The 15 best Stephen King movies and miniseries, ranked

A movie so addictively ambiguous that other movies have been made trying to dissect it, The Shining is Stephen King’s greatest cinematic moment. It’s ironic, considering King hated it for ages. His main gripe was that genius director Stanley Kubrick took a semi-autobiographical story about a good man losing his battle to his demons and made said man a nut job from the get-go.

The Shining book had personal significance to the writer, so we get it, but the rich layers of symbolism–from images of genocide to clues about reincarnation–make this a compelling mystery. Single-handedly, Kubrick made this ghost story an allegory for the repetition of mass murder through history. It’s a lamentation of humanity never learning its lesson, yet it never fully reveals itself, so its scares can still tap into people’s natural fear of the unknown. Both as a straight-ahead people-pleasing horror and as a beard-stroking art film, The Shining is our number one pick for best Stephen King horror adaptation.