ByJake Rossen|Mar 24, 2023, 12:02 PM EDT
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In 2017, It, an adaptation of horror legend Stephen King’s 1986 novel, became the highest-grossing horror film in history. It was a fitting badge of honor for the prolific horror novelist, who has seen dozens of his books and stories transferred to film, often with only mixed success.
Fortunately, there’s still plenty of King-inspired material that lives up to his name. Take a look at 15 movies and television shows currently streaming that capture the essence of King’s work.
1. Carrie (1976)
Sissy Spacek stars as Carrie White, a telekinetic teen who gets her revenge on the mean girls (and boys) in high school. Based on King’s first novel (1975), the master of horror wasn’t such a well-known commodity at the time. Trailers for the film misspelled his name as “Steven.”
Stream it: Amazon Prime
2. Creepshow 2 (1987)
A macabre King vibe inspired this anthology, a sequel to 1982’s Creepshow, which the writer collaborated on with horror master George A. Romero. The standout of the sequel is “The Raft,” about a group of college kids who find a sentient blob of sludge at a lake that makes their weekend getaway anything but relaxing. Two other King stories, the bowling-centric “Pinball” and “Cat From Hell,” were planned but cut due to budgetary concerns. The latter wound up in 1990’s Tales From the Darkside: The Movie.
Stream it: Amazon Prime
3. 11.22.63 (2016)
King’s revisionist take on JFK’s assassination comes to life in this Hulu original series. James Franco stars as a professor who discovers he can travel back in time to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting at the motorcade in Dallas. Unfortunately, those heroics have consequences in the future. The late director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) was originally slated to helm a feature based on the book before the rights eventually went to J.J. Abrams.
Stream it: Hulu
4. Gerald’s Game (2017)
Carla Gugino’s weekend getaway with her husband turns into an endurance test when she finds herself alone and handcuffed to a bed. Slowly, creeping horrors both real and imagined begin to materialize. To keep her sanity—and her life—she’ll need to escape by any means necessary. King loved the movie, which he described as “hypnotic.”
Stream it: Netflix
5. In the Tall Grass (2019)
King’s 2012 novella—co-written with his son, Joe Hill—is a classic King conceit of taking the mundane and making it terrifying. After chasing a boy into a thick patch of farmland grass, two siblings realize that it harbors dangerous and mystifying entities. Patrick Wilson co-stars.
Stream it: Netflix
6. The Mist (2007)
One of King’s most gut-wrenching adaptations comes courtesy of Frank Darabont, who had previously helmed 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption. In a small Maine town, artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) finds himself trapped in a grocery store as a strange fog envelops residents—and brings with it a terrifying menagerie of creatures. Darabont had previously adapted a King short story, “The Woman in the Room,” as a low-budget project in the early 1980s. As he has does with many budding filmmakers whose work impresses him, King sold Darabont the rights for $1.
Stream it: Netflix
7. Stephen King’s Silver Bullet (1985)
Corey Haim and Gary Busey are an unlikely pairing in this werewolf thriller based on King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf. Don Coscarelli (Phantasm) was originally slated to direct the film but quit over disagreements with producer Dino de Laurentiis. Dan Attias wound up helming the movie.
Stream it: HBO Max
8. The Green Mile (1999)
Tom Hanks stars in this adaptation of the 1996 King novel, which was serialized and released in six published installments. Hanks plays a prison guard assigned duty on death row who finds himself grappling with the otherworldly abilities of inmate Michael Clarke Duncan, who may or may not be innocent—and gifted with paranormal powers. To reinforce Duncan’s physical presence, filmmakers sometimes used camera tricks to make him appear even taller than his co-stars.
Stream it: Hulu
9. Stephen King’s Storm of the Century (1999)
King wrote this original miniseries for ABC about a mysterious stranger named Linoge (Colm Feore) who terrorizes a small town during a snowstorm. He’ll leave them alone—but only if they agree to a horrifying request. King has called it his favorite among all of his made-for-television work.
Stream it: Hulu
10. The Dead Zone (1983)
Christopher Walken has the weight of the world on his shoulders as Johnny Smith, a teacher who emerges from a coma with psychic powers. When he encounters a power-mad politician (Martin Sheen) with destructive tendencies, Johnny must decide whether to take drastic action. King’s 1979 novel also inspired a USA Network television series starring Anthony Michael Hall, which is available to stream for free on Tubi.
Stream it: Amazon Prime
11. Children of the Corn (1984)
King’s short story from 1978’s Night Shift collection imagines a small town in which children are free to explore their most violent impulses without any parental supervision. Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton are a couple who stumble upon this kid-run community and quickly come to regret it. The film franchise has grown to nine movies, but you’re best off sticking with the original.
