The Kingcast

The last thing we expected to arrive in ye ol' Kingcast mailbox was an email from Disney+ saying "hey, we think there's a Stephen King connection you might like in our super popular family-friendly cartoon series." Thankfully they did reach out, though, because we ended up with this delightful chat with Big City Greens's co-creator, Shane Houghton, who arrived to fill us in on getting King himself...

This past weekend The Kingcast held a live show at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX. The guest was genre filmmaker Mike P. Nelson who was at the fest for his new flick, a giant killer snake tale called Beware Boiuna starring Jessica Rothe, Kiana Madeira, and Kingcast alum Logan Marshall-Green. It must also be noted that Mike was just announced as the director taking over the SAW franchise. He's a good...

Children of the Corn continues to be a Stephen King staple after all these years so it's fitting that the Kingcast boys get a chance to corner actor and musician Courtney Gains to talk about his experiences playing the red-headed, scythe-wielding, teenage rapscallion Malachai. Of course we also talk about some of his other endeavors as well, from his latest album, Liberation Day (available now), t...

Kingcast favorite Kate Siegel (Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass) returns to the show to discuss her latest genre appearance as the special guest star for the Season 3 premiere episode of The Creep Tapes, debuting next Tuesday, September 15th on Shudder/AMC+.  We talk about the sexual politics of that episode, her working relationship with star Mark Duplass, and how she prepared for one specif...

If you're a weirdo like us here at The Kingcast then you'll hold Casper Kelly's work up as an ideal beacon of the bizarre. From Too Many Cooks to his Cheddar Goblin commercial in Mandy, Kelly's been bouncing between pitch perfect nostalgia and crap-your-pants creepiness his whole career.  He finally got to make a feature film called Buddy, which is essentially what if Barney was really a hellish p...

Are The Boulet Brothers the hardest working drag queens in the world? There's an easy case to be made that they are. From hosting their long-running and Emmy nominated show The Boulet Brothers' Dragula, to guest-editing Heavy Metal, to producing and hosting their Creatures of the Night podcast, it's a wonder Dracmorda and Swanthula Boulet found the time to join Vespe and Breznican to talk over Mik...

This past weekend we lost genre great Chuck Russell, who directed the best Nightmare On Elm Street sequel, one of the best horror remakes (The Blob), and introduced the world to Cameron Diaz in The Mask. Last year we had the great pleasure of interviewing him on this show, so in honor of the man and his legacy we're rerunning that chat this week. Most of the conversation revolves around his remake...

One of the most common questions we receive here at The Kingcast is where to start. It's not an easy question to answer, especially given the mountain of work the author has put out and continues to add on to year by year. So Vespe and Breznican brought in acclaimed genre author Nat Cassidy (When The Wolf Comes Home, Nestlings, I Know A Place) to talk through different titles and determine what we...

NYT Best Selling Author and Kingcast favorite guest Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter) makes his triumphant return to the show to delve into the rural weirdness of Stephen King's Children of the Corn.  Discussion flickers between the original King short story and the not-that-great 1984 film adaptation of the same name starring Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton....

Who better to pontificated about the similarities and differences between two of the most popular American authors of all time than Ray Bradbury's own chosen biographer and your dedicated Kingcast boys. New York Times best selling author, biographer, and journalist Sam Weller (The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury) makes his first appearance on The Kingcast to discuss his relationship...

One of our greatest working character actors joins up for his first appearance on The Kingcast. You know Stephen Root from just about everything, from Office Space to King of the Hill to No Country For Old Men to Man In The High Castle and the recent hit horror/comedy show Widow's Bay. Root shows up ready to rock as we look back over his career, from working with George A. Romero on Monkey Shines...

Obsession rules. It's the latest horror sensation to take over the box office and has the genre community abuzz with how good it is. So naturally we had to get two of the stars on the show to talk about their cool ass movie and their favorite Stephen King things. So, we're joined by Michael Johnston and Cooper Tomlinson and topics include their Stephen King origin stories, which King movie adaptat...

