. It’s silly ’80s camp, but that’s why it’s great.

However, the movie also has almost nothing to do with the Stephen King book it’s based on. It’s one of the books he wrote under his pen name “Richard Bachman“, so it’s especially dark and bloody. Instead of a game show, the novel Running Man actually is a dystopian reality show. Yeah, King imagined reality shows decades before they were even a thing. The novel’s scale is far larger too: all of the ruined world of 2025 is fair game for the hunt. The hero isn’t fighting wrestlers with chainsaws, he’s fighting the fans of the show — the entire world.

The novel is a much grimmer, darker, and depressing story than the film. Sure we all love a good Schwarzenegger one-liner, (“What happened to Buzzsaw?” “Uh… He had to split.”) but Stephen King novel, The Running Man, had actual cultural commentary that gets scarier every day. It could use a proper adaptation.

The Tommyknockers

These effects weren't even good at the time...

Some of the early ’90s King miniseries like It and The Stand were good for the time but had a lot of room for improvement. Some, like The Shining miniseries, had their heart in the right place but ultimately weren’t that great. However, 1993’s The Tommyknockers is just bad.

Stephen King fans usually rank The Tommyknockers novel pretty low, but it’s actually one of my personal favorites. A small Maine town discovers an alien spaceship and is driven to genius and madness by its power. The book has plenty of weird stuff, like a magic act that sends a child to a planet. But really the sci-fi horror and the later body horror are a metaphor for a more earthly horror: King’s struggle with alcoholism.

The book is worth a read but the TV version is not worth a view. The miniseries format was too long for this book and the body horror elements were cut along with the grim ending. It was mediocre television. And so The Tommyknockers deserves to have its themes told in the way it was intended. Better still, modern CG could properly tackle the breadth of King’s vision: alien weapons, massive fires, and an explosive finale.

The Dark Tower

Can we get a mulligan?

IT is not the only big Stephen King release of 2017. We need to talk about the… (sigh) other movie.

This summer’s The Dark Tower is still in theaters, yet we should consider it a failure already. The movie got just about everything wrong with the seven novel fantasy series it was based on. This is as “In Name Only” of an adaptation since Dragonball Evolution. That would be fine if The Dark Tower‘s new story were good. Spoiler: it isn’t. Or if the movie itself was good. Spoiler: it’s not.

Obviously Hollywood isn’t going to revisit The Dark Tower anytime soon, but it really should. It wasn’t King who failed, it was co-writer, Akiva Goldsman who failed. Roland Deschain‘s tale of a post-apocalypse Western is a creative and dramatic tragedy. The Dark Tower movie was generic and bland.

Since nobody will remember The Dark Tower for very long, we might as well wait a few years and try it again. Start by adapting the first book, The Gunslinger and see what comes. This book series is Stephen King’s centerpiece to his universe; it’s his magnum opus. It deserves better than this.

Eric Fuchs
FFWiki Admin, Gunpla Builder, House Lannister-supporter, Nice Jewish Boy that Your Mom Will Love, and a Capricorn. http://bluehighwind.blogspot.com/