All Hail Stephen King With 10 Movies to Watch on Tubi
Killer cars, haunted hotels, cursed burial grounds, creepy cornfields, and one serious emotional gut punch prove there’s more than one way to enter Stephen King’s world on Tubi.
Stephen King has spent decades finding new things for us to be afraid of. Hotels? Absolutely. Cars? Why not. Cornfields? Never trusted them anyway. Your deceased loved ones returning home? We're going to stop you right there.
Spend enough time in King's world and you learn the danger can come from pretty much anywhere. Childhood, grief, small towns, ordinary objects, and the supernatural have a habit of colliding at exactly the wrong moment, usually somewhere in Maine. The King of Horror earned his crown through scares, but his stories can also be funny, heartbreaking, completely bizarre, or all of the above before you've even figured out what genre you're watching.
We already went back to prom with our Carrie article, so we're opening the rest of the library. Tubi's All Hail Stephen King collection has plenty of Stephen King movies and adaptations waiting for anyone ready to spend a little more time inside one of horror's most recognizable imaginations.
All hail the King. Just maybe don't accept any hotel reservations from him.
Pet Sematary
Death is difficult. Grief is worse. Having access to a burial ground capable of reversing one of those things? Maybe keep that information to yourself.
The Creed family's move to rural Maine introduces them to kindly neighbor Jud Crandall, the dangerously busy road outside their home, and a pet cemetery hidden in the nearby woods. Then Jud reveals something farther beyond it: an ancient burial ground with the power to return the dead, although “return” doesn't necessarily mean “come back exactly as you remember them.”
Pet Sematary is one of those quintessential King stories where the supernatural horror works because the very human temptation underneath it is so easy to understand. Grief makes terrible decisions feel reasonable, while Jud's warning that “sometimes dead is better” hangs over a family learning exactly why certain doors should remain closed.
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Stephen King's The Shining
Checking into the Overlook Hotel is already questionable. Staying for more than four hours? Now we're committed.
Unlike Stanley Kubrick's famous adaptation, Stephen King's The Shining is a 1997 television miniseries written by King himself and designed to stay much closer to his novel. Steven Weber plays Jack Torrance, who moves into the isolated Overlook with his wife Wendy and son Danny for a winter caretaking job that comes with spacious accommodations, beautiful mountain views, and around several thousand reasons to leave.
King's version restores more of the novel to the screen, including those sinister topiary animals that definitely aren't helping the hotel's TripAdvisor score. Danny's psychic “shining,” Jack's unraveling, and the Overlook's long memory are all still waiting inside, but the expanded runtime gives the Torrance family more room to breathe before the hotel starts taking that privilege away.
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Children of the Corn
Children are our future, but the children of Gatlin have made some concerning plans for theirs.
A road trip takes Burt and Vicky into an eerily deserted Nebraska town where the adults appear to be missing and the local children have formed a religious cult around a mysterious entity living among the corn. Children of the Corn takes something as ordinary as driving past endless farmland and gives you a very good reason to keep the windows rolled up.
The nightmare began as one of King's short stories, but the 1984 movie helped Isaac, Malachai, and “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” escape into the larger horror lexicon. It's also classic King territory: an isolated American community, a belief system that's gone horribly sideways, and normal disappearing somewhere between one row of corn and the next.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Christine
Your first car is supposed to represent freedom. Arnie Cunningham's comes with possessiveness issues.
John Carpenter directs Christine, King's tale of an unpopular teenager whose life begins changing after he buys and restores a battered 1958 Plymouth Fury. Christine is beautiful once she's back in shape. She's also jealous, homicidal, and more emotionally invested in her owner than most vehicles.
A murderous Plymouth Fury sounds like the kind of premise that should require some explaining. King and Carpenter make it frighteningly simple. Christine isn't unsettling only because she can kill people; watching Arnie change alongside her turns an evil car into a story about obsession, possession, and one spectacularly toxic relationship.
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The Green Mile
Plot twist: the King of Horror can emotionally destroy you without a killer clown, haunted hotel, or murderous automobile anywhere in sight.
