Stephen King’s IT has haunted us since 1986. But most recently, IT and IT: Chapter Two directed by Andy Muschietti really captivated popular imagination. The devious Pennywise and his red balloon caused a stir among die-hard horror fans and casual viewers. And now, we’re heading back to Derry for more of that specific world. The newly coined streamer Max (formerly HBO Max) has officially greenlit and ordered Welcome To Derry, an IT prequel series from Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs. And now we know who will star in Welcome to Derry and when it will arrive on our screens.

The platform recently revealed that Welcome to Derry‘s cast will include Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, and James Remar. According to Deadline, Madeleine Stowe and Stephen Rider have also come aboard in recurring guest and series regular roles, respectively. Additionally, although the Pennywise series was slated for a Halloween 2024 release on Max, HBO CEO Casey Bloys now reveals that it will likely come in 2025.

According to TV Line, Andy Muschietti will also direct several episodes of the series, including its first. The publication reports the HBO IT series will be set in the ’60s. It will delve into the origins of Derry’s curse and, presumably, Pennywise the Clown. The HBO Max show will eventually lead to the first IT film.

It’s not clear whether we’d see Pennywise become the main character of the Welcome to Derry prequel show. But we wouldn’t mind seeing Bill Skarsgård step into the role once more. Though, for now, it doesn’t seem like he’ll have any involvement.

Skarsgård shared the following about the IT prequel with Jake’s Takes:

As of now, I’m not currently involved in it… If someone else gets to do it, my advice would be: Do it your own. Make it your own. Have fun with it… What I thought was so pleasurable about that character was how incredibly abstract he was.

We do, however, have a look at first look at the set of the series.

We’ll just have to see what else lies in store for Pennywise and Derry.

Originally published on February 23, 2023.

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One of Stephen King’s earliest novels is coming to the big screen… at some point. The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Annabelle Comes Home director Gary Dauberman will soon be helming a big-screen adaptation of Salem’s Lot. The epic vampire tale was one of King’s earliest success stories and was his follow-up novel to his breakthrough hit Carrie in 1975. Dauberman will not only direct the film, but he’s writing the screenplay as well. He also wrote the screenplay for both chapters of the blockbuster It. Horror maestro James Wan is one of the film’s producers. Unfortunately, in the latest round of Warner Bros. release date shakeups, Salem’s Lot lost its release date. The movie no longer has a slot on Warner Bros.’ upcoming theatrical calendar. Its release date remains unknown, and reports indicate it could ultimately head to Max.

Warner Brothers

Salem’s Lot Release Date

Salem’s Lot had an original release date of April 21, 2023. But in a recent slew of release date changes which included shifting release dates for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, the movie has found itself without a date at all. Deadline reports the Salem’s Lot remake will release at a TBD time in the next year.

In addition to the question of Salem’s Lot‘s release date, its release platform could also be in flux. According to Variety, Salem’s Lot seems to now be heading toward a streaming release on Max. However, a  spokesperson for Warner Bros. shared, “No decision has been made about the film’s future distribution plans.” So we’ll just have to wait and see.

Salem’s Lot Cast

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Lewis Pullman (Bad Times at the El Royale) will play the story’s lead character, Ben Mears. Additionally, Makenzie Leigh, Bill Camp, and Spencer Treat Clark will co-star alongside Lewis Pullman. Pullman plays Ben Mears, an author who discovers a bloodthirsty vampire is preying on his childhood hometown.

Deadline further shared that Oscar-nominated actress Alfre Woodard has joined the cast as Dr. Cody. In the novel, the character is actually Dr. Jimmy Cody. Jimmy helps Ben Mears (Pullman), Susan Norton (Leigh), and Matt Burke (Camp) fight against the vampires. Also, John Benjamin Hickey will portray Father Callahan. We feel interested to see how this character will evolve in the movie.

Finally, in a recent addition to the casting, Pilou Asbæk has joined Salem’s Lot. Asbæk is well-known for playing the villainous Euron Greyjoy on Game of Thrones. In Salem’s Lot, Asbæk will be taking on the role of Richard Straker. Straker is the vampire’s familiar, or servant, who gets his hands plenty dirty as well.

The History of Salem’s Lot

Salem’s Lot is essentially a modern retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and centers on an author who returns to his hometown in Maine (King’s home state) to write about a creepy abandoned mansion that’s haunted him since childhood. Not long after arriving back home, he finds out that the mansion was bought by a mysterious and reclusive antiques dealer, who is a vampire master. After turning several of the locals into his vampire minions, the author and several other townsfolk join together to put an end to the undead infestation.

The 1979 Mini-Series

The novel was turned into a two-part mini-series in 1979. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper directed this Stephen King adaptation. It was big success and re-aired on TV for years. It was later edited down into a shorter runtime and released on VHS, where it became a favorite rental choice among horror fans. The scene were a young boy sees his vampified friend float to his window in the middle of the night traumatized an entire generation, myself included.

The original mini-series made several changes to the book, most notably turning the talkative vampire master Kurt Barlow into more of a Nosferatu-style vampire, who doesn’t speak and is more animalistic and terrifying looking. Although this was very different from the novel, the mini-series Barlow was a horrifying and memorable creation.

The 2004 Mini-Series

A TNT mini-series that stuck closer to the book released in 2004. It featured Rutger Hauer as Barlow and Rob Lowe in the lead. This was another vampiric notch on the actor’s belt. Not only was he the physical inspiration for Anne Rice’s Lestat, but he played vamps in movies like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Argento’s Dracula, and Dracula III: Legacy. It remains to be seen if this new version of Barlow will stick closer to the ’70s mini-series or the 2004 one, or go off in a completely new direction.

One thing is for sure, though. This is one King adaptation we can’t wait to sink our fangs into.

Featured Image: Warner Brothers

Originally published on April 20, 2020.

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Most of us are at least generally familiar with the concept of an “elevator pitch.” Whether starting a new business or trying to make a movie, it refers to the concept of selling someone on your idea in the short time it takes to ride an elevator. Well, a new project from Intrepid Films doesn’t need an elevator. It doesn’t even need a step ladder. All it needs to do is share its all-star list of names working on the project. Because a list including “Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Mike Flanagan, and Stephen King” is among the easiest sales jobs in movie history.

Deadline reports horror luminaries Mike Flanagan and Stephen King are joining forces. Flanagan will direct, write, and produce a film adaptation of King’s novella “The Life of Chuck.”

The author published it in his 2020 anthology If It Bleeds. King’s official website describes “The Life of Chuck” as “three separate stories linked to tell the biography of Charles Krantz in reverse, beginning with his death from a brain tumor at 39 and ending with his childhood in a supposedly haunted house.”

Flanagan completed the script before the WGA went on strike, and the movie is already in development. Per Deadline, it recently went into production under an interim agreement with SAG-AFTRA. Loki’s Hiddleston will play the doomed Chuck, with Hamill joining him as Albie. This will be the latest project between the Star Wars legend and director. Hamill also stars in Flanagan’s The House of Usher at Netflix. Joining Hiddleston and Hamill in the Flanagan cast of this Stephen King adaptation are Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan and Jacob Tremblay. Their roles in The Life of Chuck are currently unknown.

Don’t expect a true horror film. Deadline also states the movie will “draw tonally” from previous King adaptations such as Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile.

That’s more than fine by us. “Mike Flanagan directs Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill in a Stephen King adaptation that reminds us of The Shawshank Redemption” is such a good elevator pitch that the elevator doesn’t even have to move to get us onboard.

Originally published on May 9, 2023.

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After the financial success of the remake of Pet Sematary in 2019, some sort of continuation was inevitable. Even if Stephen King’s original novel had no continuation to speak of. That certainly didn’t stop the makers of the original 1989 film from making Pet Sematary II back in the day. But this time, for Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, instead of a sequel, they’re going the prequel route. We have our first trailer for the film, which premieres at this year’s Fantastic Fest, before dropping on Paramount+ in October. You can check out the creeptastic trailer for Pet Sematary: Bloodlines below:

This prequel takes place in the year 1969. It focuses on a younger version of the Jud Crandall character from the novel. Fans probably remember Jud Crandall as the old man who gives all the information about the burial ground to the original story’s lead, Louis Creed. Jud also utters the original movie’s most famous line, “Sometimes, dead is better.” In this prequel, Jud is still a young man, and dreams of escaping his hometown of Ludlow, Maine. That is until he discovers the dark secrets of what lies buried in a nearby ancient cemetery. Jud will come face to face with the family legacy that connects him to Ludlow. This sets him up for his future in the original Stephen King story.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is directed by Lindsey Anderson Beer, who co-wrote it with Jeff Buhler. Buhler wrote the 2019 remake film. The movie stars Jackson White as the younger Jud Crandall, as well as Jack Mulhern, Natalie Alyn Lind, Forrest Goodluck, and Isabella Star LaBlanc. A few notable veteran actors in the film include Pam Grier, Samantha Mathis, Henry Thomas, and David Duchovny.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines hits Paramount+ on October 6, just in time for the spooky season.

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When you ask most horror fans to name a film based on a Stephen King story, most people bring up the same titles. We all know that Carrie and The Shining rule but there are so many to enjoy. One film that comes to mind is The Mist, a 2007 film based on King’s 1980 novella of the same name. A storm blowing through a small town and leaving a supernatural creature-laden mist in its wake is prime scary material. Is The Mist a cinematic masterpiece? No. Is it fun, full of torture, and yet another affirmation that humans are always our own worst enemy. Sure. Just in time for Halloween, The Mist will arrive on 4K HD (Blu-ray + Digital) and get a Best Buy exclusive release on October 3.

The release comes with a few special features, too. An alternate black and white version of The Mist and audio commentary from the film’s director and writer Frank Darabont are two key treats. If you get the Blu-ray, you’ll get deleted scenes with optional commentary by Frank Darabont. There’s also a conversation between him and Stephen King. Blu-ray owners will also receive two hours of bonus material. The artwork is very weird and creepy, just like the movie.

This movie feels exceptionally delightful for The Walking Dead fans (hello, it’s me). Three years before the show hit AMC, Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn, and Melissa McBride were in this movie together. They later went on to portray Andrea, Dale, and Carol in The Walking Dead. Frank Darabont developed The Walking Dead and served as its first showrunner. Truly a legend. Juan Gabriel Pareja plays a character named Morales in The Mist before playing another Morales in The Walking Dead. The Mist stars Thomas Jane after his turn as the titular antihero in The Punisher movie. His co-star? The legendary Marcia Gay Harden of Law & Order: SVU fame.

We can’t wait to see The Mist come to sharper life in 4K HD soon. The Blu-ray plus digital will cost $34.99 while the Best Buy exclusive is $37.99. Pre-orders are live on Amazon as well as Best Buy’s website.

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Stephen King’s short stories are some of the bleakest, most upsetting horror fiction of his career. And that’s really saying something. In the same stretch of the early ’70s that saw publication of some of his most celebrated, including “Trucks,” “The Mangler,” and “Battleground,” King gave us “The Boogeyman,” a riff on perhaps the classic nightmare monster. The story is excellent, depicting the titular menace attacking a family and picking it apart person by person. It’s a nasty, fun little story. Adapting it to a feature film, director Rob Savage (Host) keeps some of that, but not quite enough to make it stand out.

Story goes, in 2018 A Quiet Place screenwriting partners Scott Beck and Bryan Woods optioned the King story. After loads of Hollywood production nonsense, which saw other writers come on and leave, the eventual script comes to us from Beck, Woods, and Mark Heyman whose previous feature films are co-writing 2010’s Black Swan and co-writing 2014’s The Skeleton Twins. End of list. Directing duties fell to Rob Savage, the British filmmaker who made a splash in 2020 with the hour-long, shot-on-Zoom horror movie Host. The result feels a bit like A Quiet Place but in a house, with a bit of mental health stuff thrown in.

The movie follows the Harper family; father Will Harper (Chris Messina), a psychiatrist, is trying to solo parent his teenage daughter Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and elementary-age daughter Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) following the sudden death of their mother. Will has, as yet, been unable to open up to Sadie about his feelings, leaving her to mostly cope alone. One day, a disturbed man named Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) comes into Harper’s home office and wants to tell him about the deaths of his children, seemingly at the hands of an unseen shadow force. Oops, now the monster wants the Harper family! Dang it, Lester!

The Boogeyman boasts some solid jump scare moments and a wholly otherworldly monster. It definitely feels more alien than demonic, and it has a similar long-arm-crawly thing that the Quiet Place aliens do. Except instead of attraction to sound, this guy has aversion to light. Savage handles the tension and thing-in-the-dark chills quite adeptly. We never fully get a sense of how this creature operates, but its methods—including warping the sound of loved one’s voices—works in the mix.

The problem is the story. It takes no chances at all in the Harper family drama. We’ve seen this a million times before. Following the death of a parent, the other parent closes off while the eldest child has to be the grown up and the youngest child has nightmares. It’s Horror Movie Setup 101. As good as the actors are, the plot follows such a rote path without taking risks or adding wrinkles. Dad doesn’t believe there’s a monster, so eldest daughter has to try to save the day.

For those who haven’t read the short story, it entirely focuses on Billings relaying the horrifying events to the psychiatrist. That’s where all the horror truly lies as it sees a man forced to watch his children succumb to this monster. That portion of the movie is incredibly brief and the rest feels so underwhelming. It’s like a bit of Insidious; a scosh of Poltergeist; even a little Haunting of Hill House. It never branches out into its own thing.

