Since 2017, acclaimed filmmaker Mike Flanagan has been adapting some of Stephen King‘s trickiest books, much to the joy of horror films everywhere. 2017’s Gerald’s Game, 2019’s Doctor Sleep, and this year’s The Life of Chuck have all been well received, despite being difficult to imagine on-screen before he made it happen. Now Flanagan is working on a Dark Tower series and an eight-episode Carrie series.
Unlike some who attempt to bring the Horror Maestro’s works to the screen, Flanagan really understands the essence of King’s storytelling: “I don’t think people give [King] enough credit for the humanist he is and for the enormous heart that beats behind all the horror,” Flanagan told Deadline in September. “His horror works because he’s a man who really loves his characters. It’s about the people.”
Since Stephen King adaptions can live or die by the screenwriters and directors involved, here are other King stories that we’d only want Flanagan to bring (or bring back) to the screen.
“Children of the Corn”
“Children of the Corn” has been adapted for the big screen three times — and the 1984 film led to several sequels — but we’re still waiting for a good cinematic version of the source material. That short story follows an estranged couple that chances upon a rural Nebraska town populated by a murderous cult of teenagers who wander the cornfields and worship a mysterious being known as He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
Similarly, Flanagan’s Midnight Mass also concerns a small, isolated community caught up in religious zeal, so we expect Flanagan can work the same miracles with “Children of the Corn.”
The Dark Tower
King considers this series of stories — eight novels, one novella, and a children’s book — to be his magnum opus. It’s the story about a gunslinger journeying across the post-apocalyptic Mid-World in search of the titular tower, the nexus point of the space-time continuum. A 2017 film adaptation didn’t impress fans or critics, but as of June 2023, Flanagan has the rights to the story and was planning a five-season TV series and two feature films and is in the process of making it happen.
And it might just be his magnum opus, too — he told Deadline the pilot script is one of his favorite things he has ever worked on and that he’s been thinking about an adaptation for more than half of his life. Nothing’s a given in Hollywood, though, especially with no filming date slated or network attached, but we have faith we’ll one day get the Flanaverse version of The Dark Tower.
Duma Key
After surviving a construction accident and a divorce, Edgar Freemantle moves from Minnesota to the Florida coast, where he starts painting pictures that have a power of their own. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Eastlake, one of Edgar’s new neighbors on Duma Key, is an elderly woman who is losing her memory but is haunted by her past. “The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural — Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying,” the book flap reads.
So much of Flanagan’s work involves memories and memory loss in particular — especially in Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Bly Manor — so we’d imagine seeing his depiction of Elizabeth’s dementia would be particularly moving.
From a Buick 8
After a Pennsylvania state trooper dies in a drunk-driving accident, his young son starts hanging around the Troop D headquarters… and comes across a Buick 8 that has been the state troopers’ secret for decades. And it’s a car that seems to have a life of its own. “From a Buick 8 is a novel about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable,” the synopsis adds.
Midnight Mass also deals with the ramifications of a drunk driver’s actions, and that “beating heart” of the story was Flanagan’s worst fear, as he told The New York Times. Adapting From a Buick 8 would offer another chance to exorcise that terror.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
This book follows 9-year-old Trisha McFarland as she gets lost during her family’s Appalachian Trail hike. Worse yet, Trisha is haunted by an unseen entity in the woods — and everything else that threatens to overwhelm her with “nasty, no-brain panic” — and her only ally is an imagined version of Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon.
Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game also depicted a supernatural fight for survival and sanity off the grid, and we imagine his take on The Girl would be just as nerve-shredding.
Joyland
Once in development as a TV series for Freeform, Joyland is a coming-of-age story that publisher Titan Books says has an emotional wallop akin to that of The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. The novel follows a young man named Devin Jones who gets a summer job at a North Carolina amusement park called Joyland and starts investigating the years-old mystery of the murder of a young woman named Linda Gray at the hands of the “Carny Killer.”
By the time of Devin’s hiring at Joyland, Linda is haunting the park’s “Horror House” dark ride — and haunted houses are certainly Flanagan’s bailiwick. But the filmmaker is also adept at depicting mysteries set across decades, like The Haunting of Hill House.
Revival
Touted to have the terrifying ending King has even written, Revival follows a heroin-addicted musician who reconnects with the minister who beguiled and betrayed his childhood hometown.
Flanagan has explored issues of addiction in many of his works, including The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep — and he has spoken candidly about his own recovery from addiction — but beyond that, Revival might end up the best project he’ll never make. He was set up to write a Revival screenplay for Warner Bros. in May 2020, but he told Collider this August that the project died after Doctor Sleep underperformed at the box office. “When people ask me what the phantom limb is, what the project that got away is, it’ll always be Revival,” he added.