Has any popular novelist of the past 30 years had as much commercial success at the box office as Stephen King?

The Maine-based writer has been penning terror tales ever since his teens, and Hollywood has been snatching up the rights to his increasingly lengthy and elaborate books practically from day one. It's not hard to see why. King, a child of the 50's, grew up marinating in a stew of inspirational media like the 50's sci-fi movies he gobbled up double-feature matinees of every weekend, the famously ghoulish EC horror comics of the period like The Vault Of Horror and Tales From The Crypt and novels and short stories from giants of the sci-fi/horror fields like Richard Matheson and H.P. Lovecraft. Elements of all of these books and movies would find root in the dankly fertile soil of King's imagination, which would quickly spout into a series of compulsively readable novels which would insert the shambling zombies and blood-drooling vampires of King's wasted youth into the very real world of the 1970's, where Watergate, the fallout from Vietnam and the worsening energy crisis opened up a dark, yawning abyss of general unease which King ruthlessly and brilliantly exploited.

King's first published novel, 1974's Carrie, was an achingly relatable tale of a social misfit named Carrie White who, tormented incessantly by her high school peers and mentally beaten down by her fanatically religious harridan of a mother, finally snaps, and using her nascent psychic abilities, finally gets even following a particularly unforgivable bit of ritual humiliation at the senior prom. Despite it's clumsy structure (assembled to resemble a series of newspaper clippings and interviews with eyewitnesses who survived Carrie's terrible wrath), Carrie's don't-get-mad-get-even hook is an irresistible one, and Brian De Palma's elegant 1976 film adaptation (featuring a heartbreaking performance by Sissy Spacek as the poor, shamefully mistreated Carrie White and a supporting cast filled with countless familiar faces, including a young John Travolta in his film debut) peeled the narrative down to it's bare essence and heightened it's best attributes with De Palma's typically hypnotic visual sheen. Soon, the film was a smash, and King's following best sellers were quickly snapped up by film and TV producers eager to glom onto the same brand name. Tobe Hooper brought an eerie visual sense to his 1979 TV miniseries version of King's 1976 book Salem's Lot, which depicted the invasion of a sleepy New England town by vampires. While television standards and practices of the time toned down the more gruesome aspects of the book (although a shorter, two-hour version of the film which played theatrically in Europe added some additional gore), and the transformation of the film's chief vamp heavy Barlow from a cultured, Bela Lugosi type into a snarling, Nosferatu-inspired ghoul was probably insisted upon by the producers who wanted a more visceral "monster", Salem's Lot still packed an atmospheric kick that resonates even today. No less a cinematic legend than Stanley Kubrick tackled King's 1977 haunted hotel shocker The Shining for his 1980 film version, with Jack Nicholson delivering an iconic performance as Jack Torrance, caretaker of the isolated, snowbound Overlook Motel who finds himself slowly but surely losing his mind over the course of an endless winter, terrifying his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son (Danny Lloyd), who has a psychic connection to the evil spirits that have collected in the motel over the past 80 years. Despite being brilliantly shot and scored, King was nevertheless dissatisfied with Kubrick's vision, eventually producing and writing a 1997 TV miniseries version (with former Wings star Steven Webber in the Jack Torrance role) which hewed closer to the book's narrative and offered up more of the underlying emotional core even if director Mick Garris couldn't match Kubrick's coldly beautiful visual sheen.

After provided the original screenplay to George A. Romero's enjoyably schlocky ode to the 50's horror comics of his youth, 1982's anthology feature Creepshow (even taking the lead role of the segment "It Grows On You", where he delivers the memorable line "Ewwwww, meteor shit!!!"), 1983 became the year where King's name suddenly became a ubiquitous cinematic commodity, when no less than three major films with his name attached were released to theaters. Bodily horror specialist David Cronenberg brought a chilly gravity to his haunting adaptation of King's excellent 1979 novel The Dead Zone, with a pre-caricature Christopher Walken delivering a terrific performance as a schoolteacher named Johnny Smith who suffers a terrible accident and slips into a coma for four years, only to discover, upon waking up, that he has the ability to see the future of those he comes into physical contact with, which eventually spurs him into a fateful decision involving a governmental candidate (Martin Sheen) who has the potential to bring the country to ruin. The other two King adaptations of '83 had more modest, B-level aspirations, like John Carpenter's Christine, about a possessed 50's Plymouth Fury with a bad attitude, and Lewis Teague's gruesomely effective Cujo, about a hulking St. Bernard that contracts rabies and terrorizes a young mother (E.T. mom Dee Wallace) and her son (Danny Pintauro) who are trapped in a stalled car. Both films don't pretend to be anything other than they are, and remain efficient scare fare, even if Christine plays like Carrie with a sex change for it's lead character, a high school nerd played by future director Keith Gordon who uses his connection to his prized new "girl" to gain crunchy vengeance against his tormentors (I especially liked the scene where Christine corners one of the punks in a narrow, blocked-off alleyway, then squeezes herself into the space, squishing the punk like a bug).