And I think its biggest failing is it doesn’t go as hard as last year’s Smile which attacked the mixture of demonic curse and mental health/trauma so much more effectively. The Boogeyman isn’t bad, it’s fine. It has a couple of nifty sequences, some good scares. It’s just nothing like as scary as it ought to be. It pulls too many punches, tries to explain too much and not enough. The monster in the closet, under the bed, in the basement—we’ve seen it all before. Without the punch of King’s original prose or macabre sensibility, it’s little more than a passing shiver.

The Boogeyman hits theaters on June 2.

The Boogeyman (PG-13) ⭐ (2.7 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The Boogeyman is a horror icon. It’s a supernatural being that lurks under children’s beds and in the recesses of dark closets. Perhaps it is somewhere in the corner of their eye, causing the hairs to stand up on the back of their necks. But this mythical character can also get adults in its clutches, too. He will drag you into his lair of despair, never to be seen or heard from again. Or, he will simply get into your head to the point that you can only focus on his looming presence. So it only makes sense that Stephen King would have a short story, aptly titled “The Boogeyman,” about this infamous entity. Now, that ‘70s-era fright is coming to live in The Boogeyman, an upcoming movie with a very ominous trailer. 

Yellowjackets star Sophie Thatcher is student Sadie Harper, a high school student living with her younger sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) and their therapist father Will (Chris Messina). The family recently lost its matriarch and is all dealing with their pain separately, but that is the least of their problems. You see, one of Will’s patients came to their home and left the very unwanted houseguest behind. You know, a creepy and terrifying entity that loves to feed on the suffering of grieving families. Perfection.

And we all know those kinds of monsters do not want to leave until everyone is dead. The Boogeyman story and its trailer certainly amp up the terror. The connection between grief and horror, along with small flashes of its titular monster and sketchy lighting, make for a frightening narrative. King’s short story ends with a shocking twist that we won’t give away. But we can say that this movie will probably be one hell of a twisted ride. And it is always nice to see one of our beloved Yellowjackets girls onscreen. 

The Boogeyman will hit theaters on June 2, 2023.

Originally published on January 30, 2023.

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Even though it’s been over 40 years, we can’t help but keep returning to the Overlook Hotel. Stephen King’s The Shining is one of the most beloved books and horror films of all time. Now there’s the ultimate gift for the aficionado in your life: a 2,198 page collector’s set that dives deep into the behind the scenes story of Kubrick’s classic 1980 film. It includes behind the scenes photos and tidbits collected from interviews with the cast and crew. The limited edition Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining by the late J.W. Rinzler, edited by Lee Unkrich is available for pre-order now for a cool $1,500. 

From the Taschen’s description of the two-volume tome:

Equally a study of the intricate mechanics of Kubrick’s genius as an in-depth look at the making of a visual masterpiece, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining gathers hundreds of hours of exclusive new interviews with the cast and crew in an unprecedented look at the 1980 cult classic. Slip in through the back door of The Overlook Hotel to witness Kubrick’s endless rounds of script rewrites, his revolutionary use of the Steadicam, the mechanics behind the infamous blood elevator, the mysterious mid-filming fire at Elstree Studios, and the countless takes needed to satisfy the meticulous force that was Kubrick.

While we know what happens to people who are all work and no play, it’s also easy to appreciate the dedication that went into this collector’s set. And just how much went in to making the film, with its alternate endings and other changes. While many have made movies based on Stephen King novels, Kubrick’s is certainly one of the finest.

Other Shining compendiums include a Kickstarted cultural history made to look like Jack’s manuscript from the film. The iconic horror film still clearly resonates with fans all these decades later. WandaVision made multiple references to it. The prop axe used on-screen by Jack Nicholson recently sold for $140,000. And then of course there’s the twins. The actresses who played them, Lisa and Louise Burns, even attended the book’s launch party. 

Melissa is Nerdist’s science & technology staff writer. She also moderates “science of” panels at conventions and co-hosts Star Warsologies, a podcast about science and Star Wars. Follow her on Twitter @melissatruth.

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No one working in film or TV today has had more success adapting Stephen King than Mike Flanagan. From the “unfilmable” Gerald’s Game to the supremely ambitious Doctor Sleep, a sequel to both King’s novel The Shining and Kubrick’s film, Flanagan has proven his Kingly chops. Following the news that Flanagan and his producing partner Trevor Macy have left Netflix for Prime Video (which coincided with the cancellation of The Midnight Club), Flanagan revealed that his next King adaptation. It’s a big one, folks, the pinnacle of King esoterica: The Dark Tower.

In a lengthy piece from Deadline, Flanagan and Macy revealed their plans. They hope to produce a five-season adaptation of The Dark Tower for Prime Video. The show would then conclude with two feature films. Lofty, innit? Prime, of course, has already shown its willingness to sink huge money into high-fantasy with The Rings of Power. Famously, that’s the most expensive show ever made. Flanagan has already written a pilot script and an outline for The Dark Tower.

King began The Dark Tower—a sprawling series of eight novels, a short story, and a children’s book—in 1982. The series mixed elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and westerns. It follows the exploits of Roland, a gunslinger in a feudal society. In this fantasy melange, cowboys are the analogue to Arthurian knights. Roland seeks the Man in Black, an evil SOB who is King’s ur-villain. The Dark Tower books also include numerous references and crossovers with King’s other novels, including Salem’s Lot, It, and The Stand.

A 2017 film adaptation of The Dark Tower starring Idris Elba was famously a massive flop. The books have been the subject of a number of never-realized TV adaptations for years and years. Flanagan has described The Dark Tower as his dream project. He and Macy secured the rights to the novels recently.

Flanagan and Macy’s final Netflix project, The Fall of the House of Usher, will premiere some time in 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We’re never short of Stephen King adaptations—and with good reason. The horror maestro’s mind is chock full of chilling, thrilling, and downright sinister stories. The latest, fiery adaptation, Firestarter—based on his 1980 book of the same name—is a tug of war over pyrokinetic powers and the adolescent who possesses them. The film stars Zac Efron as Andy, the patriarch of a family on the run for a decade, trying to escape the government agency that wants to get its hands on his daughter, Charlie. But they can only run for so long, especially as Charlie’s powers become more difficult to manage.

A new clip from the film shows off exactly what happens when Charlie fully unleashes her powers.

In the clip, which features the confrontation between Michael Greyeys and Charlie and Andy, we can precisely see how Charlie’s powers reflect her moods. We can hear the terror in her voice and the way things start to burn around them. But the agent clearly underestimates Charlie’s powers even as Andy warns him off, pleading for Charlie’s release. That is until the flames really start to burst.

Here’s the full synopsis from Universal Pictures:

For more than a decade, parents Andy and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) have been on the run, desperate to hide their daughter Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) from a shadowy federal agency that wants to harness her unprecedented gift for creating fire into a weapon of mass destruction. 

Andy has taught Charlie how to defuse her power, which is triggered by anger or pain. But as Charlie turns 11, the fire becomes harder and harder to control. After an incident reveals the family’s location, a mysterious operative (Michael Greyeyes) is deployed to hunt down the family and seize Charlie once and for all. Charlie has other plans. 

Keith Thomas directed Firestarter with a screenplay from Scott Teems. Kurtwood Smith, John Beasley, and Gloria Reuben round out the cast. Jason Blum and Akiva Goldsman are among those producing. Excitingly, the film also boasts a score from John Carpenter, alongside his Halloween Kills collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.

Firestarter releases in theaters and on Peacock on May 13, 2022.

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There comes a time in every former teen heartthrob’s career when suddenly he’s the dad. Zac Efron’s time has come and his child has a fiery set of skills… literally. It’s been a minute since we last encountered the actor Zac Efron. Over the last few years, he’s been busy learning lots of fun facts on his delightful Netflix show and getting a bacterial infection for Quibi. Now, he’s back in a new adaptation of Stephen King‘s 1980 novel Firestarter. The film lands in theaters and on Peacock later this spring.

In the film he plays Andy, whose daughter has pyrokinetic powers, forcing the family on the run. Based on the Firestarter trailer, it seems the people they’re running from are catching up and things are set to get pretty deadly.

Here’s the full synopsis from Universal:

For more than a decade, parents Andy and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) have been on the run, desperate to hide their daughter Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) from a shadowy federal agency that wants to harness her unprecedented gift for creating fire into a weapon of mass destruction.

Andy has taught Charlie how to defuse her power, which is triggered by anger or pain. But as Charlie turns 11, the fire becomes harder and harder to control. After an incident reveals the family’s location, a mysterious operative (Michael Greyeyes) is deployed to hunt down the family and seize Charlie once and for all. Charlie has other plans.

Rounding out the cast are That ’70s Show‘s Kurtwood Smith, John Beasley, and Gloria Reuben.

In addition to its source material, the film boasts some pretty big horror names behind the scenes. Jason Blum and Akiva Goldsman serve as producers. Plus John Carpenter is scoring the film, alongside Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. Carpenter’s involvement is especially notable given that he was initially set to direct the 1984 adaptation, which featured Drew Barrymore as Charlie.

Keith Thomas directed the film, with a script from Halloween Kills scribe Scott Teems. Ryan Turek, Gregory Lessans, Scott Teems, Martha De Laurentiis, J.D. Lifshitz, and Raphael Margules are executive producing.

The film debuts in theaters and on Peacock on May 13.

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A new Stephen King adaptation is in the works, according to Deadline. What’s on the docket this time? The Boogeyman. This adaptation was “originally developed by 21 Laps as a Fox film and now will find new life through Hulu.” Production will start in early 2022. Rob Savage will serve as the film’s director. Shawn Levy, Dan Levine, and Dan Cohen from 21 Laps will produce the movie. 20th/Hulu will release the two-hour feature film.

“The Boogeyman” is actually a short story by King. Published in 1978, this short story makes up part of The Night Shift collection. Many other stories from this collection have already gotten their own feature film or TV adaptations.

Amazon/StephenKing.com

According to Deadline, the logline for The Boogeyman reads as follows:

Still reeling from the tragic death of their mother, a teenage girl and her little brother find themselves plagued by a sadistic presence in their house and struggle to get their grieving father to pay attention before it’s too late.

That sounds genuinely chilling. The sadistic presence is the titular Boogeyman. Presence can mean many things… But nothing good. Especially not with children involved. Children, though, often serve as the basis for truly horrifying movies. So we bet this will make for one eerie movie.

And now, the movie has received its first bit of casting news. In an exciting turn of events, Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher will come on board. Presumably as the aforementioned teenage girl. Chris Messina will also star. Again, likely as the grieving father. We think they will make for an ace combination.

In addition, Deadline shares Mark Heyman is penning The Boogeyman‘s script,  “[for] which Scott Beck & Bryan Woods and Akela Cooper wrote the original drafts.”

Stephen King is a hot commodity right now. This is the latest of several adaptations in the works. From Salem’s Lot to Christine to Firestarter, more King than ever will arrive on screens soon. A true boon for horror fans. Hopefully, each one ends up better than the next.

We can’t wait to hear more details of this latest addition to the line-up as they unroll. In the meanwhile, what a great time to get caught up on all of King’s works. You never know what will make its way on-screen next. So it’s best to stay ahead of the curve. We know what we plan to read tonight, anyway. We just hope we don’t end up too scared to sleep.

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A remote New England locale. Characters with dense interpersonal turmoil. A religious fanatic whose beliefs taunt and torture her community. Addiction and trauma narratives laced with supernatural horror. But at the center of it all a through line of hope and, most of all, love.

This may sound like the recap of a Stephen King novel when in fact they are facets of Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix horror series Midnight Mass. Not that it comes as a surprise to those familiar. Flanagan has adapted and directed two King adaptations in his short career: Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. More impressively, both are adaptations of novels that seemed nearly impossible to do right. Yet Flanagan made them with ease. Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game, a chamber piece of sorts, and Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining that’s divisive among book fans, are horror masterworks. It’s clear that Flanagan gets King. Like, really gets him.

Netflix

So of course his first wholly original Netflix series feels like a major tribute to King’s oeuvre. Flanagan previously adapted and brought to life two classic horror novels in his Haunting series: The Haunting of Hill House and The Turn of the Screw (adapted into The Haunting of Bly Manor). Both are excellent, the former being a nearly undisputed horror masterpiece. (King himself sung its praises and Tarantino called it his favorite Netflix series.) And while both took major liberties with the classic text, Midnight Mass is still Flanagan’s first wholly original project since Hush in 2016. (Ouija: Origin of Evil, also released in 2016, is a sequel and his other 2016 project Before I Wake filmed in 2013 and had a delayed release.)

Flanagan’s been teasing Midnight Mass for a while. There are Easter eggs for the project in both Hush and Gerald’s Game. He’s said that Midnight Mass is “more than a decade in the making” and also, for a while, “the best thing I never made.” Until now. Now, Midnight Mass is here and real with a gristly beating heart. Critics are calling it Flanagan’s best project to date. (I, an on-the-record Haunting of Hill House devotee, would have to agree.) That’s due in large part to Flanagan’s own unique genius. But also thanks to the lessons he’s learned along the way from King, who is clearly his foremost influence. And in many ways, it feels like Midnight Mass learned from King how to avoid certain pitfalls.

Netflix

The seven-episode series is set on a small New England island called Crockett and centers on Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), a man recently released from prison for killing a young woman in a drunk driving accident. Riley returns to Crockett Island—population 127—to be with his family: mom Annie (Kristin Lehman), dad Ed (Henry Thomas), and younger brother Warren (Igby Rigney). He’s a hollow husk of his former self, colored by prison life and his forced sobriety, haunted by guilt and a specter of the woman he killed.

