We’ve seen plenty of Stephen King adaptations throughout the years, but Hulu’s newest show may be the first original story set in the universe of the horror king’s vast library. The cast and creators of Castle Rock sat down at San Diego Comic-Con 2018 to discuss the show, but this being a J.J. Abrams-produced mystery box series, they couldn’t say much without giving away the surprises.
Castle Rock tells an original story set in the Maine town that famously appears in many of King’s tales. It begins with a death that leads to a discovery in the bowels of the infamous Shawshank prison of a man (Bill Skarsgård) with a mysterious past. This leads Henry Deaver (André Holland) to return to Castle Rock, the town he grew up in, to investigate the happenings in the town.
The first thing one notices about the show is the number of references to previous Stephen King works. Not only is the Shawshank prison prominently featured, but there are references to Cujo, Stand By Me, Pet Sematary, and more. Despite intellectual rights for Stephen King character being all over the place in terms of ownership, the creators of Castle Rock didn’t face many problems when it came to adding Easter Eggs and references: “We made the show with WB and they already have a huge library of material at our disposal because they are responsible for some of the all-time great adaptations,” said co-creator Dustin Thomason, “We also planned out from the start which characters to use, since some kinds of characters and landmarks were sort of naturally applicable and others not so much. We didn’t really run into the problem of desperately wanting a piece of material that was out of hand.”
The most prominent reference is the titular prison from The Shawshank Redemption, which is a central location for the show. Jane Levy, who plays Jackie on the show, finds the prison to be one of the coolest Easter Eggs on Castle Rock. “I am a huge fan of the movie [The Shawshank Redemption] so that was a nice Easter Egg. I also love the idea of Cujo, this psychopathic, unstoppable and raging canine, so I really liked that too.”
It was also noted during the roundtable interview that Levy’s character is named Jackie Torrance, and she confirmed it was not a coincidence.
“Yes, Jackie does have a close relation with a famous King character,” said Levy with a cryptic smile. When asked if that relationship is familial, she replied “Possibly.”
When it comes to the scares that audiences can expect from Castle Rock, Jane Levy said this isn’t like IT. “The whole premise of the show is ‘what if your town is actually the sinister character?’ so in that sense, I do think the scares are slower and creepier rather than quick jump scares.” Show co-creator Sam Shaw looks back at The Shining as an inspiration for the kind of horror they do in Castle Rock. “It’s not always immediately clear to the audience what is a portent of doom or disaster and what is just a quotidian aspect of everyday life.” Coming right out of the highest grossing Stephen King adaptation, Bill Skarsgård does agree with that comparison. “IT is much more expressive, a sort of jump scare type of horror, and Pennywise is extremely expressive and in your face. Castle Rock is more of a slow build, it’s not about the scares as much as it is about the uneasiness of the mystery. My character, The Kid, is less in control and is much about his inner self, as opposed to be extrovert.”
Skarsgård also talked about how he was reluctant to go back to a Stephen King story so soon after playing The Dancing Clown. “They were very secretive about what the show is about,” said Skarsgård. “I just heard that they were interested in me for this thing, and they had a two-sentence description of the character, no script to be read or anything like that, just the Stephen King connection. IT wasn’t out at that time, and I felt like it was just too much of the thing I was just doing, but they were persistent and allowed me to read the pilot and it was completely different and intriguing.”
What can we expect from future seasons of Castle Rock? Sam Shaw confirmed that they will do self-contained stories.
“Our plan was always to approach each season as an unwritten Stephen King novel,” Shaw said.
“He’s a genre unto himself and there are seven or eight well defined sub-genres. We’ve always loved the stories dealing with crime and punishment, and prisons, and Stephen King sort of grappling with real-world monsters – and what we do with them, and where we put them, how we treat them, and whether that makes us monsters. This season is written very much in the shadow of Shawshank and The Green Mile, and stories dealing with incarceration. But then there are great banging monster stories or there are cosmic stories about good and evil.” Then he teases some of the different stories they could pull in future seasons: “We hope to have the latitude to come back to future seasons and just tell a great monster story set in like 1974 or a different kind of story under the influence of a very different Stephen King novel.”
