The Kingcast

Rose Red is Stephen King's take on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, made exclusively for a TV mini-series in the early 2000s. Ghosts, psychics, greedy professors desperate to prove the existence of ghosts and the afterlife, Jimmi Simpson being a creepy weirdo, prune-faced entities, Melanie Lynskey being awesome, this series has it all!

In his sequel to The Shining, Stephen King focuses on a grown up Danny Torrance who is tempted to make the same mistakes his father did, but ultimately overcomes the challenges his father could not. Mike Flanagan's adaptation marries the Stanley Kubrick film and the Stephen King text in a way that miraculously honors both.

You may think you know what this episode has to offer, but trust us when we say that you're not prepared for the insanity that is about to be unleashed on your eardrums.

Carrie is a pivotal moment in Stephen King's career. It was the book that launched him and Brian De Palma's adaptation set King up to be a dominant figure in the movie theater as well as the book store.

Holly Gibney is at it again, this time chasing down a pair of elderly cannibals. Can she find them before they devour another innocent? That's the question in Stephen King's latest book.

On Writing is Stephen King's memoir/how-I-write-good tome that is both inspirational and revealing about how one of our greatest living authors navigates his craft. Personal stories lead into grammar lessons that somehow diverge into editorial and then back to King's childhood where he suffered various traumas, like getting fart on by his babysitter and maybe even seeing his closest friend obliterated by a passing train.

Jessie Burlingame finds herself in one hell of a predicament when a romantic night with her husband goes south and she finds herself handcuffed to a bed with no chance of rescue. It's up to her to fight through the panic and figure out a way out of this impossible situation using only her wits and a secret buried deep with her memories of childhood trauma.

Expect to hear from campers Kate Siegel, Mike Flanagan, Wynter Mitchell, David Lowery, Akela Cooper, Steve Agee, Devon Sawa, Josh Ruben, Flula Borg, Michael Kennedy, James Austin Johnson, Chuck Tingle, Laura Lux, Matt Fraction, Daniel Danger, Trae Crowder, Patton Oswalt, David Dastmalchian, David Farrier, Stephen Graham Jones, Dave Schilling, Josh Gondelman, Mallory O'Meara and Josh Robert Thompson as they recount their favorite short stories from Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

2006's Lisey's Story is King's self-proclaimed favorite novel, but it is one that has proven to be divisive among his constant readers and flies well under the radar of his casual fans. The story follows Lisey, the wife of a famous author, who is trying to cope with the loss of her husband after his untimely death, be there for her sister whose sanity is seemingly slipping away, and all the while having to defend herself against a particularly psychotic fan of her husband's.

Pet Sematary is the one story Stephen King was reluctant to publish and he ultimately did so in order to fulfill his contract with his then publisher. It's the story that examines what a parent would do in the face the most excruciating series of events any mother or father could experience. Sometimes dead is better.

What is one to do when you find an alien spaceship buried on your property? Well, dig it up and start building weird-ass machines that can zap your little brother to a distant planet or sort mail real good. The Tommyknockers isn't one of King's most beloved books, but it does spawn a great discussion when you try to pick it apart.

What is concealed in the mist? Tentacle monsters? Massive behemoths that will squash you without even knowing you exist? Crazy white people? All of the above, it turns out, and every single one of those things are touched on in this episode.

George A. Romero and Stephen King produced 1982's Creepshow and forever changed the landscape of anthology horror. That movie had a massive impact on a whole generation of horror nerds, including today's guest, and now it's time to dig into what still holds up today and what maybe doesn't so much.

Dreamcatcher is Stephen King's return to fiction writing after the accident that almost took his life. It's a novel about a bunch of friends who gather together in the woods as a really weird alien invasion is taking place, and while it does have its fans even King himself dismisses the book as a whiff, written mostly while the author was high on pain killers while his body was mending itself back together. As not great as the book is, the movie is even worse, despite the incredible A-list talent both in front of and behind the camera.

King's first foray into straight Fantasy was this 1984 story, The Eyes of the Dragon, which is a Dark Tower adjacent tale about two young princes in a fairy tale kingdom who are pitted against each other by the king's secretly evil magician, who regular Stephen King fans will recognize as the very same Flagg from The Stand. Part palace intrigue, part YA fantasy, The Eyes of the Dragon is an early departure from the horror realm for the author and is still a gripping read to this day.

Stephen King doesn't have much presence in the video game world, but the notable exceptions to this provide some absolutely bizarre King/Video Game tie-ins. The focus of this episode is on four of these weirdos: The Lawnmower Man, The Running Man, The Dark Half, and the CD-ROM collection of oddities known as F13.

