5 Terrifying Stephen King Villains That Still Haven’t Been in Movies (Including Two Related to Pennywise)

Stephen King has built a career on scaring his constant readers for over five decades now, and some of his most terrifying nightmares have naturally made their way to the big screen. The scares that his writing on the page can conjure are a different breed from what the adaptations deliver, but that hasn’t stopped some of his villains from becoming cinematic icons. Characters like Jack Torrance and Annie Wilkes are some of the scariest humans that have ever graced the big screen, while Pennywise, Cujo, and Gage Creed have become monsters that transcended their stories and taken over pop culture.

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Despite the success of King’s book and the movies and shows adapted from his work, there are still plenty of monsters and villains from his work that only live in the pages of his books. Some of them are isolated to the story that they live in, but others have far-reaching implications across a lot of King’s work. Not only do they carry weight in multiple books and franchises, but fan theories often point toward them having major connections to other notable monsters. Spoilers for Stephen King books will follow.

5) Jack Mort

The primary antagonist of The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, Jack Mort, is a sadistic serial killer known for carrying out his violence in ways that can be seen as accidents by passersby. As a result, he’s responsible for the tragedies that befall many of the major characters in The Dark Tower, dropping bricks from above or pushing characters to tragic circumstances. Like any good serial killer, he hides behind a facade of a normal guy, but his mind is one filled with an eagerness to kill.

What makes Mort such a unique villain in King’s work, and why he’s a tough one to put on the big screen, is that Roland enters his mind and controls his body after walking through one of the doors in Mid-World. Before all this happens, though, we meet him via his other encounters with the characters, which makes Roland’s eventual arrival into his body a big surprise.

4) Mother

In the pages of King’s Revival, the book spends a lot of its time setting up pastor Charles Jacobs, his bizarre experiments, and his obsession with using electricity to heal people. His experiments reach a nightmarish conclusion, though, when he attempts to bring a woman back to life and instead opens a doorway to The Null. Though people on Earth may have religious beliefs that point to heaven or hell, the truth is that The Null is the final destination for all humans, and its ghastly Lovecraftian landscapes are occupied by every dead human, now slaves to the giant ants that occupy The Null, all of whom serve the entity known only as Mother. This nihilistic view of the afterlife and its horrifying imagery is some of King’s best work, and no one has been able to bring them to the big screen.

3) The Little Sisters

Only appearing in the short story “The Little Sisters of Eluria” and set within the larger mythology of The Dark Tower, the Little Sisters are a troop of vampires that pose as nuns and carry sick people into an infirmary and raise them back to health, only to make a meal out of them afterward. The sad reality of their monstrous form is that at one point, they were actual nuns who did help people when needed, but after being infected by vampirism, they continued their human traditions to quench their hunger. King is no stranger to not only vampires but entire clans of the blood-sucking beasts, but The Little Sisters are one of his most terrifying. Much of this stems from the dichotomy of utilizing the innocent facade of nuns to draw their victims in, only to reveal their vampiric forms and feed after their victims have recovered from illness.

2) Dandelo

Here’s where the Pennywise connections begin to be felt. In the pages of the final The Dark Tower book, the remaining members of the ka-tet encounter Dandelo, a creature that, like Pennywise, feeds on emotions. While IT has a hunger for fear, on the flipside, Dandelo feeds on laughter. Though this may sound like a Monsters, Inc. scenario, it can still get deadly, as the beast nearly causes Roland to die from laughter. Like Pennywise, Dandelo is also capable of casting extreme illusions on his prey, which he uses to create the emotions he feeds on. Fans have long theorized that perhaps their siblings or cousins, which King has said isn’t the case, but he won’t rule out the fact that perhaps they’re of the same “species.”

1) The Crimson King

The Crimson King may be one of the ultimate antagonists in all of King’s oeuvre, but his importance isn’t made fully clear until The Dark Tower novels are almost completed. Despite his late arrival, The Crimson King’s plan to topple the tower and, as a result, eliminate all of existence across countless realities makes him the biggest possible threat in all of King’s fiction. Take that and add on that countless other King villains are actually working at his behest, like Randall Flagg, and you get King’s Thanos equivalent.

Just like Dandelo, The Crimson King has major ties to Pennywise/IT, with many fans believing that the dancing clown may be the offspring of the Crimson King. In the pages of King’s works, both monsters are capable of changing shape at will, have near-omnipotence (though IT’s is largely confined to Derry), but both also have access to channel and utilize the Deadlights on their victims. King has never confirmed their connectivity, such as if they’re father and son or even one and the same, but the similarities are too much to ignore.