Riley recalls many such King protagonists. Like Billy Halleck in Thinner, he accidentally commits vehicular manslaughter. Like Jack and Danny Torrance in The Shining and Doctor Sleep—or Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half—he’s a recovering alcoholic whose demons keep true growth at an arm’s reach. And like Dale Barbara in Under the Dome or Jake Epping in 11/22/63 or Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones, he wanders through life disillusioned after his confrontation with darker universal truths.

Netflix

Crockett Island isn’t just the blanched of color, boring hometown of his youth. Riley returns just as a mysterious newcomer Father Paul (Hamish Linklater) arrives, stepping in for the elderly monsignor who he claims is getting medical help on the mainland. Paul’s arrival—along with Riley’s—summons a darker entity. Something that rots and feeds on the religious population of Crockett. Soon, the island’s small Catholic church is home to miracles. The paralyzed walk again, the elderly become young, the dead rise. The fanatically devout Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan) feels vindicated by these so-called acts of God.

But, as you might expect from a horror series, there is something sinister afoot. Something preying on the naïveté of the Crocket Islanders. Riley, cursed by circumstance to see beyond the surface level and into the cosmos, senses this malignancy. Father Paul isn’t the miracle worker he purports to be, but has brought evil to Crockett. Evil that stokes a fire among the devout, too simple, too gullible. Too confused by what they can’t understand that they hone in on divine design. It’s up to a crop of attuned and science-minded folk—Riley, his pregnant former flame Erin (Kate Siegel), Dr. Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish), and Muslim sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli)—to put a stop to the devilish force wreaking havoc on their home.

Netflix

At one point in time, Mike Flanagan was working on an adaptation of Stephen King’s Revival, before the project fell apart. Those who’ve read that 2014 King novel will see several parallels to Midnight Mass. Revival is set in a tiny Maine town visited by a newcomer Methodist minister named Charles Jacobs. After personal tragedy strikes, Jacobs denounces God and is banished from his town. He eventually turns heretical and comes a faith healer, a gift that seems miraculous but has a darker origin and dangerous consequences. Though not a plot-for-plot remake, it’s clear the bones of Jacobs’ fanatic faith found their way into Flanagan’s story.

I also thought of ‘Salem’s Lot and The Mist when watching Midnight Mass. The former, for its vampire antagonists, which parallel Mass‘s dark angel. The Mist—the King novella published in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew and adapted into the beloved Frank Darabont film in 2007—explores an apocalyptic scenario and the religious extremism that blossoms around the attempt to make sense of it. As in Midnight Mass, a group of level-headed victims band together for survival in the face of unknowable evil.

Netflix

Midnight Mass isn’t attempting to succeed King. But it’s clear that Flanagan shares stripes with famed author. Flanagan recently shared that he is three years sober, and that Midnight Mass is a personal story for him. King, likewise, is sober from drugs and alcohol, and his earnestness about life post-recovery factors into his later work. Where earlier efforts like Carrie and Pet Sematary are nihilistic in tone and ending, King’s latter works have a streak of gee-golly optimism. Flanagan’s work, while melancholy, feels of a similar piece. When characters monologue peacefully about the afterlife or gaze longingly to the stars as their throats get ripped apart by demonic forces, it is as horrific as it is beautiful.

That’s the thing about King. He knows that the scariest truths are anchored by their opposites. There is no Hell without Heaven. Hate is only conquered by love. The inability to understand why the universe pummels and maims is beget by the freedom of submission to that which we’ll never know. It is awe-inspiring to see a new horror maestro come into form and pay respects to the granddaddy of the genre. And to understand—in a fundamental sense—what makes horror everlasting. It’s not the gristle. It’s what glitters in the carnage. Flanagan gets it.

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His top five might surprise you:

King first shared that his favorite of his short stories is “Survivor Type,” a particularly gruesome tale of a doctor and heroin smuggler who gets marooned on an island. Suffice to say, his survival methods are not very pretty. His other favorite of the shorter reads is “The Body,” which is now often called “Stand By Me,” after the beloved 1986 film. Both “Survivor Type” and “The Body” were both originally published in 1982.

As for the novels, King shared that Misery, The Stand, and Lisey’s Story are among his favorites. The latter he even adapted into the Apple TV+ limited series starring Julianne Moore. And, of course, his newly published Billy Summers.

I am very easily spooked. So much so, I spent third grade terrified of the school bathroom after learning about Bloody Mary. So suffice to say, I never quite graduated to reading the likes of It and The Shining and Carrie. But Stephen King and I have two very important things in common: we’re both from Maine and being from Maine is a big part of our personalities. (To differing financial success, of course.)

CBS

Frankly, Bloody Mary shenanigans and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, plus knowing of the treasure trove of Maine-set horror stories—and many subsequent adaptations—did not help to boost my interest in horror growing up.  But, I am trying. Very, very slowly. Luckily, not all of his novels are quite as horrific as Cujo. So, my favorite of King’s works, for the record, is On Writing, his masterful memoir. For fiction, like the author, I’m also partial to “The Body.”

During the rest of his chat with Colbert, King talked about important things (to me) like Maine property values and other important things (to everyone else) like his new book. He revealed he started writing Billy Summers in 2019, with the novel actually set in 2020. Now, for obvious pandemic-related reasons, he had to move the novel’s setting back a year, especially as it also contained an unfortunately-timed cruise trip. But while King was lucky enough to shuffle things around, he admitted that eventually writers are going to have to contend with the pandemic in their writing. Now, King already wrote a pandemic novel in the ’70s. But does that mean we’ll be getting another terrifying illness novel like The Stand in our future? We’ll have to wait and see.

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This weekend, the world bade a solemn farewell to the zany grayscale neighborhood of Easttown, Pennsylvania. HBO aired the final episode of crime-drama Mare of Easttown, wrapping up the mystery of Erin McMenamin’s murder at last. Over the course of Mare’s seven-episode run, the series presented a steadily growing number of viable suspects. Wannabe gumshoes among us fingered everyone from Mare’s ex-husband Frank to local priest Mark Burton to visiting stranger Guy Pearce. But only the deftest sleuths in the viewing audience managed to pinpoint the real killer. Sleuths like Stephen King, for example.

King knows his way around murder, mystery, and the inherent eeriness of the Northeast. So it’s no surprise that he nailed Mare’s conclusion before the finale. On Sunday, a few hours ahead of the episode’s broadcast, King tweeted his theorized answer to the show’s big question.

As we know now, he was right! Ryan Ross, the preteen son of Lori (Julianne Nicholson) and Joe Ross (Joe Tippett), killed his teenage cousin Erin following her affair with his father, her uncle. Of course, to isolate this act is to ignore the grand tapestry of woe that is Easttown. The central whodunnit alone did not drive the story of Mare Sheehan; rather, it served as punctuation to a larger expression of how the insular city breeds grief. (The fictional one, that is. I mean to insinuate nothing about the real Easttown Township’s proclivity for breeding grief.)

HBO

We first caught sight of King’s right-on-the-money guess by way of Uproxx; the site showcased his aforementioned proclamation, plus some tweets in which he discussed the theory with fans (both of the show and of his writing, presumably).

The world has reveled in King’s talent for decades, but the age of social media has allowed longtime readers to likewise enjoy his own zest for fandom in general. It’s always fun to toss around fan theories with friends. But it’s doubly so to play this game with one of our generation’s great writers.

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We’re truly living in a golden age of Stephen King adaptations, and we have been for a while now. For fans of the horror author, it’s such a pleasant space, as the stories we’ve loved for so long are coming to life in new and brilliant ways. Not every adaptation works. Some are outright bad. But some are magnificent, and all are welcome. As a huge fan, it’s been such a treat to see The Stand and Doctor Sleep and It on the big and small screens. And I’m extra excited for the next one coming out from Apple TV+, because it brings an element of prestige to the horror auteur’s work.

Apple TV+ just released the first trailer for its upcoming series Lisey’s Story, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. It’s sort of a dream project for fans, as King wrote every episode of the series. Pablo Larraín (Jackie) is also onboard as director.

In Lisey’s Story, Julianne Moore stars as the eponymous Lisey Landon, who recently lost her husband Scott (Clive Owen), a famous novelist. The “deeply personal, pensive thriller” follows Lisey as she comes to grips with a series of unsettling memories about her marriage that she has deliberately blocked out of her mind. Joan Allen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dane DeHaan, Ron Cephas Jones, and Sung Kang also star.

Apple TV+

Lisey’s Story comes from J.J. 0Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions and Warner Bros. Television. The Stephen King novel its based on won the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. King has said that Lisey’s Story is his favorite novel he’s written. King’s own near-death experience in 1999 inspired the story.

The first episode of Lisey’s Story premieres on Apple TV+ on June 5. That gives you about a month to catch up on the novel. You won’t be sorry when you do.

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Baker Street Cinema

According to Mashable, the event will run from April 23 to 25 and show 25 adaptations in total, with some of them debuting for the first time. King fans will see short stories like Popsy, My Pretty Pony, The Passenger, Garrish, and more. There will also be Q&A after each film with the filmmakers. Barker Street Cinema is hosting the festival, which is interesting because one of its partners is himself a Dollar Baby alum. James Douglas brought King’s The Doctor’s Case to life, winning awards at several festivals. The full schedule can be found below.

Anyone who wants to pop in for the fun can head to Vimeo or YouTube to watch. And, of course, there will be Twitter commentary from the Stephen King Rules Dollar Baby Film Festival’s official account. It sounds like a really awesome event to give rising creatives some shine. Stephen King could easily decide to not help any up-and-coming person, much less allow them to use his works for their films. But, he’s doing that and it shows his love and heart for creativity and horror. Tune in and experience King’s work in a new way.

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Fans have been clamoring for a new adaptation for some time now, and the project has been in various stages of production for years. But things are finally kicking into gear, and a new version of The Stand is on the way. Here’s everything we know about the upcoming miniseries.

CBS All Access

The series will air on CBS All Access. 

Back in 2014, Warner Bros. Pictures and CBS Films announced they were working on a film adaptation of The Stand, but those plans eventually changed—likely when they realized how much material there is to cover. Instead, it was announced that a miniseries adapting the book would air on CBS All Access, the broadcast network’s streaming platform. The nine-episode miniseries will premiere on December 17, 2020, with new episodes dropping weekly.

Josh Boone will direct the premiere and finale.

Boone is best known for directing The Fault in Our Stars and is an on-the-record Stephen King superfan. He’s been attached to the project since it was announced as a film, is directing and executive producing the premiere and the finale, which was written by King and includes a new coda not found in the pages of his revered book. Benjamin Cavell serves as showrunner and will executive produce, with Taylor Elmore, Will Weiske, Jimmy Miller, Roy Lee, and Richard P. Rubinstein also serving as executive producers.

CBS All Access

The cast is super stacked. 

Folks have been fan-casting The Stand forever (ourselves included), but at long last the official cast announcement is here. According to Deadline, James Marsden, Amber Heard, Odessa Young, and Henry Zaga joined the project. Marsden will play Stu Redman, the closest thing The Stand has to a traditional hero, a factory-worker turned fateful survivor. Heard will play Nadine Cross, a woman drawn to Randall Flagg, the story’s villain. Young will play Frannie Goldsmith, a young pregnant woman whose unborn child holds a promise for the future. And Zaga will play Nick Andros, a deaf and mute man who often puts himself in danger to save others.

Greg Kinnear and Whoopi Goldberg also have roles (as Glen Bateman and Mother Abagail, respectively).

In September 2019, we also learned the big news: True Blood and Big Little Lies actor Alexander Skarsgård joined the cast as the famous King villain Randall Flagg. (Skarsgård’s brother, Bill, plays Pennywise in the new It films, so creepy King vibes must run in the family.) He joined other newly announced cast members Jovan Adepo as Larry Underwood, Owen Teague as Harold Lauder, Brad William Henke as Tom Cullen, and Daniel Sunjata as Cobb.

In November, Entertainment Weekly revealed that Ezra Miller will play the Trashcan Man, casting that was previously kept under wraps.

CBS All Access

Stephen King is writing a new ending for the show.

According to Deadline, King is writing a “continuation” exclusively for the series that will give the story a new ending. “For fans of the book who have wondered what became of the survivors of the stand, this episode will contain a story that takes us beyond the book to answer those questions,” CBS All Access EVP Julie McNamara told the audience at TCA. King has previously expressed some regrets with the way he ended the book, so this will be an exciting way to breathe new life into the the story and wrap it up the way he sees fit.

Images: CBS All Access

Originally published on August 2, 2019, with updates on July 21, August 25, and August 30 2020.

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We’ve been waiting decades for a version of The Stand that lives up to Stephen King’s opus of a novel. The book, released in 1978, couldn’t possibly be more relevant today. It’s set in an apocalyptic America ravaged by a deadly illness that kills most of the world’s population. Sounds a little on-the-nose, right?

The Stand will receive a nine-episode limited series release this year on CBS All Access. (It was previously adapted as a miniseries back in 1994.) And now, we have a brand new trailer out of New York Comic Con to sink our teeth into. Let’s check it out.

There’s certainly a lot going on here! Fans of the book will notice a lot of key moments that’ve made their way to screen. But in case you don’t know much about The Stand and how it fits into the larger world of Stephen King, here’s the official synopsis for the series from CBS.

The Stand is Stephen King’s apocalyptic vision of a world decimated by plague and embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil. The fate of mankind rests on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg) and a handful of survivors. Their worst nightmares are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), the Dark Man. 

