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Stephen King Podcast The Losers’ Club Joins the Bloody Disgusting Network – Stream These Essential Episodes
Join the Losers for a chronological journey over long days and pleasant nights
Like The Beatles’ Let It Be song, the road through Stephen King’s dominion is both long and winding. For nearly half a decade, The Losers’ Club has kept their high beams on as they weave through the Master of Horror’s never-ending oeuvre.
Since January 2017, the Losers have been clutching their shovels with a chronological deep dive into every page and every adaptation involving Sai King. From eight episodes surrounding 1986’s It to four hours dedicated to 1991’s Golden Years, nothing is spared.
They’ve hardly been alone, either. Along for the journey have been a number of familiar faces among these parts: Thomas Jane, Mary Lambert, Wil Wheaton, Mike Flanagan, Joe Bob Briggs, Tananarive Due, Jerry O’Connell, Tom Holland…they’ve all stopped by to chat.
It’s been a long walk for the Losers over the past half-decade, and they’re far from reaching their proverbial Tower. Currently, they’re in the mid-’90s with King, mere weeks away from sitting down to palaver over 1997’s Wizard and Glass, and the road ahead is ever winding.
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (Grant)
Yet the road is also constantly revolving. After all, King has hardly slowed down behind the typewriter, delivering book after book each and every year. Because of this, the opportunity for adventure — and the nightmares and dreamscapes within — are seemingly infinite.
So, there’s always time to catch up. To help you along the way, we’ve strung together a handful of highlights in The Losers’ Club back catalogue. It’s a collection of episodes that are as diverse and eclectic as the voices within — and, yes, there are many.
The ka-tet behind this Club is more or a less a family that includes co-hosts Jenn Adams, Daniel Caffrey, Randall Colburn, Ana Marie Cox, Ayisha Gatson, McKenzie Gerber, Justin Gerber, Mel Kassel, Dan Pfleegor, Rachel Reeves, Michael Roffman, and Lara Unnerstall.
Join the Club over long days and pleasant nights via iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, RadioPublic, Acast, Google Podcasts, and RSS. You can also become a member of their Patreon for commentaries, King rarities, exclusive interviews, a Discord community, and much more.
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Updated: The Stephen King Interview
In the Summer of 2022, King himself guested on the show to discuss the Napoleonic complex of corgis, transgressive horror, keeping relationships in the face of fame and age, his sense of scatological humor, and whether or not he appreciates 1994’s The Mask. He also digresses on how he’s learned power chords and teases a sequel novella to a famous novel.
IT Coverage
In the Fall of 2018, the Losers went deep into King’s magnum opus — and the source of the podcast’s namesake — with eight exhaustive episodes. Each section of the book receives its own episode with a special preamble dedicated to the history of the novel. What’s more, the two-month run extends to the 1990 miniseries featuring an interview with director Tommy Lee Wallace.
Danse Macabre
In 1981, King sought to unpack his own influences and examine horror’s evolution through mediums in a dense work of nonfiction called Danse Macabre. In this far-reaching episode, the Losers intertwine the personal and the analytical as they zero in on some of King’s pop cultural theories and apply them to the author’s work. One question dominates the discourse: What makes something scary?
Pet Sematary Coverage
Sometimes … two episodes are better. That’s a lesson the Losers learned in Winter of 2018 when they scaled the deadfall of King’s coldest novel. The book has always been a Club favorite, and the Losers prove it with a discussion that digs six feet under the terrifying prose. It’s not all chilly as talks about bathtub foreplay keep things relatively balmy. Bonus: Seek out the accompanying adaptations episode that features a hilarious interview with Mary Lambert.
Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes on Stephen King and the Power of Genre Writing
During the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo of Spring 2019, the Losers were fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with authors Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. Together, they discuss their respective histories with Stephen King (the likes of which include a little rock ‘n’ roll), the Master of Horror’s history of Black characters, the enduring power of genre writing, and the exciting diverse future of horror. It’s a chat that’s as informative as it is inspirational.
The Tommyknockers
Surprise, King’s tale of psychic, battery-obsessed aliens in a small Maine town divided the Losers as much as it has his fans, resulting in a spicy chat that touches on inaccessible characters and irredeemable endings, not to mention its underlying themes of addiction. No matter your view of the book, you’ll find a Loser to root for in this heated and delirious episode.
Thomas Jane on The Mist, Dreamcatcher, and Parisian Absinthe
From the get-go, the Losers have been championing Thomas Jane. Much to their surprise, their hero stopped by the Barrens to chat in October of 2017. In addition to promoting 1922, Jane shares wild anecdotes surrounding both Dreamcatcher and The Mist, waxes poetic about Paul Westerberg and The Replacements, and talks up Twin Peaks as the best slice of TV he’s ever seen. It’s an unpredictable chat that left the Losers’ smiling from beginning to end.
Night Shift Coverage
One of the podcast’s earliest episodes finds the Losers delving deep into the 20 stories that make up this excellent collection, as well as their so-so film and TV adaptations. Recorded in a marathon session that ate up the bulk of a day, it gets goofy, insightful, and even emotional—specifically about two of the collection’s non-horror entries, “The Last Rung On The Ladder” and “The Woman in the Room.” A suitably exhaustive dive into what’s still probably the author’s best collection.
The Stand Miniseries Recap
A new adaptation of The Stand was always going to be an event. The fact that CBS All Access — sorry, Paramount+ — dropped the 10-episode miniseries in the midst of a pandemic only exacerbated that notion. For two months, the Losers were on this apocalyptic beat, delivering weekly chats and a potpourri of interviews: Owen Teague shares his approach to Harold Lauder, Katherine McNamara defines Julie Lawry, and showrunner Benjamin Cavell stops by twice.
The Best of ’80s Stephen King
When the Losers finish a decade, they hand out some awards. The Kingies are those awards, and in this funny and freewheeling episode they celebrate the best and worst of King’s ‘80s output, from Firestarter to The Dark Half, with some detours in between for one Richard Bachman. Consider it a retrospective on a landmark decade that found the author getting sober, slaying his alter ego, and introducing us to the likes of Pennywise, Annie Wilkes, and a poor dog named Cujo.
Desperation Coverage
In 1996, King released Desperation and The Regulators on the same day, presenting them as “mirror” novels that, despite existing in different universes, featured variations on the same characters. While the latter is by and large a disposable bit of splatter, Desperation is one of King’s most challenging and thematically rich novels, an exploration of “dark Christianity” that’s been informed by his recovery journey. Like the book, the Losers’ discussion veers from the sacred to the profane, with discussions of King’s vision of God folding into musings on the book’s most goriest sequences.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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