The 2026 Amazon Prime miniseries of Carrie is an important full-circle moment. It is a new adaptation of Stephen King’s first published novel releasing on the fiftieth anniversary of the first adaptation of that same novel -and the first adaptation of one of King’s works at all. It marks the longevity of both the writing career of one of the most successful novelists of all time, and how for almost as long that oeuvre has been a treasure trove for adaptation. And make no mistake, adaptations are a big part of King’s legacy. He would have been lauded as a successful writer regardless, but it’s the movie translations (and to a lesser extent TV) that have visualized his stories and made him not just a literary but pop cultural phenomenon. The iconography of such movies have become intertwined with the stories themselves, even where they have differed vastly from their source material. And there are many -including myself, admittedly- who know his work chiefly through these interpretations.
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It helps that King is a famously prolific author -in the fifty-two years he has been publishing he has averaged a novel a year and sometimes more -totaling sixty-seven- with hundreds of short stories alongside them. And while he has written some series, the vast majority are original, standalone works -the King library is quite vast and multifaceted with numerous options for aspiring adapters. It’s no wonder he is one of the most adapted authors in the world. But the nature of those adaptations, and to some degree the quality has changed over time, taken new shapes reflective of the era in which they were made, which in some cases is quite a different era from when the original works were written. The Long Walk from last year was based on one of the earliest novels King published (and apparently the first he had actually written), and both the nature of the adaptation and the movie itself are very different from what it would have been had it been made closer to the time of the source. Stephen King’s work has always been a guest in Hollywood; even when he’s been directly involved, the projects are dictated by the winds and conventions of the context in which they were made, often divorced from that in which the stories were conceived.
And this is a neutral thing, King himself understands both the differences between mediums and how changing external contexts inform how his work is approached. He’s long had his fourth novel Rage out of print -a story written in the 1970s about a school shooting from the perspective of the perpetrator- due to the epidemic of such real tragedies in the United States. Most of his other books don’t have content as extreme, but there are elements that warrant recontextualization due to the themes or simply the medium in the times that they are produced. And it is not so simple as the good King adaptations being the ones most loyal to his books -frankly several of them surpass the books they were based on.
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The original movie of Carrie is one of the temporally nearest King movies, coming out just two years after the book and becoming a much bigger hit on release than its source had been. But both versions are informed by the 1970s, and being a youth in the 1970s -which director Brian De Palma captures quite strongly with regards to the social anxiety and the bullying. The cultural mores and aesthetics would be quite similar between iterations, yet the ecosystem that Carrie the movie arrived in was that of New Hollywood and aspects of King’s book fit that mould quite aptly -the discussion of taboo topics (like menstruation, the cruelty of teenagers) and a frank countercultural streak (the critique of structures like religion) being prominent aspects of that cinematic movement.
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Following this film, his second novel Salem’s Lot was turned into a miniseries in 1979, but the next major feature of note was of course the movie adaptation of his third novel The Shining -and this was the highest profile film yet, coming from major director Stanley Kubrick and arguably the biggest box office star of the 1970s, Jack Nicholson. It hit in 1980 at the canonical end of the New Hollywood era as industry cultural shifts were beginning to change. As a horror film The Shining is an adequate bridge between horror styles -hypnotic and psychological but vivid and brutal as well. Yet it famously is quite different from King’s novel, despite being one of the most acclaimed and iconic adaptations, and King himself loathed it. If nothing else, The Shining proved the profitability of his stories and the coming 1980s would be flooded with Stephen King movies.
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Commercial appeal was a far greater motive for any movie in the 1980s -the decade of the blockbuster where American cinema began its trend towards the brand and franchise-oriented system it exists as today. And Stephen King was a hell of a brand. Following The Shining, thirteen movies based on King’s work were made in that decade, five of which he adapted himself. He even directed one, the infamous 1986 flop Maximum Overdrive. Some of these movies, like Cat’s Eye and Silver Bullet were forgotten. Others like Cujo, Firestarter, and Pet Sematary got by off of name association to better, more popular books. Still others were notable via the particular hands they were placed in, such as John Carpenter’s take on Christine, David Cronenberg’s version of The Dead Zone, and The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzeneggar.
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The one true classic of this era was also the first non-horror adaptation of one of King’s stories, 1986’s Stand By Me -a film that came amongst a wave of a kid-oriented adventure movies and is thus considered emblematic of the 80s despite being set in the 1950s. Several of these movies came in close proximity to their source -a manner of less than five years, and Christine was released the very same year as its book counterpart, beginning production before the novel was officially published. The apparent faithfulness of these movies varies greatly but many of them -The Dead Zone, Christine, Firestarter, and the Creepshow movies are visceral products of the 80s Hollywood system. Technically, artistically, and socially they are time capsules of that period and thus are imbued with a degree of that nostalgic veneration that has permeated most of the culture of that decade. Whether the movies were good or loyal doesn’t matter under that context -the 80s sheen is enough that almost any of King’s adaptations from this time have been made cult classics.