University of Maine Professor (and the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, by the way) Caroline Bicks spent a year combing through King's original manuscripts at his own personal archive and that resulted in an essential book for King obsessives: Monsters In The Archives that gives us new insights into King's process and illuminates paths not taken on some of his most iconic stories, like The Shi...

Screenwriter Jeremy Slater (Moon Knight, The Exorcist, Mortal Kombat II) returns to The Kingcast to talk about... not Stephen King. Well, not directly, anyway. The topic up for discussion is Joe Hill's 2025 epic horror tome King Sorrow which contains many familial references and those don't just include his famous father.  The story centers a group of college friends who uncover the ability to sum...

The very funny Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney had never seen David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, so naturally we had to make them watch it and report back. You know Nick & Brian collectively as BriTANiK from their sketch work at SNL, their writing on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and the two movies they have coming out this April: Pizza Movie, which they wrote and directed and is out now on...

William Sadler has been in some of the best Stephen King adaptations, including the Frank Darabont Trifecta of The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist and now he's on The Kingcast to discuss all that plus detours to his starring role in Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight, his oddly nude bad guy in Die Hard 2, Death in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, and his latest film, a tongue-in-ch...

I hope you brought your sad tissues with you today because this episode gets emotional real dang quickly. Our guest is Wil Wheaton who is returning to The Kingcast to talk about all things Stand By Me and The Body as Rob Reiner's film celebrates its 40th anniversary and Wil steps behind the mic and into adult Gordy LaChance's shoes as he narrates a new audiobook of Stephen King's novella, The Body...

Horror author Nat Cassidy (When the Wolf Comes Home) has a new book of short stories coming out called I Know A Place: Rest Stop and Other Dark Detours so it was only natural that we brought him back on the show to talk about one of King's most beloved short story collections: Nightmares and Dreamscapes. This is one of King's doorstoppers, so me, Breznican, and Nat all pick our three favorite stor...

We have something of an academic detour for you with this episode. Listen along as we're joined by Professor Andy Hageman (Director of the Center for Ethics and Public Engagement at Luther College) who recently got access to the exclusive Stephen King Archive where he got hands on with King's original typed manuscripts and discovered something fairly interesting about King's process, particularly...

Director Natasha Kermani (Abraham's Boys, The Dreadful) is our guest this week and she picked a very interesting title to discuss: Stephen King's collaboration with his son Joe Hill titled Throttle. Kermani is no stranger to the work of Joe Hill, having adapted his story Abraham's Boys last year, and has some keen insights into both father and son's work, especially how both authors wrote about th...

Mr. Clarke himself, Randy Havens, joins The Kingcast boys to talk about the final Stranger Things season, the not-so-chill fans that showed up in its wake, working with Frank Darabont and looking back at Darabont's very first Stephen King adaption: The Woman in the Room. 

For those sensitive listeners out there, consider this fair warning: when our guest Mallory O'Meara (Girly Drinks, The Lady from the Black Lagoon) pops up on The Kingcast, things tend to get a little raunchy and this episode is no exception. She may be a James Beard award winning author, but she also hosts a podcast called Reading Smut. Mallory returns to the show to finally dive into some Dark To...

It is time to return to Mid-World in this final Kingcast episode of 2025 as indie horror star Graham Skipper (Re-Animator: The Musical, Almost Human, Beyond the Gates) joins Breznican and Vespe to discuss the fourth book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series: Wizard and Glass.  We break down the plot, underline how it weirdly mirrors the plot that George Lucas would later use for The Phantom Menace,...

Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were tragically murdered over the weekend and the film community is still reeling. Reiner was not only a kind man, someone dedicated to protecting the rights and freedoms of everybody, and a talented filmmaker, he was one of the very few filmmakers that understood exactly how to translate Stephen King to the big screen. Author Nat Cassidy (The Wolf at the Door) an...

If you're a fan of SCREAM then you're going to want to pay attention to today's episode featuring none other than Stu Macher and Billy Loomis themselves, Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich. They're appearing in the upcoming Five Nights At Freddy's 2 and they decided to stop by The Kingcast to talk about their love of King's work and specifically Frank Darabont's adaptation of The Shawshank Redemptio...