King of horror Stephen King is not afraid of being outspoken on social media, and just dropped the big one: his top 10 films of all time.
King can regularly be seen posting about movies he’s appreciated, particularly from the horror genre. But his top 10 doesn’t actually include any horror picks beyond Spielberg's classic Jaws.
Here’s the list, which King says is relayed in no particular order.
- Sorcerer
- Godfather Part II
- The Getaway
- Groundhog Day
- Casablanca
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
- Jaws
- Mean Streets
- Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind
- Double Indemnity
Stephen King omitted all-timer adaptations of his works, Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me and Green Mile, from consideration. And, well, he famously doesn’t like Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining in the first place.
Most of his picks are recognised classics, but there are a couple we’d bet more of you are less familiar with.
Sorcerer is a William Friedkin-directed movie, and is in contention with The Exorcist and The French Connection for his best work as a director. It sees a group of men transporting a truck filled with explosives across a jungle in South America.
The movie is a masterclass in tension generation. It’s a proper nerve-shredder and is a remake of 1953’s Wages of Fear. Annoyingly, Sorcerer is not currently available to stream through any of the big streaming services.
Also among the slightly less universally-known films on the list is Double Indemnity. It’s a Billy Wilder noir released in 1944, in which a woman and an insurance agent plot to kill her husband to claim on his life insurance.
Again, it’s not available to watch “freely” through any of the major streamers, but you can rent it through the usual suspects, including Prime Video.
Why has Stephen King pulled out the big guns right at this moment? The movie adaptation of his brilliant, and sometimes overlooked, novel The Long Walk is out this week.
It’s set in a dystopian society where an annual event is held, in which 100 teens are forced to walk across the US. If they stop or drop the pace too much, they are shot. And the long walk continues until only one of them is left.
Judging by the reviews so far, it’s one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date, ready to nestle in behind the all-timer classics King himself excluded from his own ranking.
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