After the Kingsploitation glut of '83, the remainder of the 80's had barely a single year pass without at least one King project on the big screen, ranging in quality from the first "serious" screen adaptation of King's work, Rob Reiner's achingly sincere Stand By Me (adapted from King's Different Seasons novella The Body) to the howlingly inept schlock of the road rage thriller Maximum Overdrive (which marked both King's directorial debut and swan song), both released in 1986. Most of the movies adapted from King's text in this period ranged somewhere in the middle of those two extremes; competent, workmanlike horror pieces that haven't aged well in the past two decades. Children Of The Corn, Firestarter, Silver Bullet, ...the 80's culminated in the critically reviled box-office smash Pet Sematary, which followed the text of King's horrifying book (wherein a small town doctor is possessed to resurrect his dead son, in a twisted intertwining of Frankenstein and Poe's The Monkey's Paw) closely enough but swapped the tragic gravity of King's tale for gross-out gore.

The 90's dawned with a trio of King adaptations that, like in 1986, ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Graveyard Shift was an ugly programmer about giant, mutated rats and bats spawning under a decaying lumber mill. the highly-rated ABC miniseries It featured a brilliant performance by Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown, the physical manifestation of an ancient evil infesting the small town of Derry, Maine, but it barely skimmed the surface of King's sprawling masterpiece of a novel. And Rob Reiner returned to King's world in Misery and ended up directing Kathy Bates to an Academy Award win for Best Actress, in a grimly compelling battle of wills between a popular romance novelist (James Caan) and the psychotic "number one fan" (Bates) who rescues him from a car wreck and nurses him back to health, before forcing him to complete one final book featuring his fictional heroine Misery Chastain. However, the commercial popularity of King's work on the big screen began to wane even as the ratings for his TV projects began to swell. While early 90's big screen offerings like Sleepwalkers (King's first feature-length screenplay), The Dark Half and Needful Things played to mostly empty theaters, ABC found a large audience for Mick Garris' eight-hour adaptation of King's 1978 epic The Stand (about an America decimated by a virulent plague and how the survivors rally into two opposing groups). The same year (1994), Frank Darabont made his directorial debut with The Shawshank Redemption, a Capra-esque wish-fulfillment drama about an wrongfully-incarcerated prisoner (Tim Robbins) and how his friendship with a fellow "lifer" (Morgan Freeman) affects him over the course of two+ decades. The horribly-titled film blipped through theaters despite rapturous reviews (earning 7 Academy Award nominations along the way), but has attained a fervent cult following over the past decade, becoming a programming staple on TNT and a form of cinematic "comfort food" for many viewers who have watched it time and again (few of which realizing that the film sprung from King's poison pen). More TV adaptations like 1997's remake of The Shining and 1998's eerie Storm Of The Century (written specifically for the small screen by King) soon followed, even if the big screen King gold rush of the 1980's slowed down to a trickle (although Taylor Hackford's excellent Dolores Claiborne, featuring another terrific performance by Kathy Bates, failed to find much of an audience)