Based on King’s best-selling novel of the same name, CBS All Access’  The Stand will close with a new coda written by the famed author himself. 

That’s right. This version of The Stand will have a new coda from the horror auteur himself. We can’t wait to see what King cooked up for us.

CBS All Access

In addition to Goldberg and Skarsgård, The Stand stars James Marsden as Stu Redman; Odessa Young as Frannie Goldsmith; Jovan Adepo as Larry Underwood; Amber Heard as Nadine Cross; Owen Teague as Harold Lauder; Henry Zaga as Nick Andros; Brad William Henke as Tom Cullen; Irene Bedard as Ray Bretner; Nat Wolff as Lloyd Henreid; Eion Bailey as Weizak; Heather Graham as Rita Blakemoor; Katherine McNamara as Julie Lawry; Fiona Dourif as Ratwoman; Natalie Martinez as Dayna Jurgens; Hamish Linklater as Dr. Jim Ellis; Daniel Sunjata as Cobb; and Greg Kinnear as Glen Bateman.

The series premieres December 17 on CBS All Access, with new episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays.

Featured Image: CBS All Access

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If someone told me there are actually seven or eight authors who write under the pen name Stephen King I would  believe them. It doesn’t seem possible any one person can be so prolific, churning out quality books one after another like they were baking cookies rather than best-sellers. And yet it really is just one man responsible for them. But it turns out even the horror master himself has limits. He recently shared an idea for a novel he never intends on writing, even though it would definitely be a hit. Because Stephen King telling a tale from Jason Voorhees point-of-view is the Friday the 13th story we need.

King recently Tweeted about “the best novel idea” he never wrote and, unfortunately “probably never will.” It would be a first-person narrative about Camp Crystal Lake’s iconic supernatural sociopath, Jason Voorhees and “and his hellish fate.”

It’s a pairing that sounds both insane and amazing. This seems like the type of idea a college student would come up with at 3 a.m. after a night of too much partying. But as King notes, Jason Voorhees is a fascinating character. He’s “killed over and over again,” creating one “hellish, existential fate!” That’s an understatement.

Paramount Pictures

And while we can’t even begin to imagine what goes through the mind of Mrs. Voorhees’ little boy as he slashes his way through young coeds and is repeatedly murdered himself, that’s exactly the kind of twisted, macabre matter we would trust Stephen King to think about.

So even though he says he will never write it we’re always going to think about what could have been. Would he have followed Jason throughout the entire Friday the 13th franchise, the good and the bad? Did Jason hate his trip to New York City as much as we did? And what did he think of space?

We’ve never considered what things must be like for Jason before, just his victims. But now that’s all we’ll be thinking about. Fortunately there’s always hope Stephen King will write this novel. He’s so prolific he’s basically supernatural himself.

Featured Image: Warner Bros./New Line Cinema 

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 Pocket Books

The film’s failure inspired Mazzara to take a different route with his adaptation. His pilot took from a later book in the series Wizard and Glass, which would have seen the story follow a younger version of the Gunslinger, Roland. He even revealed that he shot his vision for the pilot with actors Sam Strike as The Gunslinger and Jasper Pääkkönen as The Man in Black. So what would that pilot have been about? “The story of the pilot is basically Roland in the desert.” Mazzara explained.

“‘The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed,'” Mazzara told the hosts in reference to the opening of the first novel, The Gunslinger. But he revealed that here the key would be that the Gunslinger was chasing the Man In Black, who’d had an affair with Roland’s mother while assuming the identity of a man named Marten, and he’s now seeking vengeance.

That first season arc would have followed the events of the fourth book which Mazzara explains here. “In Wizard and Glass, very quickly you go from the death of Susan to the death of Gabrielle, [Roland’s] mother,” Mazzara said. “I felt that I needed a season to give me real estate so that Gabrielle’s death didn’t step on Susan’s, and that it felt like an escalation. Roland fails to save Susan, but he actually shoots and kills his mother.” Just like the time-hopping-world-hopping books, Mazzara would have then jumped to the eighth novel Wind Through the Keyhole for the second season, before heading back to original book The Gunslinger for the third. Though it might sound random the first novel does follow an older Roland, so it would be easy to make it make sense!

How does that sound to you? Are you a fan of The Dark Tower series? Does Mazzara’s take on it sound like you would have enjoyed it? We’re definitely impressed by the thought that went into it. The unexpected timeline also showcases a love and understanding of the property that could have translated to something special. You can check out the full Kingcast episode to learn more about Mazzara’s plans for the scrapped series.

Header Image: Sony Pictures

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Even thought it’s been forty years since it was released, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s classic The Shining remains one of the best horror films ever made, if not arguably the best (it has some serious competition from The Exorcist in my humble opinion). But when it was first released back in 1980, it wasn’t the mega-hit that Warner Brothers was hoping for. It performed decently, but audiences used to slasher flicks of the day were expecting something more straightforward, probably more like King’s original novel. The movie was even nominated for several Razzie awards, which seems beyond absurd today. Nevertheless, today most fans and critics agree that The Shining is indeed a masterpiece.

In an effort to make the film more palatable to mainstream audiences back in the day, many changes were made to the film while in production, especially to the ending. Many different endings were bandied about by Kubrick and the production team before they finally settled on the conclusion that we got: Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance frozen in the snow after failing to kill his family. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the film’s producer Jan Harlan and screenwriter Diane Johnson went into details about some of them, including one which was super dark, and one which would have given audiences a surprise twist ending.

In King’s original novel, no one innocent gets killed, and Wendy, Danny and the kindly cook, Dick Hallorann get away to safety. Kubrick wisely surmised that since this is a horror film, someone innocent has got to die. At one point, Little Danny was actually considered, and screenwriter Diane Johnson said “I remember Kubrick saying that visually he could imagine a small yellow chalk outline on the floor like that they put around the bodies of victims. And Kubrick liked that image. But he was too tender-hearted for that ending and thought it would be too terrible to do.”  I’d agree: that was a very smart omission.

In another discussed finale, Johnson confirms that there was once going to be quite a twist ending, worthy of M. Night Shyamalan. In one version, Wendy manages to kill Jack in the third act. Then Hallorann arrives seemingly to rescue them, and then he gets possessed by the hotel too, and becomes the finale’s surprise villain. It’s unclear if the newly possessed Hallorann then kills the rest of the Torrance family, but man… that would have been another truly bleak ending.

The final ending deviated from King’s book in several ways, by replacing the living topiary animals with a hedge maze, and electing not to blow up the hotel at the end. But right up until release, there was an epilogue to the film, which assures us that Wendy and Danny got away and told their harrowing story to the Overlook Hotel’s manager, Stuart Ullman. Ullman then gives Danny the mysterious ball that rolled his way in the hotel, suggesting that he too is a ghost in service of the Overlook. Wait, what? The film’s preview screening for critics had that scene, but realizing it made everything more confusing, Kubrick then ordered it removed from prints distributed around the country at the last minute.

For more details on scenes and moments omitted from The Shining by Kubrick, be sure to check out the full article at Entertainment Weekly.

What do you think of these alternate ending to the classic film? Would it have made the movie better or worse? Let us know what you think down below in the comments.

Images: Warner Brothers

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A terrifying pandemic envelopes the globe, killing off a significant portion of the population. The catastrophic event instills survivors with fear and guilt, and splinters them into groups with first and separate sets of beliefs about the tragedy. Tensions rise, violence flourishes, chaos reigns. No, we’re not talking about the current coronavirus pandemic, but the plot of Stephen King’s The Stand. The massive novel is one of the horror author’s most famous and esteemed works. And soon, it will make its way to the small screen (again) in the form of a CBS All-Access miniseries.

Today, Vanity Fair shared a first look at the upcoming show, featuring interviews with show runners Benjamin Cavell and Taylor Elmore, the cast, and King himself. We got our first glimpse at many of the show’s characters, and learned tidbits about the changes made to the story, the production, and how COVID-19 impacted filming—and will almost certainly inform how audiences react to and engage with the show when it finally debuts.

Here are a few of the most interesting things we learned about the upcoming adaptation of The Stand from the Vanity Fair article.

Filming was impacted by COVID-19

Like many shows and films, production for The Stand shut down as the coronavirus pandemic took hold. In fact, the series was just four days away from completion when filming stopped. CBS All-Access is still moving forward with the show’s original release date, which means they either had enough completed to make the series work regardless, or there will be some additional production when quarantine lifts.

It couldn’t possibly be a more eerie coincidence. The Stand tells the story of a virus called Captain Trips that affects the entire global population. There are some key differences, however. The virus in King’s novel is the result of biological warfare that gets out of its facility, and it kills about 99 percent of humanity in quick succession. Still, it’s hard not to note the similarities, or the spookiness of the pandemic taking hold while a new version of The Stand filmed.

CBS

The series won’t play out in chronological order

Much like Greta Gerwig’s recent Little Women adaptation scrambled chronology to tell a linear story in a brand new way, so will the new version of The Stand start somewhere other than the beginning. The article says that the first episode opens in Boulder, Colorado, well after the onset of the disease, where folks are piling bodies in the street. The Stand series will also take a page out of the Lost handbook, with flashbacks to characters’ lives pre-Captain Trips.

Frannie plays a central role

One of the more intriguing characters from King’s novel will get a big spotlight in the series. Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young) learns that she’s pregnant right as Captain Trips takes hold. She’s immune to the virus, but she doesn’t know if her unborn child will be. Its very existence opens a fascinating moral quandary: what does it mean to bring a child into a crumbling world?

“Is it futile if there’s no hope for humanity?” Young told Vanity Fair. “Even after the virus has run its course, is it an act of cruelty to continue humanity?” The creators also took “tiny liberties” with Frannie’s relationship with her neighbor, Harold Lauder (Owen Teague), hoping to update the characters to relay a more modern dynamic.

Randall Flagg will have a different vibe

Flagg, the ultimate villain of not just The Stand but of many other King works, gets an update in the CBS All-Access version of The Stand. Described as a mysterious, denim-clad demon in the book, the new version sees him as “ a charismatic rockabilly demon.” That’s evident in the first photos of the character, which shows Alexander Skarsgård rocking a pretty interesting beard and hair situation.

Stephen King villainy runs in the Skarsgård family bloodline; Alexander’s brother, Bill, played the “villain” in the first season of Castle Rock, based on King’s stories, as well as Pennywise in the new It movies.

We’ll see the layers of Mother Abigail

Whoopi Goldberg plays Mother Abigail in The Stand, the antithesis to Randall Flagg. While he gathers survivors along a darker path, Abigail represents all that is good and lures people to her homestead in Boulder through their dreams.

Mother Abigail is a somewhat controversial figure in the novel, as she falls into a trope King unfortunately dips into quite a bit: the “Magical Negro,” a black character who is all-seeing and whose inherent abilities serves as motivation or action for white characters. (The term was coined by Spike Lee, after the release of another King adaptation, The Green Mile.) Goldberg told Vanity Fair that she was aware of this criticism and tried to work against it in the series, calling the character more “complicated” than that designation.

“She doesn’t listen when God is talking to her. And she tends to go her own way because she’s been like this her whole life,” Goldberg told the magazine. “It takes her a little while to figure out that there’s something bigger than her.”

Doubleday

King wrote a new ending for the show

Word of this spread a while back, but the article once again confirm that King wrote a brand new ending for this version of The Stand. This isn’t the first time he’s tampered with the ending, either; an updated edition of the novel came with a new epilogue, which teased an intriguing continuation for one surviving character.

Will the new show include that epilogue, or go off in an entirely new direction? We’ll find out together when The Stand hits CBS All-Access Later this year.

Featured Image: Doubleday

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HBO’s The Outsider was truly terrifying from start to finish thanks to its roots in genuine grief and loss. It earned its horror by completely investing in its human characters, which deepened the despair and darkness of the show. And while that terror and heartbreak were on full display in the season finale, it also featured another Stephen King calling card. Even amid unimaginable horror, his works remind us that we can find hope and love.

The Outsider season finale started with a brutal shootout that was physically hard to watch, and followed that up with a terrifying monster calmly explaining how children taste best. The episode ended with the nightmarish suggestion that unimaginable evil infected one of the show’s heroes. But all of that fear, heartbreak, and sadness weren’t the only elements that made the show a quintessential Stephen King yarn. It was also the unexpected light in the darkness his stories offer, the one Ralph wouldn’t have found without this experience.

HBO

A Stephen King horror story never lets its audience off easy. The show started with the truly heinous murder of young Frankie Peterson and it ended with most of its characters gunned down by a man under a demon’s control, leaving even more people to grieve for them.

Just as dreadful was the show’s mystery. Even the calm El Coco, which spoke more like a man than a demon, didn’t know where it came from, how old it was, and whether there were others like it in the world. The little we did learn about it was horrifying: El C0co ate children because they were most desirable, and it fed on the presence of the dead and grief itself.

HBO

El Coco died with its secrets, its final act of terror being the terror of the unknown. But then we got that mid-credits scene and we were reminded that Stephen King nightmares never truly end. Evil isn’t a single entity that can be defeated. Jack’s ghost could be haunting Holly because he’s inside her head. Or El Coco, either this one or another of its kind, might have “infected” Holly. Although she and Ralph won this round, but their battle isn’t over, and they’ve already suffered terrible losses they’ll carry with them for ever.

But in the midst of all this carnage and death was the strange hope and optimism that permeates many of Stephen King’s best stories. Fans love that he can scare them, and he takes them to some very dark places. But he also offers a light even in the deepest caves, because there’s more to this world than just death and suffering.

