Horror literature is creative, engaging, and actually really hard to write. While it may seem like everyone’s trying to dive into the genre and generate cheap scares, it’s not easy to compose a horror story that engages and terrifies. The same goes for movies—horror movies are often highly subjective, precisely because the scares translate differently for each person; many dive into it, but a few find a universal audience.
Horror movies and horror literature have always had a love-hate relationship; the genre’s best books exist because a novelist got somewhere a camera couldn’t, while adaptations of those very books had directors who figured out how to follow them there. It’s rare to see adaptations that either match or deepen their source material rather than just borrowing its premise; that’s why we celebrate the best adaptations and keep them in high esteem. Here are the ten perfect horror movies based on books.
10
‘The Haunting’ (1963)
Before Mike Flanagan made a hit miniseries, The Haunting of Hill House, Robert Wise adapted Shirley Jackson‘s 1959 novel of the same name into a very compelling film, The Haunting. While Hill House is still regarded as one of the finest haunted-house books ever written, its first adaptation from 1963 is widely considered one of the genre’s greatest examples of restraint. Wise shows almost nothing directly; no ghosts, no gore, just doors that breathe and walls that seem to bulge, depicting an ambiguity that makes the film so unnerving.
Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), an investigator of the paranormal, invites a small group with histories of psychic phenomena to spend time in the notoriously haunted Hill House, hoping to gather scientific proof of the supernatural. Among the group is Eleanor “Nell” Vance (Julie Harris), a guilt-ridden woman who spent years caring for her now-deceased mother; she quickly becomes the house’s fixation, and the film never makes it entirely clear whether Hill House is truly haunted or whether it’s all just Eleanor’s breakdown that the house is simply amplifying. Martin Scorsese named The Haunting one of the scariest horror movies ever made, while Jackson herself was famously unimpressed at the time, finding it too talky and too far from her book; still, the film’s reputation has only grown since.
9
‘Misery’ (1990)
Stephen King may not give his seal of approval to any old adaptation of his many novels, but Rob Reiner‘s adaptation of his 1987 novel Misery is one of the exceptions. In fact, King wrote in his short story collection Stephen King Goes to the Movies that Misery is one of his favorite book adaptations ever. Kathy Bates stars as Annie Wilkes, and her portrayal often puts the film and the character among the greatest of all time; Bates even won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role, and it remains the only Oscar any King adaptation has ever won.
In Misery, James Caan plays Paul Sheldon, a novelist who kills off the heroine of his best-selling romance series and crashes his car in a blizzard on the way to deliver his “real” next book. He’s pulled from the wreckage by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse and self-declared number-one fan of Sheldon’s novels; after realizing who he is, Annie takes in and nurses Paul back to health in her isolated farmhouse, right up until she reads his new manuscript and discovers what he’s done to her favorite character. Suddenly, Misery turns into one of the tightest two-act thrillers ever made, built almost entirely on Bates cycling through affection, rage, and violence. It’s hypnotizing and quite a thrill to watch.
8
‘Let the Right One In’ (2008)
Tomas Alfredson‘s adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist‘s novel of the same name, Let the Right One In, does something few vampire stories manage: it makes the terror feel almost secondary to the tenderness. Alfredson, who wasn’t especially interested in vampire mythology before deciding to make this film, deliberately stripped down the novel’s more overt horror elements to focus on the relationship at its center, and the result is a film that’s genuinely moving as often as it is unsettling. Lindqvist wrote the screenplay himself, as well, so this adaptation has a unique seal of approval from its author.
Let the Right One In follows Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a bullied, lonely twelve-year-old boy living in a gray Stockholm suburb; he strikes up a cautious and uncertain friendship with his new neighbor, Eli (Lina Leandersson), a pale, unusually strong child who never comes out during the day. As Oskar and Eli grow closer, trading messages in Morse code through their shared wall, dead bodies start turning up around the neighborhood, drained of blood, connected to the man who poses as Eli’s father. Let the Right One In is a scary coming-of-age story that also feels warm and emotional, though that part comes a bit reluctantly.
