The Innocents is the creepiest Stephen King movie that King didn’t write

polygon.com:

With a new movie version of Stephen King’s Firestarterjust arriving and a third adaptation of his novel Salem’s Lot on the way, it’s worth wondering whether creators will ever run out of King material to recycle or reboot. If they do eventually hit a point of diminishing returns on reusing the same material — and with King books now being mined for TV miniseries on every streaming network from HBO Max to Epix, they might — at least there’s the option of making stories that feel like Stephen King classics. Stranger Things, a series openly inspired by King’s work,is the most prominent and successful example, while projects like Midnight Mass or Marrowbone often capture one particular aspect or another of King’s writing. And the chilling new horror movie The Innocents comes closer to feeling like a King story than most actual adaptations of his work do.

There’s no one model for what “a Stephen King story” feels like — the same man wrote the streamlined fantasy novel Eyes of the Dragon, the detail-soaked post-apocalyptic epic The Stand, and the monster-free coming-of-age story “The Body,” later adapted as Stand By Me. The Innocents specifically feels like King in the “kids in trouble” mode he brought to stories as diverse as Needful Things, The Institute, It, and yes, Firestarter — all stories where children are struggling to deal with threats far beyond their experience range, with the adults around them proving helpless at best and harmful at worst.

Written and directed by Norway’s Eskil Vogt (co-writer of frequent best-of-2021 list-maker The Worst Person in the World), The Innocents follows a group of children navigating their growing supernatural powers. But while that description seems a little familiar in an era of