CASTLE ROCK
SERIES PREMIERE! Season 1 M-Net (*101) 23:10 Episode 1
Stephen King fans will have their eyes peeled for every single reference to his books, the creepy small town of Derry, Maine and his movies – including Pennywise himself Bill Skarsgård playing “The Kid”. NB!
Nothing is normal about the little town of Castle Rock in thriller-horror Castle Rock (2018-current) – especially when it’s filled with characters from author Stephen King’s novels and takes place in Maine, the setting for a number of his iconic stories and movies like Carrie (1976), Cujo (1983) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). “The idea was to think of the people who have the grit and fortitude to stick it out in a place that terrorises over and over,” explains series creator Dustin Thomason. “Who stays in this place?” Stephen was handson and gave Dustin and show co-creator JJ Abrams free range of his work. “When the new kids on the block want to play in my sandbox, it’s fun to what they bring,” says Stephen.
The story is fairly simple: Death Row lawyer Henry Deaver (André Holland) returns home to investigate the case of a young man called The Kid (Bill Skarsgård, killer clown Pennywise in Stephen’s 2017 horror It), who is found in a cage in an abandoned wing of Shawshank Prison. Henry life is made messier by his adoptive mom Ruth (Sissy Spacek, Carrie from the Carrie film) who has Alzheimer’s and his former bestie Molly Strand (Melanie Lynskey), a drugusing estate agent who has supernatural abilities.
Adding to the mystery is a messy suicide (episode 1), a missing cemetery, a St Bernard like in Cujo and ex sheriff Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn) who believes there is “true evil in this town”. Scott is no stranger to creepy storylines, having faced the biblical rapture in post-apocalyptic sci-fi series The Leftovers (2014-2017).