Stephen King

There’s something up with Stephen King — rather, his house, which looks to have been taken over by a certain sinister clown. It’s a little tough to notice at first, but if you look very closely, it appears the master of horror literature has put a red balloon up in one of the front windows of his gorgeous home in Bangor, Maine to celebrate the impending release of It.

If the early buzz is to be believed, fans couldn’t get any more excited for the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s It. Not only does the film have one of the most-watched movie trailers of all time, and is also projected to make over $60 million in its opening weekend, it’s also coming into theaters riding a wave of impressive reviews. And somehow, the movie has done all of this without tipping its hand on some of the most impressive scares. All of this for an R-rated horror movie about children being jeopardized. We’ve come a long way since the original miniseries, America.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of The Dark Tower isn’t that it failed to live up to expectations decades in the making, or even that it mangled Stephen King’s source material in a way that die-hard fans found unforgivable. No, the most frustrating aspect of The Dark Tower is that it’s just… fine. Despite the plethora of negative reviews, it isn’t some disastrous flop a movie, nor is it an ambitious mess that reached for the stars and came crashing back to earth. It’s just sorta there, a Young Adult action-fantasy film that limps through its paces before ending with a thud. Really, how do you even make a King adaptation that doesn’t have a little bit of ambition?

Historically speaking, Stephen King adaptations tend to be better when the master of literary horror isn’t involved — which may bode well for Andy Muschetti’s new adaptation of IT, as the author recently revealed that he did not participate in the development of his iconic tale of terror. For his part, Muschietti apparently had his reasons, and the way he tells it, they seem like pretty good ones.

I chose the Emoji Movie over the Dark Tower, I chose wrong.

The corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street is a Los Angeles icon, once the heart of the city’s booming film production and now the nexus of the world-renowned Hollywood Walk of Fame. Usually, the most frightening thing a person will experience at the intersection is an encounter with improv comics attempting to strong-arm you into attending their latest show, but a new horror will soon dawn in the area. Locals now have bigger things to worry about than spending the day sad after accidentally overhearing an actor speaking to their agent on the phone.

Something fishy is going on with the two Stephen King movies coming out this year. At least, their runtimes aren’t exactly what you’d expect. It was recently revealed that The Dark Tower clocks in at a lean 95 minutes long, and now we’re hearing that Andres Muschietti’s It is considerably longer than two hours: approximately 135 minutes.

This week’s The Dark Tower starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey is the first big-budget adaptation of a Stephen King novel in a while, but King’s books and short stories have inspired more than 30 years of great horror, sci-fi, and drama films. Even as The Dark Tower is designed to launch a new franchise based on King’s epic fantasy series, the film is littered with references, homages, and Easter eggs to previous King novels - and to the movies they spawned. In this new video from ScreenCrush’s Britt Hayes and Ryan Arey, we connect all the dots between The Dark Tower and the long history of Stephen King cinema.

The years-in-the-making adaptation of Stephen King’s epic fantasy series finally comes to the screen. But was it worth the wait?

You know Stephen King as one of the world’s most prolific and beloved fiction authors. But did you know King spent years writing books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and that several of “Bachman”s stories have been adapted to the screen too? That list includes the likes of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man. That’s just one of the facts featured in the latest installment of You Think You Know Movies!