Hulu’s Castle Rock, an original tale orbiting around the fictional Maine town created by Stephen King, made an impactful debut last Wednesday and now, as the series enters its second week of release, co-creator Sam Shaw has disclosed where it might be headed – should his creation be successful enough to warrant a renewal, of course.
Speaking with Bloody Disgusting at San Diego Comic-Con, Shaw revealed that the “plan was always to approach each season as an unwritten Stephen King novel,” much like an anthology series.
“We hope to have the latitude to come back to future seasons,” said Shaw, “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.”
Combining the mythological scale and intimate character storytelling that’s become synonymous with the Master of Horror, Castle Rock – produced by J.J. Abrams – was ironically influenced by one of the author’s most recognizable pieces of literature not directly associated with terror, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. At least, that’s according to Sam Shaw, who said the following:
“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.”
Ever since the remake of IT hauled in $700 million-plus worldwide on a budget of just $35 million, Stephen King’s oeuvre has been partitioned then sold to the highest bidder, but Castle Rock is much more than merely the next adaptation in a long line of impending translations.
Hulu’s anthology series, which sees André Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Sissy Spacek, Bill Skarsgård, Jane Levy and Scott Glenn play out “an epic saga of darkness and light, on a few square miles of Maine woodland,” will run for ten episodes. And if the first three instalments are any indication, you might want to get in on Castle Rock early, as it’s sure to be picked up for a second season.