Dolores Claiborne has been dealt a crap hand from life and in her later years she's dealt another blow when she finds herself the main suspect in the suspicious death of her tyrannical boss.

Back in 1992, Stephen King released Gerald's Game, a novel about a traumatized woman named Jessie Burlingame who finds herself alone in a cabin, handcuffed to the headboard of a bed, with only her past and current traumas to keep her company. If she's going to survive this, she's going to have to listen to her inner voice and confront a past trauma that could very well hold the key to her freedom.

What if your cell phone turned you into a zombie? Okay, that's probably already the case, but I mean a real honest to God zombie? That's the premise of Stephen King's 2006 novel and its questionable, shoddy, and rather unpleasant 2016 adaptation starring the usually dependable John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson.

One of Stephen King's early forays into fantasy was 1982's The Talisman, which he co-wrote with celebrated genre author Peter Straub. The story focuses on a young boy who embarks on a cross-country (and cross-reality) quest to save his dying mother by obtaining a magical talisman that could very well cure his mother and save a parallel world also at risk of falling apart.

This episode is sponsored by A24 as they build up to the July 28 release of the fantastic Talk To Me, which is about a particularly grotesque party game involving a severed hand that can open the door to the afterlife. Naturally, things don't go very well when this happens and the result is one of the scariest, most fun horror movies of the year, coming soon to a theater near you.More info can be found here: https://a24films.com/films/talk-to-me

The Stand is Stephen King's epic tale of morality and survival set against the backdrop of a global pandemic that damn near wipes out the entire human race. Good and evil fight over the scraps of humanity in one of King's earliest masterpieces.

A devilish figure arrives in the small town of Castle Rock and he offers items to the townsfolk in exchange for an escalating series of pranks that could very well rip the town apart. Stephen King's Needful Things is an epic book that is darkly funny and also unflinching in its examination of the rot that festers at the heart of small town America.

Stephen King's delicately constructed tale of an innocent man on death row was a phenomenon upon its serialized publication in 1996 and was then adapted into an Oscar-winning movie by The Shawshank Redemption's Frank Darabont in 1999.

That bad, bad OG corn boy Isaac has done returned and there's hell to pay in this inexplicable fifth sequel to 1984's Children of the Corn. Oddly enough, this 1999 film barely features either children or corn, but what we do get is a middle aged religious zealot and a bunch of late '90s teenagers making a ruckus in a small town.

Once upon a time there were two titans of horror named George A. Romero and Stephen King. These masters joined forces to make a horror movie and the results of that was an anthology movie with roots going back to the horror comics of their youth. And thus Creepshow was born.

Night Shift is Stephen King's first collection of short stories and contains some of King's meanest writing. Almost every single one of these stories were first published in nudie magazines before King became famous and he wrote to his audience. That doesn't mean they're not sophisticated in the own right, but he definitely leans into sex, gore, and brutal Twilight Zone-ish twists.

The Jaunt is quite possibly Stephen King's scariest story, all about the perils of ignoring safety protocols while using teleportation technology. While the episode only clocks in at just over an hour and fifteen minutes, it's longer than you think.

When a heroin-smuggling doctor gets stranded on a tiny rocky outcropping in the middle of the ocean he must decide just how far he's willing to go to survive. This Stephen King short story, which can be found in Skeleton Crew, is one of the maestro's goriest tales as the doctor loses his mind and body piece by piece.

Stand By Me is a formative movie for both hosts of this show and every time it comes up the episode tends to be a banger and today's episode is no exception.

Danse Macabre was Stephen King's first non-fiction publication. Released originally in 1981, this tome promised to cover the history and impact of horror fiction from 1950-1980, but with King at the wheel the scope was widened significantly as he couldn't help but fold in the works of Stoker, Shelley, Lovecraft and many others.

Stephen King was such a big fan of The X-Files that he asked to write an episode. The result is Chinga, this weird monster-of-the-week entry that aired during the show's fifth season about a little girl, her (maybe?) witch mother, and an evil doll that makes people hurt themselves.

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a controversial entry in the Stephen King adaptation discussion. Some, including King himself, think it strays too far from the book while others hold it up as a classic of the genre.

The Dead Zone is the tale of a mild-mannered school teacher who wakes up from a long coma and comes to find out he has psychic powers. These gifts turn out to be anything but welcome to Johnny Smith, who can't help but try to use them for good no matter the personal cost to himself.

