Published Jun 26, 2026, 12:06 PM EDT
Jeremy has more than 2600 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He’s an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU… well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He’s also very proud of the fact that he’s seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He’s plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he’s not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author’s 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
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There’s an undeniable history of horror books being made into horror movies, as you can go back about 100 years to see it done with success. Like, Dracula and Frankenstein are two of the most iconic works of horror-related literature of all time, and were both published in the 1800s, and then in the early 1930s, there were film adaptations made that still hold up to this day. And with Dracula, you can go back to the silent era and find the unofficial adaptation that was Nosferatu. Further, with Frankenstein, there was a feature-length silent film made even earlier than the 1931 one, but that film, 1915’s Life Without Soul, is unfortunately lost, like so many movies from the silent era.
Since then, you’ve got Psycho, The Exorcist, The Shining, and The Silence of the Lambs, for just a small selection of great movies that were based on horror novels. Some longer or perhaps more ambitious books get adapted to TV, too, including the likes of The Stand and The Haunting of Hill House. And then there are horror books that haven’t had movie or adaptations yet, potentially because they’re a little obscure or niche, or because they’re overall difficult to adapt to a visual medium. The following books, at the time of writing, have not yet had movie or TV adaptations. To be fair, that might not remain so, for all these examples, forever, and it’s also worth stressing that some of the novels here have been influential on various movies and TV shows (just not themselves directly adapted).
Probably the least well-known novel here, which is likely the main factor for it not being adapted, The Wolf’s Hour is honestly pretty fun, and it admirably commits to the pulpiest of premises. Essentially, it’s a work of spy fiction that takes place during World War II, and involves the main character going behind enemy lines to combat the German forces… but that main character is also a werewolf. He’s a werewolf spy. It sort of writes itself, or at least is worth engaging with for that concept alone, but to Robert R. McCammon’s credit, he does keep it interesting and adds a bit of variety thanks to the structure.
There is a lot of action throughout, too, which keeps that pulpy feeling alive, and is also a big factor as to why The Wolf’s Hour would, one imagines, work quite well as a movie.
Things cut between two different stages in the protagonist’s life, with one thread covering his World War II exploits, and the other being set quite a bit earlier: the time around which he first became a werewolf, with that stretch covering the group of other werewolves he was originally a part of. There is a lot of action throughout, too, which keeps that pulpy feeling alive, and is also a big factor as to why The Wolf’s Hour would, one imagines, work quite well as a movie, since it’s certainly not lacking in excitement and spectacle. It’d need a high budget to do some of the sequences justice, or else some parts might have to be cut to do it with more modest means, but come on, Hollywood. Make it happen. It’s like The Dirty Dozen or maybe Inglourious Basterds, but with werewolves. What’s not to like?
One of Stephen King’s strangest and most sprawling books, Insomnia has moments of greatness, and then some stretches that feel a bit too drawn-out, but it is a rewarding read if you’re invested in the vast multiverse (of sorts) King has built through all his fiction. Insomnia has strong ties to The Dark Tower series, and might well be the most central book, to King’s multiverse, which isn’t strictly one of the mainline Dark Tower books. The references and connections are the best part of it, and also the part that would make Insomnia hardest to translate to the big screen, or the small one.
A television adaptation of Insomnia would still have to deal with some tricky legal stuff, as different studios own the rights to different Stephen King stories, and one would have to have a near-monopoly on everything King-related to properly include everything. Not including everything would make an adaptation of Insomnia ultimately feel less special than the book, and excluding too much would run the risk of an adaptation ending up something like The Dark Tower (2017), which barely scratched the surface of The Dark Tower series. An adaptation of Insomnia executed properly would be something to behold, but it feels unlikely, at this stage. So, it remains up there as one of the better Stephen King horror stories to be without an adaptation (unless you want to count most of The Dark Tower books, which aren’t really horror, or The Eyes of the Dragon, which is far more fantasy than horror).