Death-row guard Paul Edgecomb thinks he understands the men who walk the green linoleum toward the electric chair until John Coffey arrives. Convicted of murdering two young girls, Coffey possesses an extraordinary gift that forces Paul to question what kind of man has actually been placed in his custody.
Frank Darabont's The Green Mile is proof that King's supernatural side doesn't always arrive looking like horror. Tom Hanks brings a quiet decency to Paul, while Michael Clarke Duncan makes Coffey's gentleness feel enormous despite the intimidating figure everyone sees first. King originally released the story as a six-part serial novel, giving readers the unusual experience of waiting installment by installment to see where Coffey's story would go. Different format, different genre, same author finding a creative new way to emotionally ruin your evening.
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Maximum Overdrive
Cars weren't enough. Stephen King decided all the machines could kill us.
Maximum Overdrive occupies a rather chaotic corner of King history: it's the only feature film he has ever directed himself. When Earth passes through the tail of a comet, machines begin turning against humanity, trapping survivors inside a North Carolina truck stop while homicidal vehicles circle outside.
King adapted the movie from his own short story “Trucks” and then somehow decided homicidal machinery deserved an AC/DC soundtrack and a truck wearing the face of the Green Goblin. It's loud. It's chaotic. It's one of the stranger pieces of King screen history. Subtlety had the day off.
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Creepshow 2
Can't commit to one nightmare? Have three.
Creepshow 2 keeps the EC Comics-inspired anthology spirit alive with three macabre tales, including a wooden-storefront avenger, a very hungry presence floating in a secluded lake, and one increasingly difficult-to-escape hitchhiker.
Mention “The Raft” around the right group of horror people and somebody is probably going to remember that lake. The segment has earned a nasty place in King adaptation history by taking swimming, isolation, and an innocent-looking patch of water and making all three look less appealing by the second. Three stories also means three chances to discover just how many unrelated activities King can ruin in 90 minutes.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Thinner
Weight loss probably shouldn't qualify as body horror. Stephen King found a way.
Billy Halleck is an arrogant attorney whose connections help him escape punishment after a deadly accident. Then he crosses paths with the victim's father and receives a one-word curse: “Thinner.” The pounds begin falling off at an impossible rate, and what initially looks like the transformation Billy wanted quickly becomes something his body may not survive.
Based on King's novel published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Thinner gives us another one of his favorite arrangements: a deeply flawed person, a supernatural consequence, and an escape route that's nowhere near as simple as saying sorry. Director Tom Holland leans into the grotesque physical transformation while the story keeps asking whether Billy is actually capable of taking responsibility for what put him there in the first place.
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The Dark Half
Writers love killing off characters. Thad Beaumont discovers the characters may have notes.
George A. Romero directs The Dark Half, where novelist Thad decides to publicly retire George Stark, the pseudonym responsible for his much darker books. The problem is that Stark doesn't seem particularly interested in staying fictional or retired.
The premise comes with an especially fun piece of King history: he famously published novels under the name Richard Bachman before his pseudonym was exposed. The Dark Half takes the author/alter-ego idea somewhere much bloodier, with Timothy Hutton playing both sides as the boundary between creator and creation starts falling apart.
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Stephen King's Silver Bullet
Small towns in Stephen King stories should really start investing in better streetlights.
A string of brutal killings has Tarker's Mills terrified, but young Marty Coslaw becomes convinced the culprit isn't entirely human. Corey Haim gives Marty the curiosity and nerve needed to start asking questions better left alone, while Gary Busey's Uncle Red brings a scruffier kind of heroism to the family operation as Marty and his sister Jane hunt for proof.
Stephen King's Silver Bullet adapts King's novella Cycle of the Werewolf, which paired his story with illustrations by Bernie Wrightson and structured its horrors around the calendar. The movie turns that material into a small-town creature feature built around family, local secrets, and the uncomfortable possibility that the monster everyone is hunting may already be someone they know.
Because after cemeteries, hotels, cars, cornfields, machines, lakes, writers, and curses, why wouldn't the moon be next? Long live the King.
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