KING’S ‘CASTLE’
Hulu miniseries features characters and locales from the renowned horror meister’s canon
CASTLE Rock is the classic Stephen King town.
Some say it’s cursed, and it’s been the setting of King novels such as “The Dead Zone” (1979), “Cujo” (1981), “The Dark Half ” (1989) and “Needful Things” (1991) and numerous short stories. Named for the mountain fort in the 1954 William Golding novel “Lord of the Flies,” it’s now the subject of its own Hulu series, “Castle
Rock” — and a place where familiar King characters such as Sheriff Alan Pangborn reappear.
“Castle Rock is like way too many small mill towns that have shut down, with super-high unemployment,” says Scott Glenn, who plays Pangborn. (Ed Harris and Michael Rooker previously played the role in “Needful Things” and “The Dark Half,” respectively.)
In the anthology series, premiering July 25, the Shawshank prison is the town’s biggest employer. In the opening scenes of the series, the guards there make a startling discov- ery: a young man (Bill Skarsgård), who’s been kept prisoner in a cage in an underground vault. When he’s rescued, the first words he speaks are “Henry Deaver” (played by André Holland).
The second half of the “Castle Rock” mystery concerns Deaver and an episode from his childhood, specifically a disappearance that is tied to the death of his father, Rev. Matthew Deaver, in the minds of the townspeople. “I rescue the boy in these kind of crazy Stephen King-ish circumstances,” says Glenn. “Henry was wandering in woods in subzero temps and has no frostbite.” Henry comes back to Castle Rock, primarily to meet the prisoner who summoned him. What’s in it for him? “The experience of being a boy and wrongly characterized as a murderer,” says executive producer Dustin Thomason. “There’s a feeling that when someone has been mistreated by the town it hits home for him. In his own mind he wants to believe he is innocent.” Henry’s walk down memory lane, like Camille Preaker’s in HBO’s “Sharp Objects,” requires shock absorbers. His adoptive mother, Ruth (Sissy Spacek), is exhibiting signs of Alzheimer’s and Pangborn has moved into Henry’s childhood home and assumed some of his next-of-kin responsibilities.
“My sense is that Henry has not been present enough in his mom’s life while she’s been growing through this,” Glenn says.
With the storyline of the captive stranger and the prodigal son headed for a TV “collision,” as executive producer Sam Shaw says, it’s worth mentioning the show’s scripts were submitted for King’s approval.
It does seem strange that no part of “Castle Rock” was filmed in King’s beloved Maine. The dismal town scenes were shot in Orange, Mass. and the prison locations were set at the West Virginia State Penitentiary (the prison in the 1994 movie was set at a penitentiary in Ohio).
“We approached the material with humility,” Shaw says. “Stephen King is a writer who loves to return to the scene of the crime and he has returned to Castle Rock over and over again.”