The 90's came to a conclusion with two major events in King's life and career. On the big screen, Frank Darabont's haunting The Green Mile (adapted from King's book which was initially published in six serialized, monthly installments) became the first King Flick since Misery to become a sizable box office hit, grossing over $130 million and earning 6 Academy Award nominations (but, like Darabont's earlier period prison King film, The Shawshank Redemption, walked away with no wins). In real life, King got hit by a van while walking by the side of the road near his Maine home and came within a hair of losing his life entirely. Instead, he faced months and years of agonizing physical therapy as his shattered bones gradually mended and he graduated from wheelchairs to crutches and eventually his own two feet again (although with a pronounced limp he'll likely carry for the rest of his life, much like the protagonist of his earlier novel and film Misery). King, never shy about raiding his own life for material for his fiction, would work his accident into not only his epic Dark Tower series (going to far to pull a Charlie Kaufman and insert himself into the last two books of the series), but also Dreamcatcher, eventually brought to the screen in 2003. The first novel he completed following his accident, one wants to give King leeway for the utter insanity of his Stand By Me meets Alien concept, which must have been concocted in a painkiller-induced stupor, a TV remote in one hand, a tube of Pringles in another, and a notepad balanced on his lap. The film, directed by the normally reliable Lawrence Kasdan, is one of the most bugshit crazy pieces of sci-fi/horror since Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce. Where else can you see Donnie Wahlberg as King's obligitory Magical Retard bellowing "'Ooooby 'ooooby 'OOOOOOO!", Morgan Freeman with R. Lee Ermey's eyebrows, a character speaking into the barrel of a gun like it were a telephone receiver, depictions of the inside of a man's mind like it were the warehouse from the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (replete with boxes labelled "masturbation"), and aliens that shoot out your ass? A throwback to 80's King at it's schlockiest, you'll either be horrified or find a new cult favorite in this fascinating oddity. Other King movies were far more respectable, like Scott Hicks' genial Hearts In Atlantis, a sepia-toned bit of 60's nostalgia that, despite a fine performance by Anthony Hopkins, lacked the interweaving narratives of King's wonderful book. David Koepp's thriller Secret Window (adapted from King's novella Secret Window, Secret Garden) was criticized for it's rather obvious "twist" ending, but the skillfully eccentric performances by Johnny Depp and John Turturro and a darkly amusing ending (changed - for the better - from the novella) pleasurably reminiscent of the kind of Vault Of Horror comics King cut his teeth on made it an enjoyable watch. Most recently, TNT had a ratings success with it's 2006 miniseries Nightmares & Dreamscapes, which adapted several of King's short stories into a one-hour anthology format, with varying results. the best of the bunch was undoubtedly "Battleground", a taut, technically impressive installment about a career hitman (William Hurt) who has the tables turned on him when a mysterious package that arrives in his apartment spews forth a regiment of nasty little green army men who wage war upon him in a ruthless and bloody manner. Shot by director Brian Henson with nary a word of dialogue, it's a miniature masterpiece of tension that made the remainder of the show's episodes seem anticlimactic in comparison. This past summer's 1408 offered up a canny collection of spook tropes, with John Cusack as a professional haunted house debunker who lives to regret it when he takes up residence in an "evil" room in a New York hotel despite the grim warnings of the manager (Samuel L. Jackson, and yes, he does deliver the PG-13 film's sole F-Bomb). Liberally adapted from King's very short story (all of 20 pages) by ace biopic scribes Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander (Ed Wood, Man On The Moon) and slickly directed by Mikael Hafstrom, 1408 is The Shining lite, but Cusack's terrific performance and the enjoyably old-school approach to the film's mounting sense of unease makes this an engagingly goosebumpy good time (the expanded director's cut on the DVD is slightly preferred, with a darker ending that's more appropriate to the film that preceded it).

So, what's next for America's Literary Boogeyman? Frank Darabont makes his third King project with next month's The Mist, adapted from King's superb horror novella about a group of people held hostage in a small supermarket by a macabre mist that blots out the world beyond the automatic doors and brings grim tidings to those holed up inside. Darabont also has the rights to King's novel The Long Walk (written under his defunct pseudonym Richard Bachman) about a cruel marathon of the future wherein 100 young men and boys are subjected to a non-stop stroll where, if they let their foot speed drop below 4 MPH more that four times in a row, they're shot deader than dogshit. Hostel director Eli Roth has optioned King's 2006 novel Cell (not to be confused with the 2000 J-Lo serial killer movie), about a signal broadcast specifically to cell phone users that turns them into slavering maniacs. King's 1984 fantasy epic The Talisman (co-written with fellow genre scribe Peter Straub) is planned for a TNT miniseries, but keeps getting pushed back by script problems. And a second season of Nightmares & Dreamscapes is in the planning stages. King recently celebrated his 60th birthday, and despite rumblings about retiring after he published his last Dark Tower book in 2004, he's still as prolific as ever (even landing a gig writing the cleverly-titled column "The Pop Of King" at the back of Entertainment Weekly magazine a few years back, lending his folksy, cantankerous thoughts on the broad spectrum of pop culture). As far as the movies go, will King's name be remembered a hundred years from now? Who can tell? But, for the time being...long live the King.