7
‘American Psycho’ (2000)
Mary Harron‘s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis‘ notoriously graphic 1991 novel, American Psycho, turns 1980s Wall Street excess into a slasher movie with elements of subversive and dark comedy. Harron went through a long process of adapting the film until finally getting writer Guinevere Turner on board; the two made a deliberate choice to keep the novel’s central ambiguity in the adaptation alive rather than resolve it. Though the novel is very graphic, the film really gives Christian Bale a chance to lead us into the yuppie life of a sociopath whose spiral into untethered violence doesn’t seem to bother him or anybody else.
The protagonist of American Psycho is Patrick Bateman (Bale), a Wall Street employee who moves through the world as if it isn’t up to his high standards. Whether it’s his coworkers’ (wrong) opinions, terrible music taste, or a disappointing dinner, Bateman finds everything around him lackluster, tasteless, and a competition. Although his frustrations drive him on a killing spree, none of it draws attention, because everyone around Bateman is too locked into their own vanity to notice those around him. It seems that some audiences at the time didn’t fully grasp the intent behind American Psycho, but whether you prefer the book or the movie, this is an interesting, brilliant story that resonates even today.
6
‘Battle Royale’ (2000)
Kinji Fukasaku was a legendary filmmaker in Japan; his movie series, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, is one of the most famous and boldly made series about the rise and fall of a yakuza clan. However, his final film as sole director didn’t include any organized crime—though it was an adaptation of a very violent book. Battle Royale is an adaptation of Koushun Takami‘s 1999 novel of the same name, and it remains one of the most controversial films ever released in Japan. Quentin Tarantino has called it one of the most influential films of the past few decades, and its fingerprints are all over everything from The Hunger Games to an entire genre of death game stories.
Battle Royale is set in a near-future Japan gripped by economic collapse and youth unrest; to reduce violent outbursts among youth, the government selects a single ninth-grade class each year, straps explosive collars to their necks, drops them on an island, and forces them to kill each other until one student remains as the sole survivor. Interestingly, when Fukasaku was a teenager, his entire class was drafted to serve in WWII. Known as a dedicated user of the cinema verité style, Fukasaku directs Battle Royale with a matter-of-factness while bringing some personal fury to the material, as the film keeps circling back to who these kids were to each other before the game started. If you’re interested in some international horror adaptations, this movie will toe the line between thriller and horror in the perfect way.
5
‘Ringu’ (1998)
The world-famous horror, Ringu by Hideo Nakata, was adapted from Koji Suzuki‘s 1991 novel and is the movie that kicked off the entire J-horror boom and, a few years later, an entire wave of American remakes starting with 2002’s The Ring. Notably, Nakata and screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi took real liberties with Suzuki’s source material, which leaned more toward science fiction, with the curse eventually explained as a virus rather than a ghost; the novel also reimagined Sadako in the visual language of the traditional Japanese onryo instead.
Ringu follows Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), a TV reporter and single mother, as she investigates an urban legend about a videotape that kills anyone who watches it exactly seven days later, only to find the tape herself, watch it out of professional curiosity, and get the phone call confirming the curse is real. What follows is a race against the clock, with Reiko and her psychic ex-husband tracing the tape’s origins back to a young woman named Sadako. Sadako’s appearance, the long black hair and unnatural, crawling movements, became one of the most imitated images in modern horror, and her climbing out of the TV screen remains one of the genre’s most purely unsettling moments—it makes you almost glad they took liberties with the adaptation.
4
‘Psycho’ (1960)
Did you know Alfred Hitchcock‘s monumental film Psycho is an adaptation of a novel? Hitchcock built his famous film on Robert Bloch‘s 1959 novel of the same name, which was itself loosely inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein. Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano did also take some liberties with their adaptation, making a crucial change from the book, which turned out legendary. They cast the young and sympathetic-looking Anthony Perkins instead of Bloch’s original older, bigger Norman, making the character’s eventual reveal feel even more monstrous and tragic.
