The Best Horror Movies Streaming This Month Are Stephen King Adaptations (September 2024)

Folks, we've made it: we're officially in September, which means it's now Spooky Season. Sure, you could argue that the Halloween festivities shouldn't start until October, but I say: nuts to that! Summer is over (more or less), the temperatures are dropping (sometimes), and it's time to start watching horror movies left and right. If you're anything like me, you know that any time of the year is a good time for horror — I'll watch a horror movie in January, I'm so crazy! — but there's something extra special about embracing the genre as we get closer and closer to Halloween. It's almost as if we're given an excuse to cut loose and watch as many scary movies as we possibly can. Tis this season, after all.

With all that in mind, for this month's horror streaming column I've decided to bring out the big guns: Stephen King movies. It's probably accurate to say that no writer has done more for the horror genre than Stephen King. I suppose the case can be made that someone like H.P. Lovecraft is more influential — hell, several of King's works are clearly drawing directly on Lovecraft for inspiration — but like Lovecraft, King is a writer who will stand the test of time. Mr. King is thankfully still with us, but I truly believe that long after he's gone, his work will live on. They just don't make writers like Stephen King anymore. Horror authors come and go, and some of them even find modest success, but no one in the genre comes close to replicating King's blockbuster accomplishments. 

There are a lot of Stephen King books, which means there are also a lot of Stephen King movies. Some of these movies are excellent. Others ... not so much. For this month's streaming column, I've rounded up 10 memorable Stephen King horror movies you can watch right now. 

Streaming on Plex.

Stephen King wrote the granddaddy of all haunted hotel tales with "The Shining." As such, he probably could've sworn off haunted hotels forever. Instead, he returned to the concept with his excellent short story "1408." Working with an excellent script by Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski — a script that takes the heart of King's story and expands it to feature-length — Mikael Håfström's "1408" is an effective chiller about an author (John Cusack) writing a book about haunted hotel rooms. While Cusack's character, Mike Enslin, makes his living writing about ghosts, he doesn't believe they exist. Mike's skepticism is about to be tested when he checks into room 1408 in the Hotel Dolphin in New York City.

The room has a deep, dark history, and while Mike shrugs all of that off as nonsense, he soon discovers that the room might really be haunted after all! While the theatrical cut isn't quite as good as director's cut (which contains a darker, but much better ending), "1408" is still one of the better King adaptations. King himself was mighty pleased with it, even going as far as saying that Cusack should've been nominated for an Oscar for his work in the film. You can stream this one for free (with ads) right now on Plex. 

Streaming on Hulu.

Directed by Rob Savage (who helmed the excellent "Host" and the not-excellent "Dashcam"), "The Boogeyman" is a very loose adaptation of a Stephen King short story. The story was much more disturbing, but the film is a well-constructed spookshow about kids in peril. While you get the sense that things would be better if these characters would just turn on the damn lights (every scene is deliberately underlit), "The Boogeyman" does generate some economical scares done well. In "The Boogeyman," therapist Will (Chris Messina), his teen daughter Sadie (Sophie Thatcher), and his younger daughter Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) are still reeling from the death of Will's wife and the girls' mother. Don't worry, though — this isn't yet another horror movie trying to milk trauma for horror.

One day, one of Will's patients (horror movie favorite David Dastmalchian) tells Will a disturbing story about how his three children have been killed by some malevolent monster. Will understandably thinks this guy is nuts, but soon, that same monster — a boogeyman, if you will — begins targeting Sadie and Sawyer. All told, "The Boogeyman" is rather simple, and that ends up working in the film's favor — sometimes, the simplest scares are the most effective. 

Streaming on Tubi.

The first Stephen King novel was also the first Stephen King movie. Brian De Palma's "Carrie" is a stylish, scary story about a tormented teen and her telekinetic powers. Shy loser Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) lives with her demented religious mother (Piper Laurie) and spends her days being tormented by her mean classmates. After one particularly nasty bit of bullying, classmate Sue Snell (Amy Irving) feels guilty and decides to do something nice by having her boyfriend Tommy (William Katt) take Carrie to the prom. 

