Poets & Writers Theater

“He’s been such a mirror for pop culture, but now he’s his own pop culture.” In this trailer for King on Screen, a documentary about the many film and television adaptations of Stephen King’s stories and novels, directors and screenwriters discuss what makes King the master of horror.

“I remembered something that Raymond Chandler said, ‘When you don’t know what do to next, bring on the man with the gun,’” says Stephen King in this interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in which he discusses experiencing writer’s block and shares the top five favorites stories he’s written.

“Was it real? Or was it my imagination?” Lisey’s Story is an eight-part Apple TV Plus miniseries based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Stephen King. Directed by Pablo Larraín, the series stars Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

“The police will tell her anyone might have missed these things, and she has no reason to feel responsible. She does, nevertheless.” From his home, Stephen King reads from the title novella of his new collection, If It Bleeds (Scribner, 2020).

In the Tall Grass is a film adaptation of a novella of the same name written by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, first published in Esquire magazine in 2012. The horror film, which follows a brother and sister as they venture into a field of grass in Kansas and find themselves trapped, is directed by Vincenzo Natali and stars Laysla De Oliveira, Harrison Gilbertson, Avery Whitted, and Patrick Wilson.

Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep (Scribner, 2013), the sequel to his 1977 classic The Shining, has been adapted into a feature film directed by Mike Flanagan. The movie picks up the story several decades later as a grown-up Danny Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, meets a young girl with psychic powers similar to his own that he tries to protect from a supernatural cult of murderous nomads.

In this film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 supernatural horror novel, It, seven children are terrorized by a shape-shifting being that appears in the form of an evil clown. Directed by Andrés Muschietti, the film stars Chosen Jacobs, Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, and Finn Wolfhard.

The Dark Tower is a film sequel to Stephen King’s eight-novel series of the same name, which was published between 1982 and 2004 and inspired by Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Directed by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, and Katheryn Winnick, the film will premiere in August.

“Sometimes for a kid the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. And that’s the way that we think in dreams.” In this Blank on Blank animated video of a 1989 interview, Stephen King talks about the many different connections between childhood and his own writing process.