The King’s castle Psychological series pays homage to horrormeister's literary legacy By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Jul. 27, 2018

Opinion

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This article was published 26/07/2018 (2247 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Castle Rock is a new Stephen King show. But it’s not an adaptation.

Rather, this slow-coiling psychological horror series, which debuted this week on Space TV and is also streaming on Crave, taps into that whole “expanded universe” idea. Producer J.J. Abrams (master of mystery-box television) and creators Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason (the duo behind the underrated TV series Manhattan) have crafted a 10-episode season based on “the characters and settings” of the prolific American horrormeister, homing in on King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine.

https://youtu.be/gXsKCQenpt0

So, is this good or bad for King superfans? And what about the casual, less King-centric viewer, who might be visiting Castle Rock for the first time?

Henry Deaver (played by Moonlight’s Andre Holland) grew up as the only African-American child in Castle Rock, which would be hard enough. When he was 11 years old, he went missing for 11 days and something terrible happened to his father, an enigmatic event for which Henry was blamed.

Now a death-row lawyer in Texas, Henry reluctantly returns to his hometown to help a mystery client, an unnamed kid (played by the unnervingly big-eyed Bill Skarsgard) who’s been found in a dark, dank cage buried under the Shawshank prison. Henry reconnects with his semi-estranged mother, Ruth Deaver (Sissy Spacek); her live-in friend, former sheriff Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn); and Molly Strand (Melanie Lynskey), his childhood neighbour, now selling real estate and popping pills to quiet the constant noise brought on by her psychic abilities.

King completists will already recognize the level of fan service here, starting with recognizable themes, recurring characters and key casting decisions. A young Spacek played Carrie, all those decades ago, while Skarsgard recently did a trauma-inducing turn as Pennywise the Clown.

As the series unfolds, viewers will find themselves pelted with Easter eggs connected to King’s bazillion books and film adaptations. With the Shawshank prison facility looming large over the series, there are also mentions of balloons (It), train tracks (The Body/Stand By Me), a rabid dog (Cujo), a dead dog (Pet Sematary), a bedeviled curio shop (Needful Things) and a botched execution (The Green Mile).

Molly’s real estate slogan even encourages her Castle Rock customers to “Live Like a King!” Ouch.

All these references can be satisfying (ooh, I caught that obscure nod to The Sun Dog in the corner of the frame) or irritating (can we just stop riffing on these other stories and get on with the one at hand?). At their best, they suggest the depth of King’s interconnected universe. At their worst, they embody Abrams’ tendency to self-congratulatory surface cleverness.

But even these occasionally distracting allusions can’t dent the series’ real strength, which is its sense of pervading dread and buried grief. The creators credit “character and settings” created by King, and it’s that second aspect that really feels crucial. Castle Rock’s story is slow to develop – I mean, slo-o-o-w — but the spooked-out atmosphere of the town is there from the get-go. As Molly the real estate agent knows, it’s all about location, location, location.

This sense of place requires no previous knowledge of King arcana. Even viewers who have led a relatively King-free life will feel its inescapable power, from the iron-grey landscape, wintry and dead, without the blanketing mercy of snow, to the town’s rusted-out mills and boarded-up shops.

The setting also feels like King tuned to 2018. Castle Rock is hollowed out by industrial decay, intergenerational poverty and opioid addiction, and the series specifically takes on the abuses of privately run prisons, with a corrupt and cynical new warden who talks about increasing “enrolment” to boost profits for the board and shareholders.

Amid this bleak evidence of social breakdown and economic hopelessness, we meet bad men and neglected children. As the former prison warden says in a disturbing voiceover, when something terrible happens, “People say, ‘It wasn’t me. It was this place.’

“And the thing is, they’re right.”

There seem to be supernatural monsters to come — who, or what, is that kid in the cage? — but for now, the series is more focused on the cruelties ordinary people inflict on each other and themselves.

All those Easter eggs are fun, but they don’t add up to much more than big-budget fan fiction. What really gives this series its Stephen King pedigree is that abiding sense of familiar everyday horror.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Alison Gillmor
Writer

Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.

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