10 Scariest Stephen King Movies & TV Shows, Ranked

When it comes to great horror, few legends of the 20th or 21st centuries compare to the masterful storytelling of Stephen King, a man whose legend continues with the recent release of HBO’s 2025 “It” prequel series. While it’s already clear from the meaning-laden opening credits of “It – Welcome to Derry” that this is going to be one of the best and most terrifying recent Stephen King adaptations, longtime King fans know there’s no shortage of great stuff in the Stephen King multiverse.

From Paul Sheldon’s (James Caan) unplanned home-away-from-home staycation with his Number One Fan Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) in “Misery” to the haunting interwoven tales that make up the short-lived love letter to Stephen King “Castle Rock,” the world of Stephen King is populated with colorful characters immersed in profound psychological terror. But in a multiverse filled monsters both terrestrial and otherworldly, these 10 Stephen King adaptations stand out among fans as the most terrifying of all. 

“The Langoliers,” is a 1995 made-for-TV miniseries adaptation of the novella by the same name from Stephen King’s anthology “Four Past Midnight.” The miniseries has its share of problems, from the hammy performance of Bronson Pinchot as trader Craig Toomy, to the goofy time-eating monsters toward the end of the story (they’re so silly that they make up one of the best and most missable references in “Rick And Morty”).  But if you can make peace with those flaws going into the story, the premise itself is frightening enough to be worth it — especially if you find the idea of being trapped in a broken reality an unsettling one. 

The two-part series (about the length of a full-length feature film when combined) follows a handful of passengers on a red-eye flight as they wake to realize everyone else is gone. But they’re not gone without a trace — instead, many have left behind artifacts like watches or even surgical implants that should be inside someone’s body.

The deadheading — he’s traveling, not captaining — pilot Brian (David Morse) lands the plan in a small Bangor, Maine airport, which is silent and empty aside from a distant crackling sound mostly perceived by a young passenger named Dinah (Kate Maberly). Even stranger, everything they find there is dull and flattened, from tasteless food and drinks to the quality of sound. Matches don’t light and sodas don’t fizz. It’s the ultimate liminal space, one where the passengers come to the conclusion that somehow, their group has slipped out of sync with time. 

As corny as it is at times, Bronson Pinchot’s performance is just freaky enough to add to the fear factor. Dean Stockwell elevates the tale as a clever mystery writer who works out what’s happening. 

The 1994 made-for-TV adaptation of Stephen King’s epic 1978 novel “The Stand” is a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy that sees most of the world’s population wiped out by a superflu created in a military base lab. That doesn’t mean “The Stand” is without its seriously terrifying moments, even if most of them take place fairly early in the miniseries. 

The six-plus hour saga, which boasts a star-studded cast that features Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Ruby Dee, Miguel Ferrer, Matt Frewer, Kathy Bates, and Ed Harris, begins with one of the most downright disturbing scenes in the Stephen King multiverse: A family desperately flees a military base as a lab leak rapidly wipes out its occupants.  

Like the novel it’s based on, this is dark fantasy, not horror. It’s also a character study punctuated with occasional elements of genuine terror. In fact, much of the action in “The Stand” deals either with the story’s central characters road-tripping across the now-barren United States on a mission from either God or Satan (depending) or, upon arriving at their destination, getting involved in some good old-fashioned city planning.

You won’t find a lot of jumpscares in this film, and even the devil himself is, for the most part, one cheery dude. But there’s something about the empty streets and tunnels-turned-tombs that lend this film an existential dread.

The first adaptation of Stephen King’s “IT” traumatized many a Gen-X child when it aired on ABC in 1990, despite its overall made-for-TV energy. Tim Curry, who plays Pennywise in the original 1990 version of “IT,” is a big piece of the magic that makes this series so frightening. Like the later adaptation starring Bill Skarsgård as the titular cosmic horror, the earlier version follows the story outlined in the 1000-plus-page novel about an ancient Lovecraftian predator commonly in the form of a red-nosed clown: a creature who feeds on humans by way of their fear. 

