Amazing Stephen King stories that need to be made into movies

Another ghost-centric story, given a bit of extra spooky oomph by virtue of being set in an old amusement park. A university student takes a job at the Joyland amusement park and is told by a fortune teller to expect two encounters with unusual children. Those encounters lead to a ghost in the haunted house and an unsolved mystery.

If you have never read The Jaunt, stop what you are doing and get stuck in. It's King at his most terrifying, with a story that sends shivers down our spine as we are writing this. The Jaunt would be a tough one to adapt but we would love to see someone like Chris Nolan dare tackle the story set hundreds of years in the future where teleportation is real and it has a devastating effect on all that went through the trial of perfecting the technology.

A story of a girl who becomes separated from her mother and brother during a hiking trip and is left alone in the forest waiting to be rescued. Aside from being just an against-the-clock thriller, it also has elements of fantasy as the little girl, Trisha, begins to imagine an evil wasp-faced being is hunting her down. Lynne Ramsey is said to be making a movie out of this one so we can't wait to see what she makes of it

You don’t get a lot of sporting movies based on Stephen King books. Blockade Billy tells of an unpromising young baseball player who is called up by the New Jersey Titans in a moment of desperation and who turns out to be a phenomenal player. However, Blockade Billy, as the man becomes known, is not quite what he seems. This is one of King’s less fantastical novels and the right director could pull off both a great sporting underdog story and a psychological thriller.

Like a less elaborate Hunger Games, The Long Walk sees one hundred boys participate in an event in which they must walk with a pace over 4mph, without rest or eating anything beyond basic rations. If they slow down they get a warning. If they get three warning’s they’re shot. They’ll keep walking until there is only one left, who will be given everything he wants for the rest of his life. Friendships and rivalries are formed as the walk progresses and rules are broken. Frank Darabont (The Walking Dead) owns the rights but hasn’t done anything with them.

And there was you thinking Pennywise, The Clown was terrifying - there's another ginger fiend in Stephen King's lore who is just as scary and that's Bad Little Kid. The story, from The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, is slight: George Hallas is in prison waiting to be executed for killing a little boy. While he has never talked about killing the kid, he decides to tell the tale. What ensues is a man pushed to do terrible things by a boy who seemingly never grows old.

From the Full Dark, No Stars collection, Big Driver tells of Tess, a mystery writer who suffers a flat tyre after driving over a plank studded with nails. She’s offered help by an apparently kindly truck driver, who quickly turns on Tess and rapes her and leaves her for dead. The part that would make it a cracking thriller is Tess’s decision not to go to the police but to take matters into her own hands, exacting revenge on her attacker and getting vengeance for all the other women he’s killed.

1922 has already been made into a movie from this anthology and this one is ripe for adaptation, too.

Written with King’s son Joe Hill, author of the excellent Horns, Throttle is influenced by the Richard Matheson book Duel (which became an excellent movie by Steven Spielberg), but instead of a battle between a terrified motorcar driver and an unseen truck driver it’s a stand-off between an unseen truck driver and a group of motorcycle outlaws. Duel is a superb film that’s been seen by relatively few people, so ripping it off for an update isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In The Tall Grass has been made into a Netflix movie and is from the same anthology, so here's hoping this one can see the light of day.

An kid with autism named Seth gains the power to control his hometown thanks to an entity called Tak, which has possessed him. Given Seth’s televisual obsessions, the town becomes a hybrid of old west pastiche and sci-fi monster playground. It’s a highly surreal story of a child’s strangest imaginings seeping into everyday life, but with all the opportunity for visual excess and unpredictable plotting that suggests. We would love to see an adaptation of this which takes into consideration Desperation, too, maybe with Tak skipping between the two interconnected tales

It's such a shame that the best King collaborator right now, Mike Flanagan, scrapped his Revival movie idea as we would have been in with a treat. In the book, we follow the story of Jamie Morton, from child to man who befriends a local pastor, Charles Jacobs. Tragedy besets the pastor and what ensues is a Frankenstein-like story that straddles the ideas of death, religion and redemption admirably. Given the ending is bleak (yep, even bleaker than The Mist), this would be one dark but brilliant tale