In Psycho, Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane, a secretary who impulsively steals $40,000 from her employer and goes on the run to meet her long-distance boyfriend. Along the way, she checks into the secluded Bates Motel and meets its shy, nervous proprietor, Norman Bates (Perkins), who lives under the domineering thumb of his mother in the house on the hill above the motel. Psycho changed film’s conventions and standards with its mid-movie murder of the protagonist, which was unheard of at the time. Decades of slasher films have tried to recapture what Psycho did on a small budget in black and white, but the original novel material helped shape the film.
3
‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs is another deadly book adaptation. Jonathan Demme‘s book-to-screen vision of Thomas Harris‘ 1988 novel of the same name (from the Hannibal Lecter series) remains one of only three films in Oscar history to sweep the top five Academy Awards. Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally stayed close to the structure of Harris’ novel while dialing up its psychological dynamics for the screen; the best decision made was the willingness to make Clarice Starling’s competence, rather than her victimhood, the engine of the story, helping it transcend the classical trappings of serial killer thrillers. This wasn’t a big change from the novel, but it was still a good call to keep.
The Silence of the Lambs follows Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), an FBI trainee sent to interview imprisoned psychiatrist and cannibal Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) about the patterns of behavior of an active serial killer, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). Lecter, intrigued by Starling, starts trading cryptic clues about Buffalo Bill in exchange for details about Clarice’s traumatic childhood. A fun fact is that Hopkins appears on-screen for roughly sixteen minutes total (though other sources claim it’s more like 25 minutes); despite that, he turned Lecter into one of cinema’s most iconic villains and continued to play Hannibal in other adaptations.
2
‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968)
Rosemary’s Baby is Roman Polanski‘s American directorial debut. The film was also his first-ever adaptation of a novel, which was written by Ira Levin in 1967; Polanski’s adaptation is, by Levin’s own account, “possibly the most faithful film adaptation ever made,” making him wonder if Polanski even understood that he had the freedom to make changes to his work. However, considering Rosemary’s Baby is one of the greatest horror films ever made, the faithfulness to the novel elevates both versions greatly and makes both even more interesting. Levin wrote a sequel to the book in 1997 and dedicated it to Mia Farrow, who plays Rosemary in the film.
Rosemary’s Baby follows Rosemary Woodhouse, a newlywed who moves into a gothic Manhattan apartment building with her struggling actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes). Rosemary befriends their oddly attentive elderly neighbors and soon becomes pregnant. Her pregnancy is marked by bizarre happenings throughout, making the entire story a slow, suffocating tightening of paranoia; every doctor, neighbor, and eventually her own husband starts to seem complicit in something Rosemary can’t quite prove. With Polanski’s current reputation, acknowledging his films is hard, but Rosemary’s Baby has made great strides, effectively creating the template for prestige occult horror that many films have followed since.
1
‘The Exorcist’ (1973)
The Exorcist is a bold novel written by William Peter Blatty, who adapted it himself for William Friedkin‘s legendary film of the same name. Interestingly, Blatty was inspired to write The Exorcist after watching Rosemary’s Baby, but he also found other inspiration in a real 1949 case he’d heard about as a Georgetown student. Blatty set out to write a novel about faith rather than fear, and the tension between the theological and the visceral is greatly presented in the film, thanks to Friedkin’s constrained direction.
The Exorcist follows Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), an actress filming on location in Georgetown whose twelve-year-old daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), begins exhibiting inexplicable and increasingly violent behavior. As doctors fail to find anything physically wrong with her, Chris turns to a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist in the midst of his own crisis of faith, Dr. Damien Karras (Jason Miller), who eventually enlists a veteran exorcist, Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), to help drive out whatever has taken hold of Regan. More than fifty years on, The Exorcist is still the film every possession movie is quietly trying to be.
The Exorcist
- Release Date
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December 26, 1973
- Runtime
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122 minutes
- Writers
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William Peter Blatty