There’s a whole saga relating to the would-be adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness that’s almost its own epic, and ultimately an unhappy/unresolved one. Guillermo del Toro had spoken about wanting to adapt the H.P. Lovecraft novella for some years, and he did always seem like a great fit for the project, having been well-versed in fantasy and horror throughout his filmmaking career. It seemed like a passion project, but there were setbacks that just kept stacking up (again, like a behind-the-scenes story of despair and sadness, in a way), and then in 2025, it was ruled out that it’d ever happen.
Someone else might try to bring this novella about a doomed expedition to Antarctica that gets weird (and, you know, Lovecraftian) to the big or small screen at some point, but for now, it stands as one of those famously unadapted works of fiction. Some movies have made Lovecraft work before, or taken influence from Lovecraft and made his style appropriately cinematic, but At the Mountains of Madness just seems a little more challenging than the (already quite challenging) other stories Lovecraft wrote that have been adapted, in one way or another.
Of all the books here, Revival might well be the most likely to receive a movie adaptation someday, since it’s not too long, and much of it can be visualized quite clearly. There are some more out-there sequences near the end of the story that could be challenging to film, but not necessarily impossible, at least compared to some of the Stephen King adaptations that already exist out there (like some of the more, you know, alarming or weird parts of IT not making the jump to either adaptation). Josh Boone (in 2016) and Mike Flanagan (in 2020) were both slated to adapt the novel, at different points, though neither attempt came to fruition, even while screenplays were completed in both instances.
Narratively, Revival is about a man going mad with grief, and attempting to connect with the dead, or bring them back to life (“Revival” being the title and all that), which puts it in line with the similarly dark and despair-filled Pet Sematary. That one worked decently enough as a film, even if the book was stronger, so Revival making the jump to the big screen feels more than doable. Unlike some Stephen King stories, it’s not too long, and it finds time to be almost like a coming-of-age story in parts, too, with other King novels and novellas about being young/growing up working quite well in a visual medium (see “The Body”/Stand by Me, Carrie, and The Long Walk).
Blood Meridian could work as a movie, but it would just be a lot to handle, even more than was the case with other noteworthy heavy-going movie adaptations of Cormac McCarthy works, like The Road and No Country for Old Men. As a novel, Blood Meridian is arguably even more iconic than those other works by McCarthy, though part of that has to do with its notoriety, and both the quantity and overall graphicness of the violence. It’s about bounty hunters losing their collective minds and enacting an escalating series of murderous raids on Comanche people or Mexican villagers, for the most part. And there’s a mysterious figure who goes by Judge Holden, who seems to have some kind of otherworldly influence over the other members of the hunting party.
Holden’s a character who helps tip Blood Meridian into horror territory… well, it’s him and the brutality of the novel that give it a horror feel. It is classified as a gothic Western, too, so it doesn’t feel like a stretch to suggest it’s a work of horror alongside being a grim Western drama. How far a movie adaptation would lean into the horror is entirely up for debate, at this stage. There have been different attempts made at getting an adaptation off the ground, and it could still happen one day, but for now, it’s a story that remains locked to the page, so to speak.
There are movies that have played with the kind of horror most prevalent in House of Leaves, so doing something that isn’t as layered as the book might be feasible. At the center of House of Leaves is a documentary about a house that’s slightly bigger on the inside than the outside, and then there’s also some kind of alternate (and potentially never-ending) realm accessible through the house. This part of the novel is “The Navidson Record,” and you can indeed envision it as a mockumentary horror film, doable in the style of something like The Blair Witch Project, Noroi: The Curse, or Lake Mungo.
A recreation of “The Navidson Record” would be neat, yet that’s only a small part of House of Leaves. There’s doubt over whether the documentary exists in-universe, there’s a man who died while obsessively analyzing the documentary, and then there’s another man who spends the novel looking over the analysis that other man did, himself finding his grip on reality starting to slip. The layering here is a big part of why House of Leaves is so unnerving and memorable, and the same can be said for the formatting and style of the book, which is likely impossible to recreate in the form of an audiobook or even an eBook, let alone a two-hour movie, or even some kind of six-to-eight-hour-long miniseries.