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If a supernatural evil force like El Coco exists, an equal and opposite force of good exists too. The monster revealed as much in its own twisted way. “I still feel their presence,” El C0co said about those who died long ago in that cave, “They give off such a glow.” The dead even gave him nourishment. “They’re the blood that I’m becoming. It feels like I’m being entered. And what enters me, fills me—you have no idea what it feels like to have all of that emotion inside of me.”

Evil can feed on the dead and suffering, but the dead can also provide love and comfort. They did for Ralph. He saw the ghosts of his son and the older Peterson boy he killed outside the courthouse. They appeared to let him know El Coco wasn’t really dead. When Ralph needed guidance they came to him. Their “glow” was nourishment, but not food for a beast. It was love for a kind soul to draw from.

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Death does not mean our loved ones are gone. Like El C0co, we don’t know how or why, but we know their spirits are out there, helping us. Our loved one are never far from us. Even if we can’t see them, we can feel them and call on them.

Ralph, who was so reluctant to believe in El C0co before, asked Holly a final question before she left him. It’s a question that perfectly encapsulates why this sad, painful episode was also full of the kind of beauty and hope of so many Stephen King stories. “What else is out there?” Ralph wanted to know.

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She shrugged, but we already saw the answer—love and a world beyond our own. It’s the place where someday Ralph and Jeannie will see their son again. And no monster, or Outsider, will ever be able to hurt them again.

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El Cuco is dead, but its mystery lives on. Where did it come from? Do others like it still exist? What else is out there? Are other mythical monsters also real? With those unanswered questions, The Outsider‘s supposed series finale left open the possibility that Holly and Ralph could one day team up again to fight other supernatural creatures.

But that wasn’t the only sign that the show could return for a second season. A surprising mid-credits scene revealed that HBO might still have an itch to scratch with Stephen King’s story.

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The most frightening aspect of the final showdown with El Cuco was that it left open so many terrifying possibilities. When Holly asked El Cuco if others like it exist, the monster didn’t know for sure either. But it had a feeling they do. “There have been times when I sense there could be more,” it said.

The legend of El Cuco—the shape-shifting eater of children, the drinker of tears and grief—transcends cultures around the world. Some know El Cuco as Baba Yaga or Babau, others call it Butzemann or the Tata Duende. People everywhere fear it. Thus, the monster Ralph killed probably wasn’t the only one of its kind. And the world will need someone to hunt them.

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Ralph was open to the idea of working with Holly again someday. He’d rather they reunite for something simple like a gangland triple homicide, but if another demon posed a threat he wouldn’t ignore it.

And if El Cuco and ghosts exist, what other supernatural beings might also be out there? A second season of The Outsider could send Ralph and Holly on a different monster hunt with new challenges and dangers. (We would definitely watch Ben Mendelsohn and Cynthia Erivo as monster P.I.s.)

But they might not need to go looking for a new monster to hunt, because the story of this El Cuco might not be finished yet.

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The Outsider was supposed to be a limited series based on Stephen King’s standalone novel. As such, it was the last show you’d ever expect to have a mid-credits scene. Yet there it was.

Holly was looking in her mirror when the ghost of Jack Hoskins appeared behind her. The two, both outsiders in their own ways, had a connection. Jack only stopped gunning everyone down when she walked out into the open. Holly was the one who broke El Cuco’s spell over Jack. It’s possible his ghost appeared to her because they are linked in a way we can’t fully understand. This episode showed that ghosts exist, and that it’s possible to see them or feel their “glow.”

Jack’s presence doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but his appearance very well might have been a harbinger of something sinister. Holly immediately checked the back of her neck to make sure she hadn’t been infected by El Cuco. There was nothing there, and it seemed like that was the end. El Cuco never got physically close to her anyway.

But in the final shot of the season, we saw Holly had a fresh scratch on her arm. We don’t know how she got it or when, or who or what was responsible for it. But we do know what a scratch from El Cuco means.

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Maybe that was the show’s way of saying evil can never be fully defeated, and that good people must always stay vigilante and ready to fight. Holly’s scratch might have been a fitting metaphor to end the story with.

Or it might have been a way to tell us the story isn’t over. “What else is out there?” For fans of The Outsider, it might be a second season.

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The Outsider‘s premise is terrifying. The literal boogeyman exists, and he’s a child-killing shape-shifter who transforms into someone you trust. You will gladly welcome him into your home or accept a ride from him thinking you are with a loved one. That’s not all this monster, known as El Coco, is capable of, either.

The paranormal creature can make others do its bidding, haunt your nightmares, and appear to you without even being there. The monster’s evil is everywhere and spreads like a virus. And yet, that’s not why The Outsider fills us with such dread. The way the show roots its story in grief makes its horror personal and real.

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The supernatural elements of The Outsider alone are chilling and compelling. El Coco is the worst kind of monster, a literal “tear-drinker” you can’t see coming. It preys on children and then feeds on the pain and suffering that results from their deaths. The sixth episode also offered more clarity into how it can be in so many places at once.

As Holly explained, while it’s morphing into a new body, El Coco transmits its presence like radio waves. It’s how he visited young Jessa Maitland and Jeannie Anderson without actually breaking into their homes. It can be anywhere it wants, whenever it wants.

Its mind control ability is also much more terrifying than we’d realized. El Coco can project personal images to hurt you. It sent Jack’s dead “mother” to beat him up and make Jack follow commands. And Holly was shown a fake crash by the false ghost of Tracy Powell, which almost led to a real crash.

But the primary source of The Outsider‘s unending sense of dread is its characters’ grief. Their loss and fear are accessible and authentic. We might not be able to empathize with having a literal monster haunting our town, but we can understand being afraid that our family isn’t safe, or knowing our loved one is never coming home.

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That element has been there from the start. Frankie Patterson’s mother, Ralph and Jeannie Anderson, and Glory Maitland have all had to deal with life-changing loss. Sometimes in very loud, painful ways. Other times in sad moments of silent reflection. By investing in the characters’ personal stories, and by showing how a child or husband’s death can ruin your entire life, the show feels like a drama with supernatural affectation.

But in the show’s sixth episode, the grief became intertwined with the plot, bringing all of that pain and suffering to the forefront of the story. Glory, emotional after Holly’s seemingly bullshit theory about the boogeyman, started looking for her own answer. She tore through her late husband’s belongings, tossing them into the hall, worried she’d find some horrible secret that proved his guilt. After being so certain of his innocence, the lack of an explanation had her questioning if Terry was the man she thought he was. Her breakdown at the kitchen table with Ralph was as hard as any moment on the show yet.

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And then it got worse. Glory went upstairs and found her oldest daughter neatly folding her dad’s clothes. Overwhelmed, tired, broken, and ashamed, Glory could only hang her head. The loss of Terry and everything that surrounds his death is too much for anyone. Just like it was for the Patterson family. And just like it will be for El Coco’s next victim.

Still, the show isn’t so hopeless that we feel doomed to be lost forever in a sea of pain and suffering. The sixth episode used Ralph’s grief to give us something to believe in, connecting it directly to the mystery at the heart of the show.

Ralph holds onto to “facts, evidence, dumb cop s*** like that.” But he isn’t immune to believing in something beyond this world. He can claim it was a dream, but we saw the truth: he thinks his son really did come to speak to him. “Was it really you?” he asked, standing in his son’s bedroom. Ralph is sure it wasn’t El Coco, like Holly believes.

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Of course, what if Ralph is wrong? What if El Coco is manipulating Ralph the same way he did Tracy Powell before and Jack Hoskins now? Was that image of his late son no different than the one Holly saw on the bus? What if the tear-drinker is using Ralph’s unimaginable grief against him? How could anyone or anything use our own suffering against us in such a painful way?

We can feel the dread of The Outsider in our bones because the show explores the personal depth of what its monster does. We can’t empathize with facing the actual boogeyman, but everyone of us knows the terror and fear of possibly losing the ones we love. Nothing could be more horrifying.

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It has many names. Pugot Mamu, Black Annis, El Coco. In Western culture, we know it as the Bogeyman. It’s the stuff of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. A creature used as a cautionary tale: Obey your elders or el Coco will come for you and eat you. But what if the Bogeyman was real? What form would it take, what chaos would it wreak, and how might it maim and annihilate a community? That’s the question at the core of HBO’s The Outsider, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name. In the most recent episode, aptly titled “Que Viene el Coco,” the mysterious entity terrorizing Cherokee City, Georgia is linked to this bit of folklore.

But is el Coco really the one evoking mischief, not just in Cherokee City, but in the Ohio and New York communities where more child murders took place? Is it the reason Terry Maitland could somehow appear in two places at once? Or is it merely misdirection, a supernatural scapegoat to distract us from a human culprit? Let’s dig into the mythology of el Coco, where it originated, where we’ve seen it before, and how it might infect the plot of The Outsider.

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What is El Coco?

Private investigator Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo) is hot on the trail of a suspect who was accused of a crime very similar to Maitland’s. Her name is Maria Coneles and she was convicted of killing a little boy despite video proof that she was with her grandmother at the time. Like Maitland—and a nurse named Heath Holmes, who had contact with Maitland’s father—the DNA evidence and reports from second-hand witnesses were enough to incriminate her. But unlike the other two, Maria is still alive. Holly presses her for information and receives very little… except that Maria knows who framed her, though she won’t say.

But the trail doesn’t run dry there. Another woman is at visitation at the prison and overhears the conversation. She leaves her address for Holly, and when she arrives at her apartment, the woman relays information about a creature known as el Coco:

“All the old cultures had the bad habit of turning truth into fairy tales. When we tell our children about El Coco, we say, ‘If you misbehave, it’ll take you away and eat you.’ What we should tell them is it doesn’t matter either way. It takes what it wants […] It can look like a person if it chooses to be, but it’s not. This day and age we find it so difficult to believe in anything that we can’t explain.”

The woman then points out that so many people in the orbit of these killings have also died, not just the victims. Maria’s father and uncle were killed for being associated with her. The entire family of the boy Maitland allegedly murdered died after he was slain. Death follows this thing; “the grief eater,” the woman calls it. “It likes to linger because it craves the pain of the ones left behind.”

This is a bit of an expansion on what we know about el Coco from folklore. The myth—which has ties to Spain, Portugal, and Latin America—speaks of a “child eater,” who watches out for childish misbehavior from rooftops. It takes many forms; it can appear as a shadowy or hooded figure, a dragon, a large fish, a man with a coconut head (the name “coco” is derived from the Portuguese word côco, or coconut). There are many songs and lullabies about it, including the one the woman sings to Holly in The Outsider: Duérmete niño, duérmete ya, que viene el Coco y te comerá. (“Sleep child, sleep now, else Coco comes and will eat you.”)

Similar myths exist elsewhere in the world, different regions and cultures shaping its lore. In Mediterranean areas, it’s known as Babau; in Germanic folklore, it’s the Butzemann; in Belize it’s the Tata Duende. Thousands of variations, all of them with a similar foundation: an amorphous creature that can take the face or physicality of whatever it wants to be to scare a child.

Francisco Goya/National Gallery of Art

Where have we seen it before?

El Coco, also known as el Cuco or la Coca/Cuca, turns up in a lot of art and pop culture. As The Outsider shows, many famous paintings depict the bogeyman. Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s art is spotted twice in the episode. His 1799 drawing Que Viene el Coco shows a family terrified of a hooded creature. We also see his terrifying painting, Satan Devouring His Son, showing a demonic creature biting the head off of a body.

The folklore has trickled into other shows and movies, too. The myth of el Coco appeared in episodes of The Wizards of Waverly Place and Grimm. The boggart, variation of the bogeyman, shows up in fantasy stories like Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. There are even two Pokémon based on el Coco and la Coca: Hatterene and Grimmsnarl.

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What role will El Coco play in the show?

I haven’t read Stephen King’s The Outsider, so I have no idea how el Coco fits into the story. Speculatively, this could go a few different ways. Either the mysterious woman Holly Gibney encountered in that prison was some sort of deus ex machina, delivering very specific and precise information about what’s going on with these strange murders, or this is all misdirection. Holly made it clear to Detective Ralph Anderson that she supports a possible supernatural explanation because she herself—who has some form of undiagnosed condition that makes her both gifted with numbers and memory, and also somewhat mystic—is an enigma. But will her belief in the bogeyman lead her astray?

If I had to wager a guess, I’d say the introduction of el Coco is a little too convenient to be disregarded. There’s clearly something otherworldly at play here. How else do you explain the doppelgängers, the scratches, the man with the molten face who is haunting Maitland’s young daughter? There is clearly something spooky going on with Detective Jack Hoskins as well; he was tortured by an unseen force in the woods and is under the spell of something that seems to be manipulating his appearance the way Maitland was cored into two beings… and Heath… and Maria.

We also need to remember that this is a Stephen King novel, where the supernatural flourishes. Yes, he also dabbles in stories with plausible explanations now and then. But first and foremost, he’s a storyteller who uses the paranormal as a metaphor for our cultural fears. A bogeyman able to inhabit the skin of beloved fixtures in the community, and cause them to carry out the most horrendous possible deeds, is very in line with his modus operandi. I have a feeling the creep factor will only double down from here on out. The bogeyman is real, and he’s coming for us.

