The Kingcast

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.