A mild-mannered handyman becomes obsessed with collecting pieces of the Mangler and rebuilds it in his attic. One night... well, it kinda eats him and then replaces him with a doppleganger whose only goal is find more victims, feed them to the Mangler and drink the blood slurry that comes out.

Christmas Mangler melds together a ton of King references into a movie that can only be described as the pinnacle of elevated horror. Perhaps this is why it seemingly disappeared upon release, but The Kingcast boys have uncovered it and beat all other Stephen King podcasts to this incredible discovery in yet another Kingcast Exclusive.

The day has finally come for The Kingcast to take a look at the infamous Simpsons parody of The Shining from 1994's Treehouse of Horror episode. The Shinning packs so many jokes and spot on references into around 7 minutes that we were able to fill nearly 2 hours talking about it!

The Lawnmower Man is the timeless classic about murder chimps, gratuitous VR sex scenes and Pierce Brosnan's earring that was so faithful to the original Stephen King short story that the author sued the film to get his name taken off of it.

Set in the futuristic world of 2017 where man is hunted for entertainment while the world crumbles into a dystopia, The Running Man stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the everyman Ben Richards who is forced to compete for his very life against the most insane group of killers you could imagine.

Stephen King's On Writing is part memoir, part grammar lesson, and part inspiration. Who better to learn the ins and outs of basic writing from than the master of horror? And he does so in such a folksy, down to earth way that it never feels like homework. Follow the hosts on Twitter: @ScottWamplerRIP and @EricVespe Follow our guests on Twitter: @BeckandWoods

There are so many more Children of the Corn movies than you think there are. The Kingcast is already up to Part 5 and the movies are still in the late '90s. Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror follows a bunch of twentysomethings playing college kids on a road trip to scatter the ashes of their dead friend when they stumble upon a small town concealing, you guessed it, a weird youthful corn cult. This installment inexplicably stars Eva Mendes, David Carradine, Fred Williamson and at least two Zappa children.

The topic once again turns to 11.22.63, Stephen King's epic time travel story in which an average every day teacher is recruited to travel back in time to stop JFK's assassination. It's a tricky thing, messing with time. Turns out the timestream doesn't want to be tinkered with and all sort of weird things happen to our hapless protagonist as he investigates Oswald and a good many of the conspiracy theories before time runs out.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a somewhat overlooked King book about a young girl who gets lost in the Maine wilderness and must survive the elements and maybe even a cruel minor deity in the form of a savage bear as she either stumbles upon rescue or dies trying. A dyed-in-the-wool Red Sox fan, our young protagonist starts imaging her idol, Red Sox's closer, Tom Gordon, is there with her giving her advice along her journey.

The Mist is one of the best Stephen King stories and Frank Darabont made a hell of an adaptation. Both are up for discussion in this week's episode.Also, make sure you head over to Fangoria to cast your ballot for the 2023 Chainsaw Awards (aka the Oscars but with way cooler movies up for awards) by going to https://www.fangoria.com/voting/

Stephen King's The End of the Whole Mess is a slightly different take on the apocalypse from his previous massive entry, The Stand. Here, we're wiped out by the good intentions of a scientist seeking world peace and that he does, but at a pretty dire cost.

Today's episode is brought to you by Blumhouse Productions' There's Something Wrong With The Children (https://www.blumhouse.com/tv) currently available on digital and digital on demand. The topic of this week's show is Cujo. This story of a lovable family dog that turns rabid and tortures a poor mother and her young son in a tiny Ford Pinto holds up very well and today we dive into why we think that is.

Back in 1992, Mary Lambert followed up her popular adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary with a sequel that is flat out bonkers. Tonal shifts that are so abrupt you'll get whiplash, an already checked out tweenage Eddie Furlong in the lead, a totally confused Anthony Edwards in the kindly dad role, bizarre sex dreams involving naked women with dog heads and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

What would you do if you could type in any phrase into a mysterious (and janky) computer and it would become reality? '80s Stephen King posits that the best thing to do is totally erase your jerk family members and replace them with a new loved ones.

Cycle of the Werewolf began life as a calendar that evolved into a novella penned by Stephen King and illustrated by the late, great Berni Wrightson. King himself penned the screenplay for the 1985 adaptation that the hosts of this show think is pretty good, but wasn't accepted by critics or audiences upon release.

Wizard and Glass is a demarcation line in Stephen King's magnum opus: The Dark Tower. At the forefront is a tragic story of young love that left the series's lead character a cruel, empty shell of a man. Book IV of The Dark Tower series ups the stakes and bonds our beloved Ka-Tet even further.