20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About Stephen King

7. He's Directed Some Crappy Movies...

Yes, there's been a lot of terrible adaptations of Stephen King stories over the years. Sometimes that's because the film in question doesn't actually take the source material into account (like the incredibly loose and incredibly crappy The Lawnmower Man). Sometimes it's because the source material wasn't that good in the first place, and yet it lead to numerous direct-to-video sequels with diminishing returns (The Mangler franchise, anyone?)

Then there are the cases when the blame lies solely with Stephen King himself. The writer was famously unimpressed with Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining, which jettisoned most of the back story, the ending, and the many autobiographical elements of Jack Torrance's descent into madness. In 1997, King scripted a TV miniseries of The Shining...and it was terrible.

Worse still was Silver Bullet, which King adapted from his novel Cycle Of The Werewolf; Sleepwalkers, which was an original screenplay that should've remained in a trunk; and then Maximum Overdrive, a film about trucks gone wild trying to kill people that King not only wrote but directed €“ a decision which lead to him never doing the latter again, so awful was the finished result.