As far as tone is concerned, Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is unlike any Stephen King adaptation audiences have ever seen. There have been King films in the past that have funny lines and funny scenes, but the 2025 movie is the first to go all out and consistently use extreme horror as a vehicle for comedy. It’s faithful in its own way to the source material, but it injects a wholly original energy into the story… and it got me thinking about other King works that could be adapted with a similar approach.
Admittedly, comedy has rarely been one of the author’s artistic priorities, but as he has explored horror, fantasy, western, romance, crime and a variety of other genres, and has also expressed a wonderful sense of humor. It’s rare to finish one of his books without experiencing a few chuckles. There are a number of short stories that are either very funny or at least have a great amount of humor potential, and with The Monkey arriving in theaters this weekend, I figured this would be a great time to highlight some of them.
Afterlife
When I first read King’s “Afterlife” in The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the great Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life – which should explain why the title is on this list.
The narrative would obviously have to be expanded, but the general idea of the story is that after you die, you end up in an office and can choose to A) end your existence, or B) relive your entire life knowing that it’s impossible to change any of the bad things. There’s an absurd simplicity that could be made into a smart and funny feature.
Bad Little Kid
To be honest, “Bad Little Kid” is a story that is actually quite similar to “The Monkey,” in that it involves a supernatural entity that seems to live for torturing a protagonist and killing the people important to them. What makes “Bad Little Kid” special, though, is the image of its titular villain: a horrible young boy with bright orange hair, green eyes, and a propeller beanie on his head. Basically, I imagine a nightmare twist on Dennis The Menace.
The Cat From Hell
“The Cat From Hell” has already been adapted as one of the segments in the anthology film, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, but there is no part of me that would object to a full feature adaptation that further cranks up the insanity from the short story – which is already delightfully nutty. A filmmaker simply needs to take the premise (a professional assassin is hired to kill a cat) and keep the amazing ending (which sees the cat kill the assassin by leaping into his mouth), and then just expand the material with more feline-centric insanity.
Drunken Fireworks
It’s not hard to miss the comedic potential in “Drunken Fireworks,” which sees a war break out between locals living on a lake in Maine who try and outdo each other every year putting on a fireworks show while celebrating Independence Day. Both the escalating conflict and the weird pettiness of the characters make for great comedic material. It can be like Neighbors but with more alcohol and more explosions.
Fair Extension
There is only one novella from 2010’s Full Dark, No Stars that has not been adapted to date, and while all of the stories in that particular book are quite bleak (the others being “1922,” “Big Driver” and “A Good Marriage”), there is an opportunity for a filmmaker to have some dark fun with “Fair Extension.”
A man dying from cancer is given the opportunity from a stranger to extend his life at the expense of a person he hates… and he chooses his best friend from childhood, who he has secretly always loathed. The protagonist’s life becomes great while his “friend” loses everything – and I can imagine it as a movie similar in tone to Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man.
Finn
There is nothing generally funny about a teenager being abducted by a group of kidnappers and tortured for information he doesn’t have, but what significantly lightens the tale in “Finn” (featured in 2024’s You Like It Darker) is the characterization of the eponymous protagonist – who has spent his entire life cursed with extreme levels of bad luck.
This misfortune makes Finn a tragic character by the end of King’s story, but there is definitely latitude to play his seemingly cursed existence for laughs. To cite another movie from the Coen brothers, I can imagine something akin to Inside Llewyn Davis, where the universe just keeps beating the hero down.
The Lawnmower Man
Yes, there is a movie already called The Lawnmower Man, but it is so far removed from King’s original short story that the author actually went to court to have his association with it legally expunged. I’m not sure exactly how a filmmaker might go about expanding King’s horrific fantasy tale to feature length, but I do know that the nightmarish image that is the heart of the material – a naked fat man tracking a lawnmower and devouring grass clippings that it spits out – is so extremely bizarre that it could inspire a film that is as hilarious as it is horrific.
Lunch At The Gotham Café
Would a comedy version of Stephen King’s “Lunch At The Gotham Café” be a touch mean-spirited? Perhaps. But who doesn’t enjoy a mean-spirited comedy now and again? Traditionally, a narrative about a couple going through a divorce and experiencing a horrific event together would end with the couple having their bond reignited via the trauma – but that’s just not the way things play out in this tale, and it could be adapted as a pitch black romance (my only demand is that the final scene of the movie is exactly the same as the final scene in King’s story).
Morality
Again, this one would be a super-duper dark comedy, but with the right filmmaker who could thread the needle tonally, it could be a winner. Like a non-erotic Indecent Proposal, the story finds a financially strapped couple given a unique opportunity to make a whole lot of money: for $200,000, the wife must approach a small child in broad daylight and punch them in the face, and the husband has to capture the event on tape. It’s outrageous, but that’s what makes it darkly funny.
Rat
A writer makes a Faustian bargain with a rodent in order to get over crippling writer’s block. Do I really have to explain the comedy potential here? The novella in 2020’s If It Bleeds has high tension and high stakes – as said writer finds himself sick and isolated in a remote cabin during a storm and opts to sacrifice the life of a loved one for a fresh idea – but the larger circumstances of the story can certainly be played for laughs.
Rest Stop
Narratively speaking, “Rest Stop” is a simple story – following a nebbish writer who channels the spirit of his tough guy pen name so that he can be confident enough to interfere in an incident of spousal abuse he encounters at a highway rest stop. It’s a one-time incident for the protagonist… but where might it lead him if he were to continuously tap into that alter ego? The results could be dark but also very funny.
Umney’s Last Case
A dramatic adaptation of “Umney’s Last Case” already exists as the best episode of the cancelled-too-soon series Nightmares & Dreamscapes, but a humorous take on this material would be very doable thanks to how the story flips a traditional tale. Rather than a creative suffering at the hands of its creation, the twist here is that the creation must fight against the selfish impulses of its creator, as a fictional private detective named Clyde Umney finds himself thrust into the real world while the author who imagined him takes over his danger-and-excitement-filled life.
Word Processor Of The Gods
First published in the early 1980s, “Word Processor Of The Gods” is a story that would need to be updated in some significant ways thanks to advancements in technology, but the premise is what’s important here. It’s essentially about a computer that magically has the ability to change reality, and while it’s a cute story as it exists, a filmmaker wouldn’t really have to work too hard to imagine some comedic consequences.
We don’t know if any of these ideas will ever become a thing, but one thing we do know is that the future is rich with upcoming Stephen King adaptations – with at least five set to debut in 2025 alone. The Monkey, starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslaney, Elijah Wood and more, is the first of them, and it’s a total riot. Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for plenty of coverage of the new horror comedy, and be on the lookout for all varieties of Stephen King-related news.