King was also in this time bigger than he had ever been before, and in the literary world on a hot streak to rival Steven Spielberg in the film department. In addition to several of the titles mentioned, the 80s saw him publish some of his most popular novels including The Gunslinger, Thinner, Misery, and It as well as short story collections Different Seasons and Skeleton Crew -out of which a bunch of adaptations were born. That consistency and quality has an effect unique to its time period. And to some extent it carried over into the 1990s.
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That decade began with a couple fairly major adaptations -Rob Reiner’s 1990 movie of Misery and a miniseries based on It the same year. Each became landmarks in their own way through the performances of Kathy Bates in the former and Tim Curry in the latter. The extremely long It being done as a TV miniseries, a popular format especially of that time, made a degree of sense and it happened to hit at a moment where clowns were conveniently on the rise as an object of horror -in part due to King’s book but also due to things like the interest in John Wayne Gacy and projects like Killer Clowns from Outer Space. Though perhaps unintentional, the campy nature of the miniseries and of Curry’s performance specifically also feels vaguely reflective of certain over-the-top works of the time like Little Shop of Horrors. Misery, in closer proximity to its book, took on the emergence of intense fandom in a fairly topical manner.
This was the era when King really went hard on encouraging accurate adaptations of his work. Due to the success of It, the Stephen King miniseries became something of a staple -often with his direct involvement. The Tommyknockers, The Stand, The Langoliers, and most significantly his own version of The Shining -all of course fairly loyal but cheap and cheesy with poor production values and poorer special effects. Yet they are curiosities and time capsules of an era when King could get such projects made that likely would not have been plucked for feature adaptations.
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On the feature side of things of course, the big film of this time was The Shawshank Redemption, which both King and fans agree is the best movie of one of his books and a superior version to its source. And of course Shawshank stands out as a very distinctly 90s type of populist drama -it is as much a prestige film as could be had at the time, certainly the most of any King adaptation. Its cinematic techniques courtesy of director Frank Darabont a perfect storm of what made the big movies of the 90s quite remarkable. And King’s name attachment really bolstered his credibility -few had remembered the story he wrote, but his link to a sweeping powerful epic like this cast him as more than just a horror guy. And the same was true a few years later with The Green Mile. These movies are often considered apart from their connection to King as touchstones of 90s American cinema -they fit the mold of their environment so well and not being horror films made them stand apart.
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The 90s did see a few takes on King’s horror books from major horror filmmakers George Romero (who made The Dark Half in 1993) and Tobe Hooper (who made The Mangler in 1995), but after Shawshank, Hollywood began looking deeper into his bibliography and turned out movies like Dolores Claiborne and Apt Pupil. It was a bit of a recontextualizing of King’s persona though in tandem with an era where horror cinema was generally on a downswing from where it had been in the decades prior. The horror genre was tending less fantastical (as was King’s predominant style) and more realistic. The Silence of the Lambs is probably the cause of that -the horror literature of authors like Thomas Harris supplanting that of King where it came to the priorities for Hollywood. Scream started to change things around, finally establishing a horror identity for Gen-X, but where was the place for King in that, who was quite far removed from the slasher genre or the kinds of sensibilities that audiences and the industry were now pursuing. Something like The Blair Witch Project even further muddied things. It is telling how there was a notable gap in the late 90s going into the 2000s of Stephen King horror movies of about six years.
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It was a dry spell interestingly ended by a new TV movie version of Carrie in 2002 -nearly thirty years after the novel was first published. Naturally, it updated the setting to the present-day, as every subsequent version of Carrie would do, necessarily reworking several aspects of the original book. King by this point was unquestionably a legacy figure, with many hit books and movies to his name and yet his more recent published works didn’t have the instant icon status of their predecessors. The 2000s did see movies like Hearts in Atlantis, Dreamcatcher, and 1408 based on then contemporary King novels, but there were fewer of those cultural giants like The Shining, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption. The best King movie of this era came from his reliable adaptor Frank Darabont and his 2007 version of The Mist, a novella King had published back in 1980. Darabont very explicitly altered it so that its commentary reflected better the atmosphere of War on Terror-era paranoia and division. And most notably of course he changed the ending -though where most adapters might soften a King resolution, Darabont made it ten times more bleak. This decision was actually viewed as a positive by many fans, critics, and even King himself. Future creatives who would take bold liberties with King’s stories wouldn’t be afforded nearly the same grace.
