Movie or Series? How do you like to be scared on screen?

My copy of The Devil in Silver.

I’m currently reading The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle, which is the source for the next series of the horror anthology series The Terror. As Dan Simmons, who wrote The Terror, the historical Arctic horror that was adapted for the first series, has recently died, and as there are several horror adaptations on the horizon, I thought I’d look at what feels like a fairly modern debate – do you adapt for movie or TV?

Now, when I say TV, I’m not talking about ‘Made for TV’ movies and the like. We all know that in today’s streaming platform-centric model, an episodic adaptation can garner as much, if not more attention and views than a movie version. Think Stranger Things, Alien: Earth or Mike Flanagan’s many Netflix series for recent examples of scary hits consumed on the smaller screen.

That’s not to say that scary movies are being left behind – this year’s Oscars shortlist is clear evidence that’s not the case, with the transcendent Sinners being nominated for SIXTEEN bald golden statuettes, while Frankenstein managed to net nine. But the days of authors vying solely for movie rights are long gone, and that’s a good thing.

While Shakespeare unsurprisingly takes the top spot as the most adapted author of all time, if you look at living writers, then Stephen King comes out on top. Now, while there have been plenty of movie misfires from the man’s catalogue (The Dark Tower!), there have been many good films as well. If we focus on horror then you’ve got Carrie, The Shining (yes I know King hated it) and Doctor Sleep, The Long Walk and IT. But if you look at the series adaptations of his novels, I’d argue you’ve got some of the best versions, again with IT, but also the 1979 Salem’s Lot, The Stand and The Outsider. 

If we look at film makers in horror then for many people (including me) the current master is going to be Mike Flanagan. But which is his best, and which format? In the movie category you have two strong King adaptations (Doctor Sleep, Gerald’s Game) but then you have his run of serialised adaptations for Netflix, which are astounding. Rotten Tomatoes gives its top three as The Haunting of Hill House (93%), The Fall of the House of Usher (90%) and The Haunting of Bly Manor (88%). These are all adapted from, or inspired by, published works.

So, which one is better? Well, as with so many things, the answer is not black and white. Ultimately it depends on the source material as well as the preferences of the viewer (I’m generally more of a series man). So, I thought it might be fun to take a look at some horror titles that have yet to get a screen version of any form and try to work out whether it would work better in the cinema or in episodes. I can’t guarantee to completely avoid spoilers but any that sneak through will be very minor, I promise.

The four titles I will be talking about

1. Bat Eater, and other names for Cora Zeng - Series

Kylie Lee Baker’s Bat Eater was one of the best books I read last year, so much so I placed a pre-order for her next release, Japanese Gothic as soon as I could. Set in New York during the Covid-19 pandemic, the book packs multiple compelling themes and plot threads into a genuinely creepy and scary package. Cora has lost her sister, in fact she watched her murder and heard the killer call her ‘Bat Eater’.

As the main story opens, Cora is working, along with two colleagues, as a crime scene cleaner. Baker mines this with some wonderfully dark (as in very dark) gallows humour, but they soon start to wonder if they have uncovered someone targeting New York’s east Asian population. And then there’s the ghost hiding in the shadows of Cora’s apartment, a hungry one.

In my opinion, if Bat Eater was optioned for production, you could not do it justice in a movie. It needs space to breathe on the screen. You’ve got Cora and her friends trying to investigate a killer while also dealing with the fact that Cora is haunted, possibly by her dead sister. Then you have the backstory of Cora herself which feeds into her trauma, her guilt and her conflicted feelings around her sister, her family and herself. There’s so much in this book that I wouldn’t want to watch a film of it as I’d be worried about how much of the story itself remained. A series though? I’d be glued to that.

2. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Series

Now, while Bat Eater was one of my top books from 2025, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter was my number 1 read. This is a masterpiece of writing, merging horror and history together into something dark, frightening, heartbreaking and astonishing. The book is largely based around the diary of Arthur Beaucarne, a pastor in a frontier town in the newly-created state of Montana. He is approached by the mysterious Blackfeet Indian Good Stab, who wants to tell his story.

The novel covers the events of the Marias Massacre of 1870, when hundreds of Blackfeet were killed by the US Army. It also confronts the actions of the buffalo trappers, who slaughtered the great herds of the American plains for their pelts. This is where the book’s title comes from, as Good Stab is the one who hunts the hunters. He is an outcast from his tribe, altered by a confrontation with a monster, the one that Good Stab calls the Cat Man. 

Make no mistake, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a horror novel, but it’s also much more than that. A masterfully written piece of historical fiction as well as a revenge thriller and a tale of identity and belonging, with a lot of blood. As with Bat Eater there is so much in this book that it cannot be given the treatment it needs and deserves in the time-limited format of a movie. It’s a series I would watch, but with the trepidation of any fan who worries if they’ve adapted it properly.

3. When the Wolf Comes Home - Movie

So this is my nod for a movie adaptation. Nat Cassidy’s When The Wolf Comes Home is one hell of a ride. It is an intense, exciting, unpredictable and often very messy experience of a read. It’s effectively a road trip, albeit one with a truly original monster chasing our protagonists. Then the FBI become involved as well and it all starts to kick off in a very bloody fashion. 

When The Wolf… contains several horror set pieces, one of which left me feeling…things. The plot motors along, seemingly powered by bloodshed. I think that it would benefit from the tighter adaptation that movie scripts necessitate in comparison to the episodic format. That way the viewers could be carried along this narrative roller coaster, from the moment we meet Jess and she discovers a frightened boy hiding in the bushes outside her apartment building, all the way through her desperate attempts to keep her new ward safe from what is chasing him and to its unexpected denouement. It would be harder to maintain that momentum through a series.

4. The Lamb - Movie

The Lamb by Lucy Rose was in my top three reads of 2025, along with Bat Eater and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I thought about this one for a while, as it could definitely be a series, but in the end I decided I would put it in the movie column. The Lamb follows Margot, a young girl living in Cumbria in the north-west of England in a dilapidated woodland cottage with her mother. 

Margot’s mum likes to pick up those who stumble upon their cottage, maybe after they’ve had a mysterious puncture a couple of miles up the road. Then later, Margot and her mum have themselves a meal of these ‘strays’. Their life is progressing until one day someone new arrives. Eden is different from the others who have come to their door, and things begin to change.

The Lamb is a deeply haunting and affecting book. It creeps under your skin and it stays there. You know what is coming fairly early on, but while you might think that is a misstep by Rose, it’s not. I was wrecked before it hit, and the ending stayed with me, lingering in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. This is why I decided it would work as a film – to maintain, prolong and push the unease, just as the book does. I haven’t seen Bring Her Back but from talking with people who have, I feel like a movie of The Lamb, done well, could produce the same response in its viewers.

So there’s my take on four recent and excellent pieces of horror writing and how they would best work on the screen, big or small. But here’s a final question for you: do we need the adaptations? Genre fiction is in a boom at the moment, and horror is definitely a part of that. We’ve all got an adaptation we’re unhappy or straight up angry about, haven’t we? Why not let the monsters stay on the page, and from there, climb into our heads? Simple: we are visual animals. We consume so much of the world around us through our eyes, so we want those images dancing in front of us.

Here’s to being scared.