Interviews
[Interview] “Castle Rock” Cast and Creators Talk Easter Eggs and Building Upon Stephen King’s World
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.”
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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