31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 3 (Stephen King's The Langoliers)

AURORA BOREALIS? At this time of day, at this time of year,
in this part of the country, LOCALIZED entirely within a Stephen
King miniseries???

You may be wondering "What? Why this?"as you look on the subject of today's writeup. Maybe you have familiarity with The Langoliers, and maybe you don't... but either way, it's a bit of a deep cut when I haven't ever covered something more popular. The Shining this is not... but beyond the simple answer of "it's my marathon", I've got justification. Personal history, if you will. Let's go back to the past for a moment, albeit the past of memory and not... whatever the hell is going on in this story. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. Okay. It's 1995. I'm a kid and I'm spending the weekend with my parents up at our cabin in the woods. It's lovely, if not quiet and isolated. Playing around with other kids, heading out to the diner on the highway, going swimming in the river. You know. Fun. The important thing happens when we get home. My sister, who did not come along and instead opted to relax at home (BIG MOOD, now that I'm older, by the way), is watching something on TV. Wow, what is this? It looks kind of interesting. Then it goes to commercial and I see what it is. Stephen King's The Langoliers. This is, as I've gone into before, a source of primal fear for me. Thanks to some... shall we say choice encounters with horror at a young age, I was batshit terrified of Stephen King. But this? This didn't look so bad, and it stuck in my mind. Here's the weird thing. I know 2003 was the breakout time when I started reading King, thanks to the Dead Zone TV series that came out around that time. I also know, however, that the titular Langoliers were in my imagination sometime before then... and it had to be before 1998, because of the eras of my imagination. Sometime between that cabin return in 1995 and the new era of my imagination and storybuilding in 1998... I had to have sat down with those VHS recordings and watched The Langoliers. I wasn't even planning on covering it here and now, but the other night I just saw the book collection on the shelf, pulled it down... and got sucked right back in again. Well. Here we are at last. Let us talk about The Langoliers.



Released in 1990 as part of the novella collection Four Past Midnight, The Langoliers kicks off the first of those four novellas. When it was actually written, I have no idea... which tends to be important for this period of King's life because the King stories of the 80's were defined by both his white-hot streak of great ideas and his rampant substance abuse. (For more on this, you can read about The Tommyknockers from a few marathons ago.) I wonder this because the premise of The Langoliers is, to be charitable to a man who was and is a writing inspiration to me, completely batshit bonkers. It's a time travel story, but one in which the reality of time travel is unlike any I've ever seen before. There's no fussing over fixed points or predestination paradoxes. Time, in The Langoliers, is far from being just a social construct of humanity. It has its own presence, a living essence which moves with us as we experience our daily lives. Without that essence, the world is a dessicated empty husk of what it was. Everything is there, but it's deserted. There is little for the senses to pick up. No odors, no echos, nothing. Food and drink are without flavor, matches won't light. The present is life, and the past is lifelessness. Oh, and the group of stranded people who get stuck in the past in this story got there because the plane they were flying on flew through a rip in the fabric of space/time thought to be the Northern Lights, which you can only safely traverse if you're asleep; staying awake and going through it means you disintegrate, leaving behind only specific material objects. We haven't even gotten to the titular Langoliers yet... and let's just get that over with, hm?


It is impossible, given how I experienced this story, for me to ever know how it landed for people between 1990 and 1995. Maybe the slow tense buildup and race against time in a timeless world worked when it was all on the page and in the imagination. Our stranded passengers puzzle out the rules of the dead world, deal with mishaps and madmen, and struggle to refuel their plane and fly right the hell back through their rift in time... all as a crunching sound gets closer and closer. Something is coming. The Langoliers are coming. Then the money shot of the miniseries happens and it's fucking shit. Oh dear God. The Langoliers is 4 hours long, with commercials as aired. 3 of those hours are mystery and buildup to the mystery noise. Then the Langoliers come and... they're really really bad CGI Pac-Man monsters who munch through the world and leave nothingness in their wake. It fits with the bonkers lunacy a bit, but oh my God is the CGI garbage. This isn't even me judging from a modern standard, too; in 199X I thought it was ridiculous as well. Stephen King wrote a story where the present is alive and the past is dead, and little Pac-Man beach balls devour the husk of what once was the world, forever and ever, as time marches on. Its TV adaptation went with TV budget CGI to realize this, and botched it. And yet. And yet. There's something to be said here. The past of The Langoliers is haunted, and so too are the pasts of at least two of the characters. Nick Hopewell, a British government agent who's killed before and is haunted by the ghosts of what he's done for queen and country, gets to sacrifice himself to ensure the others can live. He disintegrates in the time rip at the end, staying behind with his own ghosts to ensure the presents of the rest. Then there's Craig Toomey (played by Bronson Pinchot in the TV version who just like, has all the ham.) the businessman, an unhinged character who's the origin of the term Langoliers. Because his father was an emotionally abusive workaholic who told him to get perfect grades or the Langoliers would eat his lazy ass. The Langoliers are a metaphor. The Langoliers are child abuse. Toomey is unable to let go of his past, and so the Langoliers eat him in the end. There's some shit going down here, see, and it's kind of thematically interesting. Beyond that... it's just a really wild and out there story. It's ironic, then, that a story aobut being haunted by the past should so suddenly haunt me to a degree that I had to write about it for here... but here we are. Is The Langoliers good? I have no idea. All I know is, it's really damn weird and I think I'll leave it at that.