This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley, Professor of Television Studies at Rowan University in New Jersey, Infra Terry Gross.

Halloween is Monday, and today we're kicking off a two-part series of shows to get us in the spirit.

We begin with two guests who love to scare us and do it brilliantly, Stephen King and Jordan Peel.

We begin with King.

Lots of King's books have been made into films or TV series, including misery, carry, the shining,

Salem's Lot, the stand, the dead zone, pet cemetery, castle rock, and fire starter.

Terry spoke with him in 1992 about his book Gerald's Game. A slight warning here,

there are some descriptions that may be unsuitable for children.

The book was long thought to be unfilmable, but eventually was released as a movie by Netflix in 2017.

As the book opens, a married couple is in their forest cabin. They're ready to play an SNM sex game.

She's on the bed, and her wrists are cuffed to the bedposts. She realizes she's tired of this game,

but she can't get her husband to stop. As he forces himself on her, she kicks him where it hurts most.

He collapses, suffers a heart attack, and dies. And she's alone, cuffed to the bed in the middle of the woods.

Now, the horror really begins. Terry asked King what made him think about how corny sex games can be.

Actually, Gerald's Game started with the concept of the woman being chained to the bed. I'd written a book

before a woman and a small child were stuck in a car that was sort of surrounded, if you will, by a

rabid St. Bernard. That book was called Kujo. Essentially, what a lot of that book was was two people

in a very small room, although it did have a shifting perspective so that it went to other characters.

I thought originally, this was the takeoff point for the book, wouldn't it be interesting to see

what would happen if you had one character in a room? The question then became, what caused this woman

to be in this room by herself? And the answer that I came up with was bondage. She's handcuffed to a bed.

And that forced me to sort of consider what causes people to do this sort of thing.

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