Although set in different time periods, both adaptations follow a group of childhood friends who take on Pennywise both in their youth and adulthood, hitting many of the same plot points as the book. But the made-for-TV format meant the earlier version was far less gory than the later version, which many viewers feel ironically makes for better storytelling. 

Without the benefit of modern CGI, the miniseries had to rely on the subtleties of old school storytelling, a fact that many fans feel made the first miniseries creepier and more atmospheric. Comparing the two versions serves as a perfect reminder that, sometimes, the best horror is the kind that relies on letting viewers’ imaginations do some of the heavy lifting. 

“Doctor Sleep” was the bestselling 2013 sequel to Stephen King’s psychological-supernatural horror novel “The Shining.” Like the novel it’s based on, the 2019 film picks up with the grown-up version of Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor), now working as a hospice orderly where his psychic gift comes in handy as he comforts patients at the ends of their lives. Still tormented by his childhood trauma and some unwanted ghostly stalkers he picked up at the Overlook, Dan has since learned to manage them with “psychic lockboxes,” a trick he learned from Dick Hallorann’s ghost (Carl Lumbly). 

But all is not well for Dan. Some years after telepathically forming a friendship with a young girl named Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), who shares his gift, Dan crosses paths with the True Knot, a cult of psychic vampires who like to snack on that psychic shine. Led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and her right hand man Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon), the True Knot seeks to torture and kill clairvoyants in order to feed. Abra is sitting high on their upcoming menu. Working together, Dan and Abra combine forces to stop the True Knot. The path eventually leads to the Overlook Hotel, where Dan plans to tap into its cruel psychic energy and set the ultimate trap. 

Like “The Shining,” what makes “Doctor Sleep” scary isn’t the supernatural, but the terror that comes with losing control of one’s own mind, a process that’s layered in trauma and loss for Danny. This memorable project is written, directed, and edited by Mike Flanagan, who has a gift of his own for balancing horror and psychological drama.  

The sequel to the 2017 adaptation of “It,” “It: Chapter Two” finds the Losers Club summoned back to Derry, where they must take up their once-promised task of killing the entity tormenting their town. To do so, the group plans to use the Ritual of Chüd, kicking off a psychic battle of the wills between Pennywise and themselves using artifacts from each person’s past. As terrifying and hallucinatory as it is, their effort fails, leaving one member of their crew fatally injured. It’s only when they overcome all of their fears that the Losers are finally capable of weakening Pennywise to the point where he can be defeated. 

“It: Chapter Two” isn’t universally loved, with many lamenting this chapter as less interesting than the kids’ story, or even too comical. There’s also an argument to be made that the nostalgia factor is part of what makes the first half of the “It” saga work better as a horror story. Still, if you can lean into the comedy and stop taking the story too seriously, there’s plenty to appreciate in the saga’s second chapter. While the latter half of the movie isn’t big on scares, there’s a terrifying scene fairly early in this film that will haunt anyone’s nightmares. 

A tale about a bullied teenage girl with a terrible mom and a telekinetic gift, “Carrie” is one of the saddest, most unsettling stories in the Stephen King canon. The film follows the story of Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a 16-year-old girl with a mother (Piper Laurie) so religiously zealous that she punishes Carrie for something as unavoidable as going through puberty. The story opens as Carrie, never taught what to expect from her own body, gets ruthlessly bullied by her classmates when her first period sends her into a panic in the girls’ locker room. When that bullying gets mean girl Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) excluded from prom, Chris sets out to further humiliate the girl with an elaborate plan involving proms and pigs’ blood. 

For Carrie, put-upon, abused, and let down by almost everyone in her life, menarche brings the gift of telekinesis, a gift she quickly begins to acclimate to despite her mother’s belief that the gift is demonic. When Carrie’s choice to defy her mother turns into the night of her dreams and then the stuff of nightmares, Carrie’s gift becomes a deadly weapon. But Carrie is neither the horror or the demon of this story. The true terror in this tale is the religious fanaticism (and everyday bullying) that causes Carrie’s mom, and her life, to become a hell on earth. 