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What’s the most terrifying thing in the world? Answers will vary. Fear is the most subjective emotion there is, a projection of what rots at the core of our subconscious. For some, it’s ghouls and monsters that haunt. For others, it’s more existential concepts: loss, murder, the afterlife. No matter its manifestation, fear is a collective experience. We all know it, and we all know how to survive it–in one way or another. But what if you couldn’t escape that fear, no matter where you turned? What if it followed you like a shadow or twin? That’s the idea behind HBO’s newest crime series, The Outsider, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King.

If there’s one name synonymous with cultural fear, it’s King, whose made a career of translating nightmares to page. He tackled the death of a child in Pet Sematary, small town vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot, a haunted hotel in The Shining. But The Outsider reconciles with something less particular. Something amorphous and impossible to understand. It asks the question: What if you were forensically guilty of a crime you know you didn’t commit?

The Outsider follows the murder of Frankie Peterson, whose mutilated and sodomized body is uncovered in the show’s opening moments. Local Cherokee City, Georgia police detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) has a seemingly easy case on his hand: eyewitnesses spotted little league coach Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) with the boy shortly before his death, and Maitland’s DNA is found at the scene of the crime. In a show of anger, Anderson—whose late son Maitland coached—has the coach arrested at a game in front of his family and half the town. It’s a move that incriminates Maitland beyond just the obvious; it turns the case into a spectacle and the Matiland family into pariahs.

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But there’s more to this crime than initially meets the eye. Maitland professes his innocence, and soon a very curious piece of counter-evidence arrives: A videotape of Maitland at a teachers’ conference in a different town at the exact time of Peterson’s death. And his fingerprints on the spine of a book at a shop in the same town. How could this man be in two places at once? Is someone framing him, or–because this is a Stephen King story–is there something supernatural in store?

I haven’t read the book so I have no idea where the story is headed, and so I am left–with other non-readers–with a lot of big questions and plenty of malaise. There is something surrealist and uncomfortable about The Outsider, from the undulating score that mimics anxiety and dread, to the muted colors that blanch the Georgia setting into a bleakly hellish habitat. Everything feels off. The fabric of our reality is called into question. Before every bad thing happens, we spot a man in a melted face mask on the scene and in the background, haunting the town, the crime, and us.

The first two episodes of the series–“Fish In A Barrel” and “Roanoke,” both directed by Jason Bateman–premiered this week, and wisely so. While captivating, “Fish In A Barrel” felt a little familiar; crime procedurals are a dime a dozen these days, and the small-town murder of a kid–while horrific–is standard as far as these things go. Even the central mystery could have a simple explanation: Someone who looks like Terry Maitland framed him, possibly a twin. But “Roanoke” flipped the entire premise on its head in its opening sequence, when the victim’s brother shoots Maitland dead ahead of his trial. The teenager is promptly killed by Anderson. Suddenly, the show isn’t about Maitland’s own moral quandary, but is instead a dissection of Anderson’s guilt and a look at how accusations rot and malign a family.

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Add to that a mysterious van that followed the Maitland family from a recent trip to Ohio, the dissolution of Frankie Peterson’s entire family (his mother dies from a stress-induced heart attack and his father attempts suicide), and a “bad man” haunting Terry’s youngest daughter at night in what is either a dream or a visitation, and you have a classic horror story. That it’s mapped onto a crime procedural only adds to its insidiousness. The horror of The Outsider is inescapable, even in death. No matter what happened to Frankie Peterson–if he was murdered by a ghost, a clone, a monster, a doppelgänger, or Maitland himself–it hardly matters. The Maitlands are cursed, Anderson is haunted, and circumstance and actions have incriminated and enveloped an entire community.

The result is the scariest Stephen King adaptation in years–possibly ever. Because it’s about the terror of the mundane. The monsters we make. The shadow of death that comes for every family. In “Roanoke,” District Attorney Bill Samuels (Michael Esper) recalls the events of a mysterious case that gives the episode its title”

“1587, Roanoke Colony, North Carolina. Close to 200 people living there when the governor sailed back to England to get more supplies, and when he returned, they vanished. Not a soul and clue as to what happened. I mean, here we are, four centuries later, we still can’t figure it out. So it is with Terry Maitland. Is there a mystery here? Yes. Will there always be unanswered questions? Most likely. Sometimes that happens and when it does you just need to learn to live with it and move on.”

It’s learning to live with the inexplicable that’s the scariest thing of all. It’s how we survive, but it can also drive us insane in the quest for solution. The Outsider may provide us with all the answers we seek. Or it may, eventually, be about making peace with the lack of resolution. Whatever road it takes, we’re in for a grueling treat. Maybe we’ll learn something along the way, too.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the first two episodes of The Outsider.

HBO’s limited series The Outsider is an adaptation of Stephen King’s best-selling novel. I don’t know anything about the story beyond what I saw in the show’s great first two episodes. Did Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) really brutally murder a young boy? Plenty of evidence says he did. The problem is plenty of evidence says he didn’t. Here’s all the clues both for and against the Little League coach’s innocence so far, along with why none of it might actually matter.

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Evidence Against

Forensic Evidence

Police discovered Terry Maitland’s fingerprints, over 70 of them, on both young Frankie Patterson’s body and the white a witness saw him entering the day of his death. The boy’s bike, as well as the tree branch used to sexually assault him, also had Maitland’s fingerprints on them. Police also found AB positive blood, the same as Maitland’s, in the van, at the crime scene, and on the victim.

Most importantly, Maitland’s DNA matched the DNA from bite marks on Frankie Patterson.

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Eyewitnesses

Four different eyewitness clearly and without equivocation identified Terry Maitland from the day of the Patterson murder, March 30. Mary the school teacher was the last person to see Frankie alive. He got into a white van, with out-of-state plates, driven by Maitland. She also saw the coach put the boy’s bike in the back. That happened at exactly 3:00 in the afternoon; she remembered because she heard the church bells play.

A young girl saw Maitland near the woods where Frankie was found. The coach’s nose and mouth were drenched in blood. He told her he had broken his nose on a tree branch. She saw him drive away in the same van.

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Claude (Paddy Considine) saw a still-bloodied Terry at his strip club minutes before 8:00 PM. The venue’s security camera captured this conversation. Maitland said he had broken his nose and needed to clean up before taking a taxi to a nearby medical center. Claude noticed the coach had blood on his back, which would have been hard to get from a broken nose. Terry was carrying a large brown paper bag. When he came out—clean—he was wearing new clothes: a white shirt, jeans, and a huge belt buckle. Those clothes were seen abandoned in a farm at the end of the second episode. It’s not clear how they got there or when.

Taxi to the Train Station

A few minutes later on the night of the 30th, at 8:05 pm, Maitland got into a taxi outside the strip club. Like the other witnesses the driver instantly recognized him; seemingly everyone in town knew him. He made it a point to have her call in his fare, as if to create an official account of where he was and when. She thought he was drunk at first. But she couldn’t smell any liquor on him. She did notice his eyes though.

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Maitland did not go to the nearby Urgent Care however. The cab dropped him off at the Amtrak station at 8:28. He never bought a ticket or got on a train like he claimed he was going to. He did seem to intentionally show his (blurry) face on the (grainy) security system, where he also flipped off the camera, before leaving.

Everything Terry Maitland did after allegedly killing Frankie Patterson makes no sense unless he wanted to be caught.

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Evidence For

Cap City Conference

On the day Frankie Patterson was kidnapped and murdered, Terry Maitland said he was 70 miles away at the Babcock Hotel in Cap City. He said he left home at 9:00 AM on Tuesday, was at the hotel all day, then left at 7:00 AM on Wednesday. Maitland claimed he returned home at noon.

He had two eyewitnesses that both told police they were with him at the conference all day. The coach also said the first panel on censorship started at 2:00 PM. He said it went for an hour, followed by 45 minutes of questions. Hotel security footage seemed to support him, but it was unclear. A local access television crew’s footage absolutely did support it. Maitland was at the conference when Frankie Patterson was killed. This was all caught on tape.

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A gift shop owner also identified Maitland as the man who came into her shop and picked up a book no other customer had ever touched. Security footage also seemingly showed him enter the store, and his fingerprints were on the book. (Unfortunately they were also an exact match to the fingerprints found at the crime scene.)

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Unreliable Eyewitness

Everyone who identified Terry Maitland on the day of the murder is a questionable witnesses in some way. Mary the school teacher doesn’t like to drive much because of her failing eyesight. The second was a very young girl who was alone. Claude has a long rap sheet and only saw the coach in a poorly lit strip club. And the taxi driver only saw Maitland sitting behind her at night in a car without lights.

Unexplained

The Van

Mary the school teacher saw Frankie Patterson enter a white van with New York state plates. Police found his bike and blood inside. Terry Maitland said he had never owned or driven that van before, yet his fingerprints and blood were all over it. He also said he had not been in New York in 16 years.

His last time out of state was weeks earlier to visit his father in Dayton, Ohio. He was there from March 4th to the 7th, along with his wife and two daughters. All four of them flew into and out of Dayton. (The show didn’t supply any evidence or scenes to support this. Ben Mendelsohn’s Ralph Anderson did repeatedly and without question say that Maitland did fly both ways, though.)

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However, the van used to abduct Frankie Patterson was in Dayton on March 6, Ash Wednesday. It was near where the Maitland family stayed, near Big Daddy’s Hangry ‘Que. The van’s windshield had a piece of a flyer for the restaurant.

Even if Maitland flew, you can always buy a car and have it shipped or driven to you.

A Cut

Maitland’s daughter said her father cut himself in Dayton. He bumped into a male nurse while visiting his elderly father, and the cut bled. He treated the cut back at his hotel, not far from the van used to murder Frankie Patterson in Georgia three weeks later.

If someone were trying to frame him for murder they would have what they needed for forensics. Especially if the nurse was trying to extract blood during their “bump.”

Questions for the Police

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The Murder Weapon 

The killer mutilated Frankie Patterson. Yet police never found or even mentioned a possible murder weapon. Could a grown man really have done something like that with just his bare teeth? And if so, why didn’t the police match the human teeth marks on the boy’s body to Terry Maitland’s own?

The Bloody Clothes

Where are the clothes worn during the crime? The security footage shows the man believed to be Terry Maitland leaving the strip club only minutes after arriving. But he no longer had any blood on him and left without the bag he came in with. Where are those original bloody clothes? How did he dispose of them, including a large jacket, so easily inside the bathroom?

Sinister Forces, But of What World?

Normally it would appear only one of two (plausible) explanations could be possible.

He Did It

What if Mary the school teacher was wrong about the time of the abduction and Terry Maitland drove back after he was caught on tape at the conference? That’s when he could have killed Frankie Patterson before driving back to the hotel that night. It was only about an hour drive each way.

There are many questions about the timeline that would still need to be answered. But it would explain how he could be in “two places” at once. And also why his fingerprints were in the gift shop and the murder scene.

This is the simplest explanation.

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Someone Framed Him

Terry Maitland, clear as day on tape with numerous eyewitnesses, was 70 miles away during the murder. One person can’t be in two places at once. The answer: someone who looked like Terry Maitland (or wearing a mask) framed him. That would be how eyewitnesses in his hometown got it wrong. They knew him well, but misidentified him under less than ideal circumstances.

The real killer seemingly followed Maitland back to Georgia from Ohio with that stolen van. He could have also had the blood from when Terry cut himself. That “evidence” could have been planted in the van and on Frankie Patterson’s body. They also could have replaced the van’s steering wheel with one Maitland has touched. This would also explain all of the killer’s weird actions from the time he arrived at the strip club. Being caught on tape “proved” Terry Maitland was the murderer.

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With no other context you can make a compelling case for either Terry Maitland’s guilt or innocence. “Guilty” is the more reasonable story, but would be very hard to get a conviction. But we know something the police don’t: this is a Stephen King story. The answer is likely not plausible at all, especially when a strange figure on a show called The Outsider keeps showing up in town.

Something Supernatural

Did Terry Maitland have an evil twin brother who murdered Frankie Patterson? Does any of this have to do with his angry father who has dementia? Or does Maitland possibly have a doppelganger? Could another person with some kind of unlikely connection and a grudge be to blame?

Or is a supernatural creature responsible for everything? Could there be a shape-shifter/demon/alien/ghost haunting this town? Is it the mysterious figure in the green sweatshirt, the one with the “melted” face? What if that isn’t a mask? He/it keeps showing up, especially when people are dying. And who/what is the unseen figure haunting Terry’s youngest daughter? Maybe it’s just a young girl’s nightmare. But then how did it leave a pool of blood on the bedroom floor? Was it from that mutilated hog we saw, the one ripped apart like little Frankie?

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All of this seemingly impossible and conflicting evidence might not make sense because it doesn’t. Sinister and unexplained forces beyond our world might be at work. Because the answer might not be “who” murdered Frankie Patterson, but rather “what.”

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

Featured Image: HBO

The post THE OUTSIDER: All the Evidence For and Against appeared first on Nerdist.

Everybody says Stephen King’s endings are bad. It’s part of the fun of being a fan of his writing; you have such a good time with his thoughtful, terrifying prose, and then it just sort of ends. It’s so much of a joke that King himself called it out during his cameo in It Chapter Two. But legitimately, if you’re going to adapt King into a movie… you maybe need to change the ending a bit. A bit!

But that’s where people have run afoul of the author in the past; if too much of his characters’ fates change, King tends not to like the movie. This is most infamously true of The Shining, where Stanley Kubrick changed the entire ending of the novel and even killed a character who survived in the book. Which may or may not be exactly what Mike Flanagan did with Doctor Sleep.

Last chance to remain unspoiled!

