Stephen King’s Favorite Movie Of All Time Isn’t A Horror Movie

Stephen King knows a thing or two about movies. Most of his books have been adapted into films, and he frequently offers up his opinions on other people’s films and TV shows, especially on Twitter (or “X,” as losers call it). For the most part, King tends to sing the praises of horror movies, and that makes sense: horror is his bread and butter, and he’s spent decades scaring people with his tales of terror. With that in mind, you might think King’s all-time favorite movie is a horror movie. But you’d be wrong! 

Speaking with BFI, King rattled off a list of some of his favorite films, and the title at the top of the list isn’t horror at all — although it does come from William Friedkin, who helmed one of the best horror movies of all time, “The Exorcist.” But Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” doesn’t make King’s list. Instead, King named Friedkin’s 1977 box office flop “Sorcerer” to be his favorite movie. “My favorite film of all time — this may surprise you — is ‘Sorcerer,’ William Friedkin’s remake of the great Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ‘The Wages of Fear.’ Some may argue that the Clouzot film is better; I beg to disagree,” King says. 

As the master of horror states, “Sorcerer” is often considered a remake of “The Wages of Fear.” Director Friedkin, who died last year, disagreed with that classification, however. He didn’t see the movie as a remake, but instead as another adaptation of the book that inspired “The Wages of Fear,” Georges Arnaud’s “Le Salaire de la peur.” In any case, “Sorcerer” tells a similar story as “The Wages of Fear,” following a group of four strangers hiding out in South America. Desperate for money, the men agree to take on a potentially suicidal mission. The results are staggering. 

Friedkin’s “Sorcerer” is incredibly tense and sweaty. The four men, including Roy Scheider as a crook hiding out from New Jersey mafia, agree to drive two trucks hauling unstable dynamite. The dynamite is to be used to help put out a fire in an oil well, and to get there, the drivers have to take the trucks through dangerous terrain in the jungle. One wrong move could cause the dynamite to explode and kill them all. Things grow extremely tense and deadly, and the men more or less go out of their minds from all the stress. Friedkin creates an almost unbearable level of tension, particularly during what might be the most iconic scene in the film, as one of the trucks tries to cross a rickety bridge.

King is right to single this movie out: it absolutely rules. Friedkin himself listed it as a favorite among his films. “I love the film. It’s the favorite of all the films I’ve made. It’s the only film I’ve made that I wouldn’t change a frame of it. It’s the film that came the closest to my vision of it,” he told Yahoo Entertainment. I think it’s fair to say that most film fans hold “Sorcerer” in high regard today. However, that wasn’t always the case. For one thing, when “Sorcerer” hit theaters in 1977, it was a notorious box office flop. Part of the reason for its failure might have to do with the title: “Sorcerer” is one of the names given to one of the trucks in the film, but audiences thought the title implied some sort of supernatural/fantasy element. 

It also didn’t help that “Sorcerer” opened around the same time as a little movie called “Star Wars.”

“It came out a week after ‘Star Wars,’ and I think that’s one factor,” Friedkin told Vulture. “‘Star Wars’ changed what people expected to see from a movie, right up to this day.” To Yahoo Entertainment, he added: “I don’t know how [‘Star Wars’] personally affected the business [of ‘Sorcerer’], but it was a massive hit. It was a vacuum cleaner. It sucked up audiences everywhere. It was massively hyped, and it appealed to people of all ages. So that affected everything. And as I say, it changed the template for a Hollywood film.” 

It also didn’t help that Friedkin ran up a high budget (about $22 million). Thanks to the box office success of “The Exorcist,” Friedkin was given freedom to pretty much do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was to shoot on location, not just in South America, but in the various locations that open the film to introduce us to the characters — places like Paris and Jerusalem. Friedkin later called the production “dangerous,” adding: 

“[I]t was way beyond what I would do today. I would never risk my own life and the lives of others the way I did on this film … It was extremely dangerous to do so much of it, and I had a kind of sleepwalker’s certainty that I could pull it off and that nobody would be hurt. But it was life threatening. The scenes on the bridge, a lot of the driving, much of which the actors did themselves.”

When “Sorcerer” finally opened, it took in only $9 million. Critics didn’t seem to care for it, either. However, over the years, its reputation grew, and the film was restored in 2013 and a remastered cut was released on home video in 2014, where it found a whole new audience. As Friedkin told Vulture, “The audience didn’t take to it, and the critics didn’t like it. Now there’s almost been a complete critical turnaround.”