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While apart from The Mist, new King movies were looking to recent works for this source, on television focus shifted dramatically to the past. The 2000s, especially post-9/11, is where American culture really began to veer into its nostalgic obsession and this may have been a reason for why the TV adaptations of this decade skewed backwards with regards to King, and often took on titles that had already been successfully adapted. The USA Network produced a TV adaptation of The Dead Zone that ran for six seasons, and in addition to Carrie, Salem’s Lot and Children of the Corn were also re-imagined -all of them reinterpreting their texts and aligning them with more contemporary visions of vampires and evil children tropes. All the while, several King favourites of book fans from across the span of his career continued to go unadapted. Though it had spawned a 1994 miniseries, The Stand -King’s 1978 apocalypse epic- had not been given the cinematic chance fans felt it deserved, and his popular fantasy series The Dark Tower had not yet made it to screen in any form, despite the 2000s being a hotbed for the genre because of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. In a way, King had been kind of pigeonholed by Hollywood, and if he wasn’t cranking out the instant classics he used to, the industry was more than content to go back to the well of the stories that had made up his brand.
And it always seems to go back to Carrie. Another new version was made in 2013, as much a remake of the original film as an adaptation of the novel. The time period was updated and with it some of the manner of Carrie's torment -cyberbullying plays a part in her harassment now. Though apart from this and an aesthetic coat it doesn't reinterpret the story very much -a trend common of other horror remakes from around that time. At least some critics could tell the film was holding back when it came to the more modern intonations of the story's themes.
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One adaptation that didn't have this problem though was the long-awaited movie version of It that finally came to the screen in 2017 at the peak of a cultural nostalgia for the 1980s. The lucky thing for It was that updating its narrative -which is split between the present and a period thirty years in the past- meant the past timeline of the story, sequestered in its own film, could capitalize on that post-Stranger Things 80s-obsessed wave. This likely was a dominating factor in making the movie a hit and the first highly popular new King adaptation since perhaps The Green Mile. Splitting the movie into two parts aligned it with Hollywood's franchise proclivity of the moment as well despite the ways this changed the structure of the story drastically. It coincided with a notable bump in new King adaptations. Another version of Pet Sematary and Doctor Sleep -King's own lega-sequel of a novel- tapped also into the legacy status of King adaptations. And in a way so too did another long-awaited movie, The Dark Tower, though far less expansive than King's saga. Title recognition at the very least was part of the marketing for that movie. Each of these adopted new tenets representative of prevailing industry interests and themes. Pet Sematary featured an abundance of jump scares, Doctor Sleep emphasized references to the movie of The Shining leading to a slew of contradictions with its original novel, and The Dark Tower took on some very generic late 2010s action aesthetics.
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King kept pumping out new novels throughout this, but the demand for them as film adaptations dried out. A big part of this had nothing to do with King or the quality of his books and more the industry's intense aversion to original ideas. It and Doctor Sleep could bank on nostalgia, but Under the Dome? Mr. Mercedes? These projects could find a home on television, which they did -but with a more limited impact. The same was even true of the 2016 miniseries based on King's 2011 11.22.63 -a novel about a time traveller preventing the Kennedy assassination that is one of his most acclaimed late-period books. This one is a gigantic tome so the miniseries format perhaps logistically suited it, but even with its own positive critical reception it never stood a chance of having the reach a movie would have. To a similar degree, Mike Flanagan's Gerald's Game -which preceded his version of Doctor Sleep- suffered for being a Netflix exclusive. It was an adaptation of an older but untapped King book that had a stark degree of relevance in a modern context, which it is largely agreed to have lived up to, but vanished into Netflix's homunculus of empty content.
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Coming into the 2020s, the same was true of Mr. Harrigan's Phone, Lisey's Story on Apple TV+, and another Salem's Lot on HBO Max. The latter is significant as even a classic title winds up being a space-filler on a streaming site. See also the 2020 miniseries of The Stand -which I didn't even know existed. Meanwhile there had been that effort to exploit and adapt the very concept of King's shared universe with Castle Rock -even though King had been doing it before Marvel, it feels like a painful riff on that idea. The pattern of a lot of these is in how their structure and format is made to adapt to prevailing trends more so than the content itself -indeed Salem's Lot took on the temporal setting of the novel rather than updating it. But a 2022 return to the well of Firestarter did alter the time-frame to a degree that elements of the film come off as nonsensical. Yet it is not so much that there is a right or wrong place for evolving King's stories, it is more the manner of evolution.
