“It wasn’t me, it was this place.”

Last year was dominated by Stephen King tales on the big and small screen, and 2018 looks to continue that awesome trend. The J.J. Abrams-produced Hulu series “Castle Rock” will dive deep into the Stephen King multiverse, bringing together many of King’s stories for one epic saga. With the announcement of a July 25th premiere comes a brand new trailer where horror comes to life.

“Castle Rock is this town that [King] made famous in all these different books; and these two writers, Dustin Thomason and Sam Shaw, came up with this incredibly cool, terrifying, weird, funny idea of a series, new story, that takes place in this town,” Abrams recently told Jimmy Fallon. “And all of these characters from Stephen King’s books sort of are peripherally involved. We pitched it to Stephen King. He went nuts for it.”

From Bad Robot Productions and Warner Bros. Television, “Castle Rock” is named after the fictional town in King’s native Maine that is featured prominently in a number of his novels, novellas and short stories. Per the producers, it combines the mythological scale and intimate character storytelling of King’s best-loved works, weaving an epic saga of darkness and light, played out on a few square miles of Maine woodland.

Castle Rock first appeared in King’s 1979 novel “The Dead Zone”, and has reappeared as late as his 2013 novel “Doctor Sleep” and 2014 novel “Revival”. The name is taken from the fictional mountain fort of the same name in William Golding’s 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies”. “Cujo”, “The Dark Half” and “Needful Things” were set in Castle Rock, while “Creepshow”, “The Stand”, “Sleepwalkers”, “Gerald’s Game” and even “IT” reference the town.

The cast includes Bill Skarsgård, André Holland, Scott Glenn, Sissy Spacek, Terry O’Quinn, Melanie Lynskey and Jane Levy.

The series, which tells an original story set inside the fictional town that Stephen King made famous, debuted a teaser trailer late last year, and you probably noticed some strong references to Shawshank Prison, the primary setting of The Shawshank Redemption. As it turns out, Skarsgård will be playing an inmate in next year’s series.

“Instead of playing a killer clown as he did in IT, this time around Skarsgård portrays a prisoner at Shawshank, who is directly connected with André Holland’s Henry Deaver, a death-row attorney,” he previously told Flickering Myth.

“The only thing I want to stress is that [Castle Rock is] a completely separate thing than Pennywise and IT,” Skarsgård himself recently explained to Rotten Tomatoes. “The world is brand new. It’s Stephen King’s universe… these are places we’ve been familiarized with through his work. But the show is an original story in that world. The character is a lot of fun. He’s — it’s a really weird one. [He’s] so different from Pennywise. I’m using a completely different tool set here for this one.”