Stephen King’s ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ gets rewrite in ‘Chapelwaite’
Halfway through filming “Chapelwaite,” star Emily Hampshire still wasn’t sure what she had gotten herself into.
“I read the short story and then I read the first script and then we started shooting and all of a sudden there were vampires,” the 39year-old “Schitt’s Creek” alum told the Daily News.
“And not like your ‘Twilight’ Rob Pattinson good-looking vampire. It was a terrifying vampire … I almost called the union to say, ‘You need to inform actors when there are going to be vampires on set!’”
The Epix series, which premiered last week, slow-plays its big reveal over the course of 10 episodes, but the horror-filled gothic drama, inspired by Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” short story and tied to his 1975 novel “Salem’s Lot,” gets to the bloodsuckers eventually.
First, though, its showrunners crafted a family drama to fill out its story.
Where recent King series, including “Lisey’s Story” and “The Stand,” have had a more direct collaboration with the master of horror himself, “Chapelwaite” only pulls loosely from “Jerusalem’s Lot.” King, though, “vetted” every step, from the original pitch to the completed scripts, executive producer Donald De Line told The News.
Writers Jason and Peter Filardi expanded the existing world, gave Charles Boone (Adrien Brody) three children and a dead wife and invented Hampshire’s character, Rebecca Morgan, from scratch.
“Upping the stakes of it was really important, especially for Charles,” Jason Filardi told The News. “We knew giving him a family and children and making him a single father was something we really wanted to explore.”
They set their story in the 1850s in a small New England town vibrating with secrets begging to be unraveled. There’s worms crawling out of noses, family trauma, delusions, racist neighbors and monsters. Boone’s explanations are rarely disproven, and pile on top of each other, a Jenga tower of misfortune.
“My favorite horror genre is true crime and I’m very fascinated with the minds of psychopaths,” Hampshire explained. “There are so many of them that could have mental-health things or is it nature or nurture. All those questions are in here in such a cool and terrifying way.”
“If you’re going to do a 10-episode series in the world we live in today … I want to see things that are relevant today even if they are depicted in a story from the past.”
For the Filardi brothers, who have worked separately throughout their careers, exploring just how dark they could go – visually and thematically – was half the fun.
“It does go from bad to worse,” Peter Filardi told The News. “By the end, it’s cosmic horror. Lovecraftian horror. It just gets as big and bad as we could imagine.”