Stream it: Amazon Prime
12. A Good Marriage (2014)
When Joan Allen finds some incriminating evidence pointing to her perfect husband (played by Anthony LaPaglia) being a serial killer, she must decide between the love of her life and a monster who takes lives. The film is based on the novella of the same name in King’s 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars.
Stream it: Amazon Prime via Freevee
13. 1922 (2017)
Full Dark, No Stars also contains the novella 1922, which Zak Hilditch adapted into a Netflix film in 2017. It’s less about what Nebraska farmer Wilfred James (Thomas Jane) will do to keep his wife from uprooting their family to the city and more about the very messy (both literally and psychologically) aftermath of those actions. The corn had already mostly been harvested by the time filmmakers started shooting in Vancouver, so the stalks you see in the movie were either shipped in or added during the editing phase. The rats, however, were all actually on set.
Stream it: Netflix
14. The Outsider (2020)
King’s 2018 novel The Outsider grew out of the author’s urge to write about someone who was inexplicably in two places at the same time. The story—which was optioned as a miniseries almost immediately after its publication—follows the supernaturally charged investigation of a child’s murder in Oklahoma, seemingly committed by an upstanding citizen (played by Jason Bateman) who also happens to have an unshakeable alibi. Ben Mendelsohn stars as the lead investigator, with help from private detective Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), whom King considers “one of the most interesting characters in my entire lexicon.”
Stream it: HBO Max
15. Lisey’s Story (2021)
In this adaptation of King’s 2006 novel of the same name, Julianne Moore stars as Lisey Landon, a widow plagued with once-repressed memories unearthed over the course of a treasure hunt left by her dead husband (Clive Owen). With J.J. Abrams as producer and Spencer director Pablo Larraín behind the camera, the miniseries is both mentally and visually arresting; King was so invested in the project, in fact, that he agreed to write all eight episodes, something he hadn’t done for one of his TV adaptations since ABC’s 1997 version of The Shining.
Stream it: Apple TV+
A version of this story ran in 2019; it has been updated for 2023.
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The Real-Life Serial Killer That Might’ve Inspired ‘Dexter’s Dark Passenger
Brazil’s most notorious killer of killers has been called the real Dexter for years, but ‘Dexter’s’ creator tells a different origin story.
ByMatt Hoffman|Oct 30, 2026, 9:00 PM EDT
Back in July 2004, Jeff Lindsay introduced readers to Dexter Morgan, a Miami police blood-spatter analyst who kills only people who deserve it, egged on by a voice in his head he calls the “Dark Passenger.” Two years later, Showtime turned Darkly Dreaming Dexter into a hit series with Michael C. Hall.
Somewhere along the way, the internet decided Dexter had a real-life model: Pedro Rodrigues Filho, a Brazilian who claimed to have killed more than 100 people, most of them criminals. Entertainment sites now call him “the Brazilian Dexter,” and ScreenRant describes the show as loosely based on his crimes. No quote from Lindsay or the show’s producers backs that up, but the similarities are hard to miss.
The Boy Who Settled Scores
Filho was born in 1954 on a farm in Santa Rita do Sapucaí, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, with an injured skull: his father, he said, had kicked his pregnant mother during a fight. He told the magazine Época in 2003 that he first wanted to kill at 13, when he shoved an older cousin into a sugarcane press. A year later, after his father lost his job as a school guard over accusations that he was stealing school lunches, Filho shot the official who had fired him, then shot the guard he believed was the real thief. (Accounts disagree on who that first victim was: some Brazilian outlets say the mayor of his hometown, others the deputy mayor of Alfenas, also in Minas Gerais.)
He fled to Mogi das Cruzes, outside São Paulo, where he robbed drug dens, killed traffickers, and took over a dead drug boss’s business. When his pregnant girlfriend was shot dead, he went looking for the man who ordered it and, with four friends, hit a wedding party, leaving seven dead and 16 wounded, according to Época. He was arrested shortly after turning 18 and entered prison on May 24, 1973; in the van on the way there, he killed a fellow prisoner he said was a rapist.
Where the Comparison Holds
Like Dexter, Filho had a code, or said he did. He told Época he killed only people who were no good, and that he never killed children, women, or family men. He also had a father story to rival Harry Morgan’s, though a much darker one: Filho claimed he killed his own father in prison, in revenge for his mother’s stabbing, and chewed a piece of his heart. (Época noted that he gave a psychiatrist a completely different account of how his father died.)
The resemblance mostly ends there. Dexter’s code, as Mental Floss has laid out before, includes “don’t get caught,” and Filho spent roughly four decades behind bars, much of it bragging. He had “Mato por prazer” (“I kill for pleasure”) tattooed on his left arm. He claimed 47 victims inside prison alone, though Época found just 18 charges against him on file in 2003; by his death, Brazilian outlets counted 71 homicides on his record.