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The novel Doctor Sleep follows grown-up Dan Torrance’s attempts to save a young girl named Abra Stone from the murderous, vampiric True Knot, a clan of shine-eating immortals, and their leader, Rose the Hat. In the book, Dan finds help from his friend Billy, Abra’s pediatrician Dr. John, and Abra’s father David. King keeps all of his hero characters alive to the end, totally victorious over Rose and the True Knot. But the Doctor Sleep movie changes almost all of this; Billy, Abra’s dad, and even Dan himself don’t live to the end of the movie.

Nerdist sat down with Flanagan–in front of a roaring fire in very cold Estes Park, Colorado–to discuss the film, and specifically why he didn’t let the characters off as easily as King.

“I knew we were going to go back to The Overlook,” Flanagan began. “I wanted it just to be Dan and Abra, which meant that I had to deal with her dad and I had to deal with Billy. The other thing that occurred to me when I was doing my outline is that the True Knot only ever kill one kid [the Baseball boy from Abra’s vision] in the book. They actually are right there, you know, with David and with Billy; they drug them and leave them alive. And I never understood that. For these to be formidable monsters, why would they care? Why wouldn’t they just cut them down?”

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But no one is more aware of King’s disdain for the original Shining than Mike Flanagan, and he wanted the author’s blessing before making these changes. “I knew it was going to potentially be controversial with King,” Flanagan continued, “because changing the fates of his characters is one of the reasons that he has a bone to pick with the Kubrick adaptation.”

The Kubrick adaptation, as you may remember, killed off Dick Hallorann, another choice Flanagan had to address in Doctor Sleep, and left the Overlook Hotel standing while Jack Torrance froze to death in the hedge maze. Whereas The Shining novel completely blew up the Overlook Hotel with Jack inside. It’s this key difference–returning to the Overlook physically and not just psychically–that necessitated more of Flanagan’s changes. One he knew he could sell King on was having adult Dan Torrance blow up the Overlook on film, finally.

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“One of the things I had tried to sell [King] on, was that I really wanted to try to bring back the ending from The Shining novel and give it to Dan,” Flanagan shared. “That changes the stakes and the fate of the principal character, the title character. I felt like, given that the additional loss of Billy and David was going to really hurt, it was going to make this final struggle much more meaningful for Abra.”

He also didn’t want to short change his terrifying villain Rose the Hat, played by the “force of nature” Rebecca Ferguson. “It had to make it feel like they were more well matched,” Flanagan continued, “especially when Billy and Dan, you know, take out so many of the True Knot. You know, there’s got to be balance. And I think structurally a movie like this is all about balance. For every step forward, there’s a step back and for every victory, there’s a loss and they should be equal.”

Ultimately, though, King gave his blessing, and, as we said in our review, it makes the whole movie. “It was the thing I was the most nervous about when I sent the script to King, to see how he would react to those changes,” Flanagan said. “But he seemed to really like them.”

Doctor Sleep is in theaters now.

Featured Image: Warner Bros

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post Mike Flanagan on Changing King’s DOCTOR SLEEP Ending appeared first on Nerdist.

A woman—sprightly, her face glowing with a dewy youthfulness—climbs atop a Winnebago. Above her, the night sky unfolds, a tapestry of velvet stars. She situates herself on a mat, surrounded by candles and an elegant glass of red wine. She’s dressed in soft yoga pants, her hair lazily braided and tucked under the brim of a silk top hat. On first glance, she looks like a woman in an Anthropologie catalogue—not a character plucked from the pages of a modern horror novel. But this is Rose the Hat, the lead villain in Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. Played by Rebecca Ferguson, she’s disarmingly terrifying. She looks out at the night sky not with wistfulness, but with hunger. The world is decaying around her, and she intends to suck it dry.

Doctor Sleep, the film, functions as a few things. It’s a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, adapted from King’s 1977 novel of the same name, and a bridge between both versions of the story. King famously hated Kubrick’s film, which takes a more clinical approach to the novel’s supernatural and emotional subject matter, but allowed Flanagan to borrow from its iconography. In Doctor Sleep, we follow an adult version of Danny Torrance, who in The Shining spent a winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel, his father Jack serving as the off-season caretaker. Under the influence of cabin fever and hotel ghosts, Jack spiraled out of control and tried to kill his family—who narrowly escaped.

In King’s novel, Jack dies in a boiler room explosion, and the hotel is destroyed. In Kubrick’s film, Jack freezes in a hedge maze and his spirit is preserved in the still-standing Overlook. In Flanagan’s take, the hotel still exists, but themes of generational trauma—like alcoholism and abuse—bleed back into frame. The marriage of King and Kubrick is one of the film’s great strengths; it even pleased King himself. “Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here,” he confessed in a recent interview.

But what does any of this have to do with a hippie woman in a top hat sitting on a trailer? It’s a good question, and one that puzzled readers when the Doctor Sleep novel was released back in 2013. Running parallel to Danny Torrance’s troubled adulthood is the story of Rose the Hat, leader of a group called the True Knot—a cultish family that feeds on “steam,” another word for the psychic “shining” ability that folks like Danny have. Steam keeps Rose and her family near-immortal, but at a cost; to retain it in its purest form, they have to brutally and painfully murder children who shine. The result, on page, is a bit of a tonal clashing. The True Knot are described as polyester, kitschy; like a group of old roadies left in the dust. Their soul-sucking is vampiric, a disorienting swerve from the ghost story that is The Shining.

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And yet somehow Flanagan makes them work. By removing those kitschy elements and rooting them firmly in the real world—they look like people you’d see in the supermarket, blending seamlessly into the mundane everyday—they’re somehow even scarier. Rose the Hat epitomizes this; you can picture her rummaging through the sale bin at World Market, braiding her hair into mock dreds, scolding you for cutting in line at Whole Foods. She’s the friend who won’t shut up about Woodstock, even though she never went. She both consumes and appropriates culture, in unknowable ways; are those Indian-beaded pillows in her trailer from a trip overseas, an anecdote from a storied and ageless past, or just a showy mockery? Are the silky fabrics that drip from her shoulders a relic of timelessness, or a window dressing?

Rose is a mirror; a symbol for our own obsession with the past—and our desperation to cling to culture as traditions fade from style. At one point, Rose slanders today’s children for their fixation on cell phones and Netflix. Steam is a rarity, imagination now replaced by instant gratification. Her violent consumption of youth is allegorical; humans slaughter cows to feed their families, Rose slaughters children to feed hers. It’s not a necessity so much as a practice. A means to an end. If the children today don’t care about the riches of the world—culture, lore, nature—they’re nothing more than cattle meat to preservationists like the True Knot.

Fate eventually puts Danny on a collision course with Rose. He psychically communicates with a young girl named Abra, who has a strong “shining” ability. This gets the attention of Rose, who senses it from afar. Soon, they’re all drawn together magnetically—and detrimentally. Danny and Abra kill off the True Knot, and face Rose in the halls of the Overlook Hotel, where the walls of trauma tumble down. It is a confrontation of many clashing identities and principles. Danny must face his addiction and childhood fears. Abra must learn that you can’t bury away that which taunts you. Rose must learn that time is a construct, and that generations evolve. In the end, she loses, and is consumed by the hotel—becoming the very ghost she’s been chasing.

Flanagan and Ferguson pull off an incredible feat with the character. They make her both vile and sympathetic. Aspirational and doomed. There are many lessons you can read into her, many fears reflected in her glowing eyes as she feeds on a dying child. She’s a perfect modern villain—and one of the best cinematic Stephen King villains ever—for how utterly normal she is. A woman who looks into the stars from the top of her Winnebago and latches onto something amorphous. Sometimes the view is all you need.

Featured Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

The post DOCTOR SLEEP’s Rose the Hat Is An All-Time Great Stephen King Villain appeared first on Nerdist.

It was always going to be a bit of a tough sell. Making a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s version of Stephen King’s The Shining seemed like blasphemy on many levels. But in 2013, King himself gave writer-director Mike Flanagan an in with his novel Doctor Sleep. Almost. The novel is a sequel to King’s 1977 book, and specifically not the Kubrick film, which King himself hates with a passion. But Flanagan knew that the only way audiences would buy anything to do with The Shining would be using the iconography of Kubrick. And that meant a few key things.

First, The Overlook Hotel would still exist; the hotel blew up in a spectacular blaze of steam pressure in the novel but remained in tact at the end of the film. Second, it would be Kubrick’s version of the Overlook, and his version of The Shining‘s characters. In addition to recasting chameleon-like actors to play Wendy Torrance, Dick Hallorann, and little Danny, Flanagan would also need to recast some of the earlier film’s most recognizable ghosts. And that’s where Doctor Sleep‘s most pivotal new scene comes in to play.

Last chance to remain spoiler-free.

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In the movie, Dan (Ewan McGregor) brings Abra (Kyliegh Curran) to the Overlook Hotel to await the arrival of Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). He walks around all the familiar lounges and hallways, “waking up” the place. He eventually comes upon the Gold Room, the massive ballroom space his father, Jack Torrance, visited a few times in The Shining. In his first visit, the on-the-wagon alcoholic Jack sits down at the empty bar only to see Lloyd (Joe Turkel), a ghostly representation of the Overlook’s growing hold over him.

In Doctor Sleep, Dan sits down at the bar in a direct recreation of that first scene. And just like in The Shining, a ghostly bartender stands opposite him, offering the also alcoholic Dan a taste of the spectral booze. Only when we finally see “Lloyd,” it’s the ghostly image of Jack Torrance himself, here played by Flanagan regular Henry Thomas doing a damn good Jack Nicholson. It’s the movie’s standout scene.

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We sat down with Flanagan at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado–the hotel that inspired King’s original novel–to discuss Doctor Sleep, and specifically his decision to bring back one of the most iconic characters in modern horror movies.

“I knew we would have to acknowledge Jack Torrance,” Flanagan began. “No way out of it. Stanley Kubrick kind of showed us the way, with Delbert Grady in the scene the bathroom [in The Shining]. And this idea that Delbert had been kind of digested by the hotel and turned into ‘the help,’ turned into a waiter and denied his identity. I thought that was so haunting, you know?”

In The Shining, Jack hears of Mr. Grady, the caretaker in 1970 who killed his twin daughters, his wife, and then himself. But when Jack meets him in ghost form, Grady is just a waiter, saying that Jack himself has always been the caretaker. And yet, in Doctor Sleep, Jack is now just a humble bartender, and it’s Dan who has apparently “always” been the caretaker.

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“I felt like that was one of the only ways we could approach Jack,” Flanagan continued, “because otherwise we’d be forced into a place where Jack Torrance has to behave like Nicholson. But if he’s Lloyd, he’s just a bartender. That changes the needs of the performance and gets us away from the most dangerous place I thought we could be, which was a Nicholson impression.”

Indeed, in the film, Henry Thomas merely has the hairstyle and the cocked eyebrow of Nicholson, without the manic energy or s**t-eating grin. There’s a two second reconstruction of this Jack with the ax, and that’s it. “Henry, who I’ve worked with a bunch and adore, was one of the few people I thought would be up for this,” Flanagan continued, “because who wants to step into that shadow? And my argument to Henry when I called him was, ‘I’ve got two parts in the movie that I think you’d be great for. One is Billy; it’s a best friend part. You’ve played this part, done it before, you do with your eyes closed. You’ll be great. The other part? I just need you for one day, but holy shit will you be scrutinized for it’.”

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Naturally, Thomas eventually agreed to take on the pivotal role of Jack/Lloyd. “He thought about it overnight and called me back. He said, ‘If we’re going to do this, you’re stepping into Kubrick’s shadow. You’re going to be in the cross-hairs. Let me go with you. I’ll step into Jack’s, and we’ll sink or swim together,'” Flanagan said, in awe of his frequent collaborator. “I love working with him. He threw himself into it. We made it very clear from the beginning. He wasn’t going to play Jack. It was all about playing Lloyd. For these two lines, I’m gonna let Jack out a little. And it was it was so awesome to watch him do it.”

That scene is a guaranteed audience-splitter, and Flanagan has mulled that over endlessly. It wasn’t just replicating, or not, Jack Nicholson–it was about completely changing Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. “We needed that scene,” Flanagan told us, “because that was the scene that made Stephen King agree to let us go back to the Overlook. That was the pitch. I said, ‘I know you don’t want to do it, but just imagine Dan Torrance walking through the Overlook Hotel, alone. Waking it up, the lights coming on as he moves. And he comes into the Gold Room where there’s a drink waiting for him. The bartender is his father, and they talk’. That’s what made him say, ‘Okay, do it.'”

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It truly is the heart of the movie; the “ghost” of Jack Torrance always hangs over Dan his whole life, both what happened at the Overlook and the alcoholism that plagues Dan. And seeing as the alcoholism’s omission from Kubrick’s movie is part of the reason King doesn’t like it, it just stands to bring the whole thing together.

“We went down every different road of how we could approach it,” Flanagan said. “And this was the direction I felt was the most respectful and the best for the story we were telling. How people will feel about it when it comes out, I don’t know. But I’m really proud of Henry. More than half the people that have seen [the movie] that I’ve talked to do not know it was Henry. And that makes me really happy.”

Doctor Sleep is in theaters now.

Featured Image: Warner Bros.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post Breaking Down DOCTOR SLEEP’s Most Pivotal Scene appeared first on Nerdist.

For those who haven’t read Doctor Sleep, it’s a rather sprawling, years-long story of adult Dan Torrance, buried under years of repression and hereditary alcoholism, trying to make himself right with the universe. His ability to shine eventually puts him in psychic contact with Abra Stone, a little girl with the biggest shine ever. But the shine-hungry vampires the True Knot are also on the trail of Abra. Naturally, they’re all destined to meet.

