228: The Langoliers with Elan Gale

The Running Man is one of the darker stories to escape the mind of Stephen King. Originally published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, the story follows Ben Richards as he attempts to evade deadly stalkers in order to win a boatload of cash in order to save his sick family. The Arnold Schwarzenegger movie adaptation is pretty different, but both interpretations of the material ended up being strangely prescient.

What would you do if you fell asleep on a flight and woke up to find a damn near empty airplane was still chugging along? That's the premise of Stephen King's novella The Langoliers and it remains one of his most fun, pulpy stories, despite a rather sketchy TV mini-series from the mid-'90s.

We sometimes break the Kingcast's usual format and this episode is one of those. Hey, we've been at this for four years, we gotta stretch our legs from time to time. Thankfully the Kingcast boys love video games almost as much as they love Stephen King and with that a beautiful idea was born.

A young couple find themselves trapped in the middle of nowhere with a creepy old dude, his mail order Ukrianian wife, and a disturbing child locked up in a shed. This is, unbelievably, the eighth entry into the Children of the Corn franchise and there are still more to go after this one.

The Shining chronicles the slow descent into madness as one very troubled father succumbs to the ghosts (both literal and metaphorical) gnawing at his psyche while acting as the winter caretaker of the fancy Overlook hotel. The debate between the quality of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of King's masterpiece has been raging for over 40 years and even spills into this very episode.

Sleepwalkers is a 1992 feature film directed by Mick Garris based on an original screenplay by our show's namesake about a mommy cat person and a son cat person who love each other a little too much while on the hunt for a human virgin to sustain their supernatural cat people powers. 

Author Mike Noonan loses his wife and his ability to face a blank page in one sad moment. Through his grief, he's able to find himself again by helping a single mother in a difficult custody battle with her very rich, and kinda evil, in-laws. This late '90s King tale has a strong following even if it's not considered one of his classics.

1408 is a Stephen King short story that proves you don't need a whole hotel to be haunted to be scary, just one "evil fucking room." This is a banger of a short story and a really good movie that is often overlooked (ahem) in favor of his other haunted hotel story.

Stephen King's alter ego, Richard Bachman, wrote a bunch of dark, cynical, and strangely prescient short novels before it was revealed that King was behind the pen name. At that point, King released them all in a collection called The Bachman Books, which featured the stories Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man. They're all fascinating looks into the darker corners of King's psyche and one of them was even allowed to fall out of circulation.

Popular podcast Screen Drafts invited the Kingcast boys onto their show to rank the top 13 Stephen King Adaptations, so it only seemed right that they journey over to The Kingcast and bring their ranking expertise for a wild curveball episode.