The Worst Creature From Another Dimension Is Clearly TV’s THE LANGOLIERS

We are living in the golden era of Stephen King adaptations. Not every new movie and TV show based on his books has succeeded, but I promise you things have never been better. I know because I grew up during the nadir of King adaptations, the ’90s. My childhood was full of cheesy and/or awful King-inspired series and films. But, with all apologies to The Tommyknockers, one from that time stands out above the rest as being the absolute worst. It turned a great, suspenseful, horrifying, creative novella into a joke by delivering the worst creatures from another dimension ever put to screen. That miniseries is The Langoliers.

As the headline of this post hopefully makes clear, I am only here to bury the “time-keepers of eternity” that appeared on ABC’s two-part 1995 miniseries, The Langoliers. The “monstrous beings” of King’s short story, published in his anthology book Four Past Midnight, are fantastic. They consume the past and anything that lingers there. They are physical manifestations of capitalism, a promise to grind up anyone who dares to stop for even a moment in time. Here’s just one of King’s many great passages conveying the sheer terror of seeing and hearing these creatures:

Faces lurked below the surfaces of the racing balls— monstrous, alien faces. They shimmered and twitched and wavered like faces made of glowing swamp-gas. The eyes were only rudimentary indentations, but the mouths were huge: semicircular caves lined with gnashing, blurring teeth. They ate as they came, rolling up narrow strips of the world.

What’s genuinely funny is that the langoliers of ABC’s miniseries for the most part really do look, sound, and move the way King describes them in his novella. Yet they still look awful for reasons that should have been obvious before anyone greenlit the doomed series.

The first is that the CGI of the mid ’90s was simply not up to the task of making “real” langoliers. The technology wasn’t there. (It apparently wasn’t up to the task of making a “real” plane as the trailer shows!) The result is they don’t look like nightmarish interdimensional beings out of time. They look like low-res Chain Chomps someone imagined while playing Super Mario Bros. with a 104-degree fever. ABC’s langoliers look like someone trying to make a knockoff SyFy movie paid their friend’s kid brother to “do the computer.” These munching monstrosities don’t appear “malignantly joyful” the way King described them. They seem like they came from a failed Atari game the company quickly buried in a literal ditch so no one could play it ever again.

They look dumb. Really, really dumb. Impossible to overstate how dumb they looked.

Even if the CGI of the ’90s had been up to the job, though, there was another inherent problem any adaptation would have faced. One of the things that makes King’s langoliers so scary on the page is that it’s impossible to fully comprehend what they are and what they look like. While the characters can definitely see, hear, and describe them, the langoliers are so horrific and move so fast they have a nebulous quality. King writes:

A Texaco fuel truck was parked on the outer taxiway. The langoliers pounced upon it, high-speed teeth whirring and crunching and bulging out of their blurred bodies. They went through it without pause.

The human brain of this dimension can’t process just how scary these beings really are even as it watches them. They evoke a feeling of existential dread that can only be felt, not seen. A visual adaptation can’t fully convey that.

That’s not an insurmountable problem. It’s more than possible to bring cosmic horror to the screen. You can adapt ethereal characters and dimensions that capture their ethereal quality. But to overcome the limits of an adaptation you must make your onscreen version literally scary. ABC’s langoliers looked stupid in the truest sense of the word. And after the long anticipation of seeing them—after hearing them in the distance unseen, of hearing a scared character describe why everyone should fear them—seeing what they actually looked like was so much worse than if they’d appeared at the start. The hype made everything worse.

The Langoliers miniseries had other problems (understatement). One of its biggest made the arrival of its creatures from another dimension even worse. The two-part special completely miscast Bronson Pinchot as its most terrifying human character, Craig Toomey. He’s the driven businessman haunted by his abusive parents who tells the others about the langoliers. He grew up fearing them and is the one most responsible for making viewers dread their arrival.

I love Bronson Pinochet, truly, and he’s not even bad as Toomey, he just wasn’t right for the role. The result is that the more he talks about the langoliers the sillier they sound. When they then arrive and are, somehow!, even sillier it’s like a big joke. And it’s absolutely hilarious.

It’s supposed to be absolutely terrifying. So, you know, not great. And since “not great” is definitely the nicest thing anyone has ever said about TV’s The Langoliers, you know they were the absolute worst.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist who would watch The Langoliers right now if you asked. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.