What Dexter’s Creator Actually Said
Lindsay has told his origin story many times, and it starts nowhere near Brazil: at a Kiwanis Club lunch where he sat at the head table waiting to speak and, as he told BookPage in 2005, “the idea just popped into my head that sometimes serial murder isn’t a bad thing.” He then built the character out of research: he collected books on sociopaths and murderers, interviewed psychologists and crime scene investigators, and got cop friends to turn him loose in their dead-files room. He also rejects the very label that made Filho famous: “Dexter’s not a vigilante,” he told Middlebury Magazine in 2011. “Vigilantes are trying to perform an act of justice. Dexter just likes to kill people.”
The Ending Dexter Survived
Filho walked out of prison in 2007, went back in 2011 for crimes committed during his sentence, and was released for good in 2018. Within months, he had reinvented himself as a YouTube personality who commented on crimes in the news and lectured about his past. On the morning of March 5, 2023, he was on a sidewalk in Mogi das Cruzes holding a small child when men in a black car opened fire, according to the news site G1. The child was unhurt, but according to the police report, one of the attackers stabbed Filho in the throat as he lay on the ground. He was 68.
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The Medium Who Wants You to Be Nicer to Ghosts
What if ghosts weren’t always something to fear?
ByEden Gordon|Oct 30, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT
Rebekah Carmichael would like you to treat ghosts with a little more kindness.
The author of The Not-So Scary Guide to Ghosts: How to Make the Paranormal Normal, which was published in July 2026, frequently shares tips and tricks for engaging with the spirit world online. In her guide, she offers an overview of her theory of what ghosts actually are, along with plenty of advice on how to handle spirits of the dead still lingering in the land of the living.
Her main goal? To make people a little more open-minded towards the paranormal. “I realized that a lot of ghosts are just doing their thing, very similar to how we’re doing our thing. The scariest part of that is when we just don’t understand each other,” she tells Mental Floss. “It was really important to me to share the other side of ghost stories, and to be able to say—they can be scary, yes, but what if they didn’t always have to be scary? What if we could meet them on a very human level? And what if we could learn something from them as a result?”
A ghost guide’s tips for engaging with ghosts
Carmichael claims to have encountered a lot of ghosts, many of whom she says have a lot to say about the historical time periods they lived in.
In her view, ghosts are parts of the soul left behind in the living world. They’re “pieces of the soul, and they’re doing very human things. Sometimes the human thing is that they go up the stairs at a particular time because that’s what they did when they were alive,” she says. “Sometimes they might care about a loved one they left behind. They are remnants of some of the most powerful feelings that we have.”
When engaging with ghosts, she advises, it’s important to remember that they were once human and are as deserving of compassion as any living being. It’s always a good idea to be polite to them, she says, and to talk to them like the people they once were. One might start a conversation by commenting on a detail in the place they’re haunting, for example, instead of immediately confronting them about how they died. “What if we could just chat? What if it didn’t have to be crazy and dramatic and scary?” she says. “What if it was just a really cool opportunity to talk to somebody like time travel to a different time?”
Still, she notes that precautions are important, and says that it’s vital to ground yourself before engaging with any ghost and to cleanse yourself afterward. Cleansing “starts with the mind saying, ‘Okay, I don’t want to hold on to anything else that is not mine to claim,’” she says. It’s an important step—otherwise, she notes, you might find a lingering spirit clinging to you long after you depart a room.
The future of human-ghost relations
For as long as humans have existed, death has been both an inevitable reality and a looming mystery—and people have been trying to understand and engage with the question of what happens after it.
Many cultures and time periods have honored death in various ways, and ancestors are still actively venerated in many parts of the world. And though there’s no scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts, a 2024 poll from New CivicScience found that 41% of Americans said they believed in ghosts or spirits.
Carmichael’s views can admittedly be far on the out-there spectrum; she claims to have seen aliens, angels, and demons as well as ghosts. But in her mind, the question of whether the ghostly encounters she films and the stories she tells are actually real is not all that important.
“One of the key things that I say to people, especially at the end of my skits, is it’s not about believing if my interaction is real,” she says. “It’s about the curiosity behind it. It’s about enjoying the story. I am not out to preach. A lot of my book is about saying, ‘Hey, discover it for yourself.’”
Ultimately, Carmichael hopes for a future where the lines between science and the spirit world blur enough to open space for dialogue among people with diametrically opposed beliefs. She also envisions a world where people treat spirits, and each other, with more understanding.
“I think we’re coming into a space where we all can get along. We all can learn from each other,” she says. “I think the only way to do that is to listen to one another, and to acknowledge that we may have differences and that we don’t all have to believe the same thing. As long as we’re not hurting one another, there’s a lot that we can do and a lot left to understand. Of course, I’m talking about ghosts here, but I think there’s also a message in that for humanity as a whole as well.”
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