Unfortunately, while Sue is reptentant for her actions, the rest of the students are not, and they plan to pull the ultimate prank on poor Carrie by dumping a bucket of pig's blood on her head. What these people don't realize is that Carrie has the ability to move objects with her mind, and all she needs is one big push to finally unleash all her pent-up rage upon the world. Employing split-screen and other neat little tricks, De Palma pulls out all the stops to turn King's debut into a memorable movie. 

Streaming on Prime Video.

Could a political assassin ever be justified in their actions? That's the question at the center of Stephen King's "The Dead Zone," his novel about a guy who wakes up from a coma with psychic powers. King's thriller was adapted to the screen in 1983 by horror master David Cronenberg, and while this isn't your typical Cronenberg jam (no body horror to be found here!), the Canadian auteure brings his chilly sensibilities to the material. The star of the show is Christopher Walken (and his huge hair) as Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who falls into a coma for five years following a car accident. When Johnny finally wakes up, he finds that things have changed — his girlfriend Sara (Brooke Adams) has moved on and gotten married, and oh yeah, he now has the ability to see someone's future when he touches them. 

After helping catch a serial killer with his psychic gifts, Johnny becomes a bit of a recluse. Then one day, he happens to shake the hand of Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a politician running for Senate. When Johnny touches Stillson, he sees a future where the man has become a deranged President of the United States willing to launch nuclear weapons and bring about the apocalypse. Johnny decides he must kill this guy before he ascends to power. While this doesn't have the reputation as a great King adaptation, nor even a great Cronenberg film, "The Dead Zone" is pretty effective, and Walken, with his off-kilter personality, makes for a compelling lead. 

Streaming on Prime Video.

Okay, okay — I know that "Maximum Overdrive" is not a great movie. Hell, even Stephen King admits that. But this monster mash deserves some attention because it's the only movie Stephen King ever directed. King infamously had no idea what the hell he was doing when he signed on to adapt his short story "Trucks" to the big screen. Working with a crew that mostly didn't speak English, and grappling with his own addictions to cocaine and booze, King made a big mess of a movie. But ya know what? It's kind of a fun mess! Whatever his flaws as a filmmaker, King at least understood that the story of "Maximum Overdrive" was very silly, so why not have some fun with it? 

The premise: when a comet passes Earth, it causes a bunch of machines — cars and trucks, soda machines, lawnmowers, etc. — to suddenly come to life and start killing people. And that's it, really! There's not much more to the premise. King uses this set-up as an excuse to cause a bunch of wreckage, all of it scored to a rockin' soundtrack courtesy of AC/DC. "I wanted it to move fast," King said. "It's a wonderfully moronic picture in that sense. It's a really illiterate picture in a lot of ways. There isn't a lot of dialogue in it. It's fast. A lot of things explode." You said it, Steve. 

Streaming on Tubi.

Stephen King's 1980 novella "The Mist" became a 2007 movie that perfectly encapsulated the American zeitgeist following 9/11. Directed by Frank Darabont, "The Mist" follows a group of characters trapped in a local supermarket after a mysterious mist blankets everything outside. A mist on its own wouldn't be much of a threat, but as it turns out, there are Lovecraftian monsters lurking in the haze, ready to pounce and kill. "The Mist" has an understandably cynical view of humanity, and sure enough, the longer the people inside the market stay trapped, the more desperate and dangerous they become. A religious fanatic (a gloriously nasty Marcia Gay Harden) is soon converting folks to her cause, making them believe that this hell on earth is the result of God's wrath. 

It all culminates in one of the most shocking and darkest endings of any Stephen King movie — an ending that was actually invented for the film, as King's novella has a somewhat more hopeful conclusion to all that horror. King, for his part, liked the new ending. "The ending will tear your heart out . . . but so will life, in the end. Frank Darabont's vision of hell is completely uncompromising," the author said. 

Streaming on Max.

