Editorials
Let’s Break Down That “Holy Shit” Twist from This Week’s Episode of “Castle Rock”
This article contains spoilers.
“People around here, they forget. They forget the past. It’s written… in blood.”
There have been a few main storylines at play in the second season of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,“ the most compelling of which has focused on a young Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan), the villain from Stephen King’s Misery. Another storyline brings Tim Robbins back into the King Universe as “Pop” Merrill, an important figure in the town of Castle Rock whose final days have been playing out in front of us. And yet another storyline focuses on Pop’s son Ace, killed by Annie but resurrected by mysterious forces deep beneath another iconic King town: Jerusalem’s Lot.
Ace hasn’t exactly been himself since Annie shoved an ice cream scoop down his gullet, but rather his body has been inhabited by a literal ghost from Salem’s Lot past. And this week’s “The Word” set about answering the question of precisely who is inhabiting the bodies of Ace and his murderous pals, taking us back 400 years into the town’s past. In 1619, to be precise, a young woman named Amity and her lover were cast out of New Jerusalem (the town that would later become Jerusalem’s Lot), her own father believing her to be a witch. Out in the woods beyond the town, however, Amity is encountered by a hooded “angel” who turns her life around. She returns to New Jerusalem and fast becomes the new leader of the town, mysteriously restoring New Jerusalem’s crops and saving those who cast her out.
But the good fortune comes with a price, and the so-called “angel” ultimately beckons Amity to kill herself (along with everyone in town) under the promise that they’ll all be resurrected on the 400th anniversary of both Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot. They’ll be able to rule over a whole new world, they’re told. Turns out, Ace’s body has been inhabited by Amity’s lover these last several episodes, and the intended host for the reborn Amity is none other than Castle Rock’s newest inhabitant: the woman who unknowingly set this whole chain of events into motion by killing Ace Merrill and burying him beneath Jerusalem’s Lot, Annie Wilkes.
The possibilities are literally endless in the world of “Castle Rock,” a series that has given itself complete freedom to play around in Stephen King’s sandbox and has this season in particular proven itself to be a real treat for King fans. After all, where the hell else can you see the villain from Misery mashed together with the sordid history of Salem’s Lot? But where “Castle Rock” got really crazy this week was in playing with its own original storytelling from the previous season for a surprise twist you probably didn’t see coming – I sure didn’t.
We had been told that “Castle Rock” would be an anthology series of unconnected tales of King-inspired horror, and though season two has thus far referenced the first season’s events in passing a couple times, “The Word” firmly linked the two seasons together in a way that actually manages to retroactively improve the unsatisfying debut season. The big mystery at the center of the first season of “Castle Rock” was in regards to the identity of “The Kid” (Bill Skarsgård), a mysterious man who starts and ends the season locked up in the bowels of the Shawshank prison. We’re never quite sure who (or what) “The Kid” is throughout the first season – at one point, I was entirely convinced he was Pennywise – and even the season’s finale deliberately made us question whether what we were told about him was even true.
To make a long, convoluted story short, “The Kid” claimed that he was actually an alternate reality version of the season’s main character, Henry Deaver (André Holland); as he explained it, he traveled through a portal in the woods of Castle Rock and became trapped in the wrong timeline, thereby causing all kinds of chaos in the town. This was revealed to us in the season’s penultimate episode, but the finale once again took everything we thought we knew and tossed it out the window. André Holland’s version of Henry Deaver ultimately decided that “The Kid” needed to be locked up in Shawshank regardless of whether his story was true or he’s actually the Devil in the flesh (as many believe). And so he returned “The Kid” to the place where he was found at the start of the season, leaving us unsure of what was really going on.
But over one year later, “The Word” has now come along to finally provide us with an answer that the first season seemed content to only dangle in front of us like a carrot. As we find out in the surprising final moments of this week’s episode, the “angel” who guided Amity to wipe out New Jerusalem back in 1619 was none other than the man we know as “The Kid”! The episode came to a close by returning to the moment Amity and her “angel” met (an encounter briefly glimpsed earlier on), and this time the man removed his hood to reveal Bill Skarsgård underneath. In other words, “The Kid” truly is the Devil – or some form of the Devil, at least – and his master plan is to rule over Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot with his devoted flock, asleep for 400 years and now reborn in the bodies of the present day townsfolk.
One of the episode’s final scenes saw Ace unveiling a statue of “The Kid” during the town’s 400th anniversary parade, with a horrified Pop Merrill looking on – Pop, after all, has been around Castle Rock for a long time, and he seems keenly aware of what’s coming. As for “The Kid,” we’ve been led to believe that Ace has set him free from Shawshank; and with just three episodes remaining, he’s sure to pop up soon to continue his reign of terror.
Unless “Castle Rock” throws another set of curveballs our way this season – and don’t be surprised if the writers do – it would seem we now have the answers we’ve been seeking from the very beginning. “The Kid” is the evil force we’ve always believed him to be – he’s not exactly “It” or “The Man in Black” but he might as well be – and it’s he who has been guiding the various horrific events that have been plaguing Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot dating back to at least the 1600s. In a wild twist on Stephen King’s established world, the only person who may be able to stop him and the denizens of the Marsten House is… Annie Wilkes.
And speaking of which, the Marsten House is of course an iconic location from Salem’s Lot, and it’s certainly not lost on us that “The Kid” and Kurt Barlow aren’t actually all that different. The second season of “Castle Rock” has been brushing up against the storytelling of Salem’s Lot without ever outright delving into the world of vampires, and while the show isn’t likely to head down that path this season, it would seem safe at this point to at least speculate that “The Kid” is the show’s version of Barlow – and that’d make Ace, naturally, his Richard Straker.
Granted, this sort of speculation is probably as off base as my speculation last season that “The Kid” was the entity known as “It,” as “Castle Rock” has primarily been in the business of toying with iconic Stephen King elements rather than outright adapting his stories, but it’s certainly fun to imagine. After all, we still haven’t been provided with the character’s real name at this point in time, so it would seem that anything is very much still possible.
As we build towards a battle between Annie Wilkes and a sort of alternate version of the vampire Kurt Barlow, it’s pretty clear to me that the writers of “Castle Rock” have cracked the code and figured out what the show ought to be, remixing familiar elements from the Stephen King Universe and mashing them together in fresh, exciting new ways. Whereas the first season only lightly touched upon the potential for messing around in the King sandbox, the second season has proven to be a veritable buffet of treats for Constant Readers.
Oh and “The Word” totally brought Tim Robbins back to Shawshank. I rest my case.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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