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Though the 2020s are far from the assumed Golden Age of Stephen King, 2025 was weirdly his biggest year in adaptations yet. Four movies saw wide release, all were first adaptations, and all contextualized the stories within an updated lens. This didn't mean too much with regards to The Life of Chuck, the best of these films and just a four year-old story by that point, helmed with surprising poignancy by Mike Flanagan, the current custodian of King's work it seems. The Monkey however alters the texture of King's 1980 story while adopting a distinctive lens of dark irony. All the deaths that occur have a mocking taste to their extremity in some ways indicative of Final Destination. Both The Long Walk and The Running Man, already set in dystopias, colour their grim futures in aesthetic languages we can easily identify. The politics of their worlds have a familiarity their sources lacked, Mark Hamill's and Josh Brolin's antagonists reflect shades of Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, or any of our modern real-life villains King himself has railed against. The Long Walk is one of King's earliest novels and its age is felt in some of its storytelling structure and choices. But these are an active reprieve from lesser conventions of its genre, some of which director Francis Lawrence -who has helmed much of the Hunger Games franchise- is responsible for. The Running Man is much more in the vein of The Hunger Games itself, albeit filtered through a reality that seems only marginally different from our own -especially in the ways it illustrates media manipulation of narratives and public opinion. A very cogent way of reworking King's themes to fit our times.
The Running Man could get away with this -at least broadly it did- for the fact that it is an exceptional King piece and is not "precious" the way certain other King stories are. Precious to his literary cultural identity in part through highly regarded earlier translations. The Shining, Misery, It -these all qualify. And so does Carrie. Perhaps that is why the discourse around Flanagan's new modern take on the story that started it all has been so fractious. It also probably has a lot to do with the internet culture being ten times more toxic now than it was even thirteen years ago when the last revamp of Carrie came out.
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This Carrie doesn’t hold to any sacred connotation and in fact makes some substantial changes to the narrative -the fact that it is getting a season two is enough to know it goes in a drastically different direction for its ending. But if the complaints are about mere inaccuracy rather than the effects these changes have on the story being told by Flanagan, then they are pretty hollow. Same for if the criticisms are directed at the modernized aspects alone and not for how they function within the story. High school, bullying, sexual coming-of-age, and religious zealotry are all themes that look very different today than they did in the 1970s, and the show needs to reflect that. And there really isn’t a point in doing another version of Carrie -perhaps just in general because it has been done so many times- but especially if it is not going to be updated. For all adaptations, King included, there is a necessity for change based on the new medium -the most faithful projects after all tend to be the weakest. Incorporating social media and school shooter drills are unfortunately integral aspects of American high school life in the 2020s. And the attitudes of teenagers and bullying have changed fundamentally as well. To expect Carrie in 2026 not to reorient itself appropriately in these manners is bizarre. And obviously no complaints related to the diversity of Carrie’s classmates ought to be taken seriously at all.
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The discussion of the new Carrie and its relationship to the now classic story had me thinking about this history of King adaptations, and how Carrie actually isn’t all that unique. For the past fifty years, movies based on the work of Stephen King have been shaped by the contexts of the changing culture and the changing Hollywood that they have been released within. The stories themselves, at least the best of them, are powerful enough. And if we aren’t seeing as many movies based on untapped sources, the least we can expect are fundamentally new incarnations of the stories we have seen. It should be a great compliment that King’s books can provide such canvases for interpretation and reinterpretation. If the movies and shows that have been based off of his work merely regurgitated exactly what he wrote he would not have the prominent pop culture status he does now -his adaptations by and large would be significantly dimmer and there would likely be less demand for them. One of the joys of new King adaptations is the potential of whose lens they are being told through. De Palma, Kubrick, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Rob Reiner, Frank Darabont, Edgar Wright, Mike Flanagan -each new adaptation means a new interesting voice executing it and that should mean as much as King’s own name.
Looking at the history of Stephen King adaptations is looking at the history of Hollywood and American culture over the last fifty years. And regardless of whether you think it good or bad, it should be fascinating to compare this new Carrie to the movie from 1976. Each version of Carrie is like its own touchstone and all the movies and shows in between, the trends in their productions related to the contexts of their original stories is a legitimately fun exercise. And I’m sure someone more familiar with King’s books could point to the same interesting patterns in his work. It’s one of the thrills of an artists’ longevity. There is a very good chance that this is not going to be the last version of Carrie, and whenever the next comes about it will be curious to observe the ways it alters the source material as well.
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