"Pet Sematary" was the Stephen King book that disturbed Stephen King — he thought he had gone too far with the ultra-bleak subject matter. Then he went ahead and wrote the screenplay to the 1989 film adaptation anyway. "Sometimes you say to yourself, 'Maybe I can take this and make it a little bit better, or maybe I just wanna face the thing that scares me the most,'" King said of the experience. While some of King's screenplays can be hit or miss, his "Pet Sematary" script is pretty good. It's a bit stripped-down, but it gets to the dark heart of the book, telling the story of a family brought to ruin by dark forces lurking in the woods near their house.

When Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff) moves his family to a house in rural Maine, things go real bad real fast. First, the family cat Church is killed on the road, run over by a truck. But kindly elderly neighbor Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne, who is great here, Maine accent and all) has a solution: they can bury Church's body in a Native American burial ground located deep in the woods. This graveyard has the ability to raise the dead, but the resurrected corpses come back changed. And an undead cat is the least of the Creed family problems. When Louis' toddler son Gage (Miko Hughes) also gets run over and killed, Louis decides to bring him back to life, too. Guess how well that goes?! Helmed by Mary Lambert, the 1989 "Pet Sematary" is genuinely scary, full of nightmarish little details that will keep you up at night.

Streaming on Paramount+.

I kind of feel like the 2019 adaptation (no, it's not a remake) of "Pet Sematary" has been a bit memory-holed. Which is a shame, because I maintain this take on the material from filmmakers Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer is pretty damn good! Kölsch and Widmyer, working with a script by Jeff Buhler, make the bold choice to change King's third act. Rather than having toddler Gage killed and brought back to life, this version of "Pet Sematary" resurrects Louis' daughter Elle, played memorably by young actor Jeté Laurence. 

This changes the dynamic of the story a bit, and while a lot of people took issue with the switch, I think it works here. This change also extends the story a bit — in both the book and the 1989 film, Gage comes back from the dead and immediately turns into a grinning ghoul on a killing spree. The 2019 film spends a little more pre-murder time with the resurrected Elle, focusing on the fractured mental state of Louis (here played by Jason Clarke) as he attempts to convince himself everything will be fine. It won't, of course. Anyway, I've added both films to this list because I think it would be an interesting experiment to stream them back to back to see how they compare. Give it a try!

Streaming on Shudder. 

There's a new, long-delayed take on Stephen King's "Salem's Lot" arriving this October, but before you watch that, why not check out Tobe Hooper's 1979 miniseries adaptation? While a tad dated, this story of vampires overrunning a small Maine town is full of iconic scary moments, like when a vampire boy floats outside of a bedroom window, asking to be let in. In the miniseries, writer Ben Mears (David Soul) returns to his childhood hometown to write a book about the Marsten House, a creepy old house overlooking the town. It turns out the Marsten House itself is a bit of a Macguffin — it's just an old house added to the story to provide atmosphere. The real threat is an ancient vampire and his human familiar, who move into town and proceed to start turning people into bloodsuckers left and right. Soon, Ben is teaming up with a band of makeshift vampire hunters hoping to save the day (or, er, night). Good luck with that, gang!

Streaming on Max.

We all know at this point that Stephen King hates Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of "The Shining." And to be fair, Kubrick's movie does change a lot from King's source material. No matter — Kubrick's film is one of the best horror movies ever made, one that has stood the test of time and fueled obsessions. Nearly every frame of Kubrick's movie seems to be hiding some sort of deep, dark secret that could unlock even deeper motives. Jack Nicholson, unhinged from the get-go, is struggling writer Jack Torrance, who moves his wife (Shelley Duvall) and young son (Danny Lloyd) into the sprawling Overlook Hotel when he takes a job as the winter caretaker. The hotel is closed for the season, which means the Torrances are the only people in the joint ... or are they? 

As it turns out, the Overlook is deeply, deeply haunted, and everyone is in danger. Or maybe Jack is just a bad drunk slowly losing his mind. Who's to say? The great thing about "The Shining" is that it's wide open to interpretation. You can view it as a traditional haunted hotel story, or you can look for even deeper, weirder meanings behind practically everything that happens in the movie. It's fascinating and brilliant (even if Stephen King doesn't agree).