If You Love Stephen King's The Stand, It's Time To Stream This Underrated Movie With 94% On Rotten Tomatoes

Name: New Life
Genre: Horror

By Cristina Trujillo

Published Mar 18, 2025

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Stephen King's best-known works, but its post-apocalyptic dark fantasy sets it apart as a uniquely dark and strangely relatable story for dark times.

Stephen King's work has seen huge popularity in recent years, with TV and movie adaptations cropping up all the time. Movie adaptations of Stephen King books have been almost as periodic as the books themselves, lending a huge influence to the horror genre in Hollywood. Filmmakers and actors have taken great inspiration from the far-reaching impact of King's work, resulting in diverse new horror movies from directors like Ari Aster and M. Night Shyamalan. But readers of The Stand in particular may notice its influence in New Life.

Science Fiction & Horror Combine In New Life

With at least one Stephen King adaptation getting released every year since 1980, there are ample horror flicks that imitate them in some regard. New Life was released in 2023 and follows the lives of two women through a virus thriller made to court internal anxieties after COVID-19. The movie is relevant to current times in many ways and recalls one of Stephen King's longest books, The Stand. Both The Stand and New Life question what life might look like if disease truly did sweep the world, making New Life a winner for fans of The Stand.

New Life Is An Underrated & Terrifying Award Winner

New Life Is An Exemplary Directorial Debut

Writer and director John Rosman's first movie was New Life, and it is an absolute dream as far as directorial debuts go. However, it is more of a nightmare to experience as a viewer, with Elsa Gray chasing Jessica Murdock arduously across the U.S.A. Stephen King's The Stand has a controversial ending, with a sudden and abrupt occurrence neutralizing the book's central conflict, and shares a potential dystopian viewpoint with New Life, but New Life may be even more of a satisfying thriller than The Stand, with a perfectly ambiguous ending.

The covers of Never Flinch, The End of the World As We Know It, and The Talisman

Every Stephen King Book Release

Stephen King has plenty of adaptations in the works, but it all begins and ends with his books, and he has exciting projects on that front.

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The latest adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand was disappointing, despite the book being easily one of King's most epic and impressive works. The Stand miniseries wasn't quite gruesome or shocking enough to draw in audiences of movies like IT, while its confusing timeline made it hard for even King fans to understand. But New Life draws on King's themes and focuses them into a tightly-packed feature-length movie with all the drama missing from the miniseries. Readers of Stephen King will love the movie and its examination of a post-COVID world.