The 1975 horror novel “‘Salem’s Lot” was Stephen King’s take on the vampire genre, and the 1979 miniseries is an adaptation by horror genre legend Tobe Hooper, best known for directing works like “Poltergeist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” The story follows author Ben Mears (David Soul) as he returns to his hometown of ‘Salem’s Lot, Maine to write a book about the infamous hilltop abode, the Marsten House. But when he tries to rent the place, Ben finds it’s already under occupation by a man named Richard Straker (James Mason) and his business partner Kurt Barlow (Reggie Nalder). And the longer Ben remains in ‘Salem’s Lot, the more he starts to realize the townspeople of ‘Salem’s Lot are gradually being turned into vampires. 

In a world full of sexy, glamorous, and even glittery vampires, “‘Salem’s Lot” presents a frightening vision of old-world bloodsuckers in a town where normal folks are transformed into mindless drones devoid of identity and free will. It’s a creepy, atmospheric vision of a once idyllic town under the thrall of evil, and one of the scariest adaptations in Stephen King’s multiverse. The world has been revisited a handful of times with the 1987 sequel “A Return to ‘Salem’s Lot,” the 2004 Robe Lowe miniseries adaptation, and the 2024 James Wan-produced Max Original version. Even after all those updates, no other version’s fear factor come close to the 1979 miniseries.

With Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of the 1992 Stephen King novel “Gerald’s Game,” the writer-director pulled off something many fans of the work thought impossible, given that most of the story takes place in the protagonist’s mind while she is chained to a bed. The film stars Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood (two actors who have gone on to become Flanagan regulars), as Gerald and Jessie Burlingame, a married couple visiting their lake house together in an effort to rekindle their troubled relationship. When Gerald’s suggestion that he handcuff her to the bed leads to a traumatic reaction in his wife, it results in a fight. Gerald then succumbs to a heart attack, leaving Carla tied up to a bed in the middle of nowhere. 

What follows is a nightmarish trip in and out of hallucinations as Carla slowly realizes that only she has the power to save herself, or eventually die on her own. All the while she is plagued by disturbing visions of a man (Carel Struycken), along with the horrors that shaped her own past. Gugino carries the film as the resilient Jessie. With its realistic traumas, “Gerald’s Game” is terrifying even without its disturbing twist ending. 

The first of two adaptations of this Stephen King novella, “The Mist” envisions a small Maine community as it is suddenly enveloped in a thick mist containing unseen horrors. Written, produced, and directed by Frank Darabont, who also produced the first season of “The Walking Dead” and served as writer and director for two of the finest Stephen King screen adaptations, “The Green Mile” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Mist” may not be his best — but it does improve on King’s ending in one shocking way. 

The film is mostly set in a supermarket as the mist descends, trapping many of the local townspeople inside. When the store’s bagger, Norm (Chris Owen), steps out to check on the generator, he is attacked by a monster lurking inside the mist. That’s just the beginning of the horrors hidden in the fog, which contains a host of frightening beings from pterodactylian creatures to giant flying scorpions, massive crablike beings, and some type of shambling leviathan; all escapees, thanks to some top-secret government project. 

The monsters in this story are frightening in a Lovecraftian, dark forest hypothesis kind of way. But, as tends to be the case in the best Stephen King stories, the most terrifying side of this story is the human factor. The townspeople soon devolve into paranoia, despair, fanaticism, and blame.

Even if Stephen King was no fan of Stanley Kubrick’s take on “The Shining,” that shouldn’t detract from the fact that this is, by far, one of the best and most frightening adaptations of the author’s work. The story follows Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) as he drags his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) to his job as winter caregiver for the Overlook Hotel, nestled high in the Rocky Mountains above the town of Sidewinder. What begins as Jack’s plan to take advantage of the solitude while he types away on his novel slowly becomes a descent into madness as the hotel, a sort of psychic battery supercharged by the ghosts of its former residents, begins to change him. 

 A psychological horror movie full of gorgeous minimalist visions from Kubrick, including the stark, frozen landscapes surrounding the cursed hotel and a fantastic hedge maze zoom-shot, “The Shining” is a head trip through liminal space. Told mostly from the perspective of Wendy and her clairvoyant son, the terror comes not from the ghosts that haunt the Overlook’s halls, but from the entirely relatable fear of watching a loved one slip away, becoming someone unrecognizable by the time it’s all over.