It sure is a good time to be a fan of Stephen King, isn’t it? Though The Dark Tower was a total dud, It has taken the box office by storm and now, we’ve also got Castle Rock to look forward to. Heading to Hulu next year, the new TV series comes to us from King and J.J. Abrams and looks like a real treat for fans of the author’s work, as it’ll dive deep into the Stephen King multiverse and bring together a number of his stories for one epic saga.
For the uninitiated, Castle Rock gets its name from the fictional town in King’s native Maine. It stands as an anchor point across the author’s rich body of work, appearing in novels, novellas, short stories and other works of fiction like Cujo, The Dead Zone and The Body. That presents Hulu with ample material to work with, and the official description from the online streamer teases the following:
“The show 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 is an original suspense/thriller — a reimagining that explores the themes and worlds uniting the entire King canon, while brushing up against some of his most iconic and beloved stories.”
Speaking about the show in a recent interview, Abrams revealed that King himself loved the idea for Castle Rock, recalling the moment when he pitched it to him.
“Castle Rock is this town that [King] made famous in all these different books; and these two 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. 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.”
As for this first trailer that you see at the top of the page, it’s brief and mysterious, not really telling us much about what’s going on. It’s clear, then, that Castle Rock will be shrouded in a fair amount of secrecy when it arrives, but we’re definitely digging the weird and eerie tone that the footage gives off. Plus, it stars It‘s Bill Skarsgard, and that can only be a good thing.
Also featuring André Holland (The Knick), Melanie Lynskey (Togetherness), Sissy Spacek (Bloodline), Jane Levy (Suburgatory) and Scott Glenn (The Leftovers), look for Castle Rock to hit Hulu in 2018.