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The novel spends roughly the first third of its page count on giving us the context for these three different stories that will eventually converge. Naturally, in a single film, Flanagan wasn’t able to do that. “What I’m trying to do is protect as much as possible, the intentions of the of the author, the arc of the characters, and to try to do it in a way that I think is going to be compelling cinematically,” Flanagan told Nerdist during a press trip to The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO. “Because a book is an internal experience, and I think movies are an external experience and they don’t translate necessarily.”

But he’s also a huge fan of that book; how do you decide what to keep? “There’s no way to know really kind of in the moment if it’s going to work,” Flanagan continued. “A lot of it just boils down to when I put down a book, especially a book that big, if I had to describe the book to a friend and say, ‘here’s the story of the book,’ what are the things that I remember? What are the things that I think are at the heart of it? And if anything doesn’t kind of jump immediately to mind in that retelling of it, that’s probably something that can go away.”

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“When you talk about a haunted house story,” Flanagan said, comparing The Shining and Doctor Sleep, “isolation and claustrophobia are kind of it. Containing these characters within walls they can’t really get out of; this is really the name of the game.” He of course knows this all too well, given his 2018 Netflix smash The Haunting of Hill House. “And that’s what makes The Shining The Shining,” he put forth. “Doctor Sleep is so weird because it is everywhere. It’s sprawling. And having any kind of sense of narrative claustrophobia, it’s really hard to build when you’re ricocheting off of so many different storylines. I very much wish that I could have spent more time with all of them.”

One of the bits Flanagan had to truncate was Dan Torrance reaching rock bottom with his addiction. So much of the story depends on Dan’s recovery, but how could the filmmaker ask the audience to stay in misery for too long? “Dan at rock bottom in particular is a tough place to live for very long,” Flanagan told us. “And yeah, and that’s a lot to ask of an audience to wallow in that. You want to get the point across because you need his arc to make sense. And without that rock bottom, the redemption doesn’t work. But it is a lot to ask someone to stay in this state of just you know.”

From the original 1980 The Shining, Warner Bros

It wasn’t just adapting King, of course. Doctor Sleep the film’s centerpiece is its return to the Overlook Hotel of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film. And with that came the challenge of re-casting some of the characters from The Shining, 40 years later. Particularly, Wendy Torrance and Dick Hallorann, played in the original film by Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers, respectively. For obvious reasons, they couldn’t come back to play the 1980 versions of themselves. In their place, Flanagan cast Alex Essoe as Wendy and Carl Lumbly as Dick. It’s an astounding replication, totally without CGI.

This is just another of the very daunting tasks Flanagan set up for himself. “It’s an incredibly intimidating thing for any actor to step into another actor’s character, especially characters that are so iconic,” He said. “We could have tried to digitally recreate those original actors, which I think would have been a horrible mistake. It would have ripped everyone out of the movie. So I wasn’t interested in doing that. We could have gone in a direction where we didn’t need to have any kind of connection to the original film and just cast whoever we wanted. But our visual language for the hotel was definitively Kubrick, right? That meant the characters had to be as well.”

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Flanagan found a way, as in so many amazing things with Doctor Sleep, to do both. “So the the decision was how about we try to find actors who remind me of those other actors but who aren’t doing impressions,” he told us. “[We had to find actors] who can still make the characters their own and take the characters in different directions. Alex Essoe has some some rather uncanny similarities to Shelley Duvall. And Carl did just an incredible job channeling Scotland Crothers, but also made the characters their own.”

It’s one thing to recast some characters; it’s another entirely to rebuild the entirety of Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel set, using Kubrick’s original blueprints. A set that, infamously, doesn’t make any sense at all. “I learned about why it made no sense,” Flanagan told us with glee. “Yow why there are stairs in the [Torrance’s hotel] residence, right? It was because there were stairs on his soundstage that they had to build around. Kubrick was using every available square foot. And that meant taking physical attributes of the soundstages in London and incorporating them into his Overlook. It was as simple as that.”

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But it’s one of the most effective practical sets in film history; perfect for a movie about people slowly losing their minds. This was all part and parcel to Kubrick’s grand scheme, according to Flanagan. “The other thing I learned as I really studied the blueprints,” Flanagan shared, “was that he clearly didn’t care if the building didn’t make sense. There were elements of our movie where we had to make a decision based on contradictions that were in The Shining. We have one scene that shows you know, the Adler which was the typewriter; robust conversation about what color it should be. He had multiple typewriters in the film and it boiled down to, how do I remember it? If I close my eyes and think about The Shining, what color is the typewriter? Whatever the answer is, that’s the one we need.”

And just like all those people who’ve spent way too much time trying to make sense of Kubrick’s version of the Overlook, Flanagan had to figure out where things were in relation to everything else. “We had scenes where we had characters walking in and out of the lobby. And I couldn’t find the damn doors,” Flanagan told us, to our utter delight. “I studied the movie, hundreds of times, studied the plans, studied the [real location] Timberline Lodge; based on where the lobby is in relation to the other rooms downstairs, where those doors are in relation to the hedge maze, where that is in relation to the parking lot. None of us on the film could come up with the answer to where the lobby was to the Overlook Hotel as Kubrick designed it.”

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“We decided,” Flanagan told us, “we have to care about logic and continuity about as much as Kubrick did. It was forensic. We’re only kind of learning about the decisions he made by trying to walk in his footsteps.”

You can see if Mike Flanagan’s dream of blending Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick succeeds when Doctor Sleep hits theaters, November 8.

Featured Image: Warner Bros

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post How DOCTOR SLEEP Adapted King Through Kubrick’s Lens appeared first on Nerdist.

It’s a giant, terrifying monolith sitting high on a hill. A massive, foreboding, cold and cavernous void for all your fears and unspoken paranoia. I could be referencing The Overlook Hotel and its ghostly, psychic nightmares; but I could just as easily mean Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Itself a controversial adaptation of Stephen King’s equally (though differently) monolithic horror novel. Each version of the story of Jack, Wendy, and Danny Torrance’s ill-fated winter at a Colorado hotel seems impenetrable and unknowable in its own way; naturally marrying the two 40 years later would seem an insurmountable task. Unless you’re Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep.

A wunderkind of creepy, ghostly horror and a clear acolyte of King, Flanagan has garnered acclaim with his intimate horror stories about family breakdowns and spirits of the past. Perfect for something like Doctor Sleep. After 2018’s hit Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, not to mention his previous, “unfilmable” King adaptation, Gerald’s Game, the pieces were all in place for Flanagan’s biggest success to date. And it is a success, ultimately, even if isn’t a work of horror mastery like the original.

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To Flanagan’s credit, much of Doctor Sleep‘s set-up is the book sped up. An adult Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) has fallen victim to the same alcoholism that destroyed his father. He’s haunted by the literal and metaphorical ghosts of his time at the Overlook Hotel. Dan moves to New Hampshire, gets a job at a hospice, and checks into A.A. While living his quiet existence, he begins receiving messages from a little girl with a big ability to shine. Her name is Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran) and they become pen pals of sorts.

Elsewhere, though, is the gang of gypsies known as the True Knot. Their leader, Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), in an effort to stave off the extinction she fears is imminent, tries to find young shiners to eat. When she feels Abra’s presence, she knows there’s no better chance for her people’s survival than to feed off of the most powerful person she’s ever felt. This naturally leads Dan, Abra, and Rose on a collision course, the endpoint of which is the one place Dan has tried to forget about for his entire life.

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At points during the movie’s first act, it seems like we’re in no hurry to get anywhere. We spend time with Dan, both as a child following the events of The Shining, and later as a supremely troubled, self-destructive alcoholic. This is an important stretch of the movie because without it, our lead character has no narrative push. Dan wants to better himself, he knows he can help people with his gift, and he knows how his dad ended up. We also get to meet Rose and her cronies. Rebecca Ferguson gives a deeply menacing and scarily relatable performance; one that provides the movie with the villain it deserves. She’s the most together person in the film until she becomes a cornered animal and it’s really great and upsetting.

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Where the movie starts to lose it a bit (and just a bit) is in the middle section. We know Dan and Abra have to meet, and that eventually Rose will show up to face off, but because the book takes a very, very long time to get there, the movie by necessity must skip around quickly without lingering. As a result, the connection between Dan and Abra, and Dan and his friend/sponsor Billy (Cliff Curtis), feels a bit undercooked. It’s taken as shorthand a bit and I wish there was room for more organic growth there. But there’s too much ground to cover, often literally.

While I generally didn’t find Doctor Sleep all that scary, there are a couple of excellent sequences that remind you why Flanagan is the important horror filmmaker he is. The first is bound to be the movie’s most upsetting sequence. It involves the True Knot’s “feast” on a particular young psychic. Like animals, the members of the Knot encircle the prey and with every scream of pain they ravenously inhale the expelled steam. It’s incredibly harrowing, serving to show just how monstrous Rose and her family are. It’s scenes like this that make me hope one day Flanagan tackles Salem’s Lot; he’d kill it.

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Where the movie really kicks up a notch is in the third act, when Dan and Abra reach the Overlook. Suddenly the movie slows down and we re-enter Kubrick’s world. Every recognizable bit of the hotel is alive and terrifying yet again. We get the sense Flanagan has been waiting the entire movie to take us into Room 237, the Colorado Lounge, and the hedge maze. This is also where Flanagan’s film diverges considerably from King’s novel, but in so doing, addresses some of King’s misgivings with Kubrick’s film in a surprisingly moving and satisfying way.

Doctor Sleep is a completely different beast to The Shining. The earlier story is about a family’s struggles with demons stemming from alcoholism; the follow-up is about recovery, trying to overcome said demons. As such, Dan doesn’t cower in fear from the Overlook’s many terrifying spirits. (The woman in Room 237 and the Grady Twins are certainly present.) Instead, he uses them and the power of the hungry evil hotel to his advantage. As a fan of Kubrick’s movie, as Flanagan clearly is, it’s supremely satisfying to see the iconography of The Shining as a weapon against an even greater foe.

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And in this way, Flanagan and Doctor Sleep forge their own place in horror canon. It’s not about being scared, it’s about overcoming childhood fears to succeed in adulthood. While it’s harrowing and upsetting and certainly very creepy, Doctor Sleep doesn’t terrify. But I don’t think it needs to. It ends up feeling like a deeply personal story from a filmmaker who’s taking his love for literary and cinematic titans and channeling that into his own unique and chilling stamp on the genre.

4 out of 5

Featured Image: Warner Bros

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post DOCTOR SLEEP Shines When it Goes Its Own Way (Review) appeared first on Nerdist.

When fans first heard there was going to be a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, it’s fair to say that a lot of people were very skeptical. Sure, it was based on King’s own follow up novel Doctor Sleep. But the 1980 Kubrick film is considered by many to be one of the greatest and most terrifying horror films ever made. Well, considered great by everyone but Stephen King himself — but that’s a whole other can of worms.

Could Doctor Sleep’s director Mike Flanagan be the one to please both fans of the book and the Kubrick film? According to early social media reactions….it most certainly seems like he has. With the social media embargo now lifted, early viewers now have a chance to reveal just what they though of maybe the most anticipated horror movie of the year. And so far, everyone seems to be pretty pleased!

Our very own Kyle Anderson claims that Rebecca Ferguson has joined the pantheon of great horror icons. I predict a lot Rose cosplay at conventions in the very near future.

#DoctorSleep somehow does justice to both King and Kubrick while perfectly fitting into Flanagan’s already impressive, somber-creepy catalog. It runs on the heart of its characters and their plight. And Rebecca Ferguson’s Rose the Hat is poised to be a new horror icon. pic.twitter.com/aq3jcgupwc

— Dyle M for Murderson (@FunctionalNerd) October 25, 2019

Best King adaptation since Shawshank? Ok, that’s a big Whoa. High praise indeed.

Doctor Sleep is the best Stephen King adaption since Shawshank Redemption. Mike Flanagan has perfectly combined nostalgia with tension, mystery, and suspense. The entire cast is superb. There are a number of surprises that will make King fans squeal with delight. #DoctorSleep pic.twitter.com/PhSDm6EZsZ

— Scott Menzel (@TheOtherScottM) October 25, 2019

Fans of #TheShining are really gonna love #DoctorSleep. It’s at its best when its fueled by follow-up. Starts slowly and descends into madness, just like its predecessor. One specific scene is really horrifying, some solid scares, and good performances across the board. pic.twitter.com/NnHcq1ia8Q

— Brandon Davis (@BrandonDavisBD) October 25, 2019

It seems the recreation of scenes from Kubrick’s film are pretty spot on, although the trailers already gave that part away.

Doctor Sleep is a well crafted, very creepy and often scary thriller that cleverly recreates moments and sets from The Shining. The cast is great, especially young Kyliegh Curran. Definitely a big thumbs up for the film from me. pic.twitter.com/EJvuMaMPTc

— My Halloween Name Is Jim Vejvoda (@JimVejvoda) October 25, 2019

#DoctorSleep is an IMMENSELY satisfying and PERFECTLY adapts the tone of Kings book. An adult psycho-drama with an abundance of emotionally satisfying and crowd pleasing thrills, watch on the biggest screen and as many times humanly possible!

— Christophe Aguilar de Travestão (2018-2018) (@ItsChrisAguilar) October 25, 2019

Horror director (and Doctor Strange helmer) Scott Derickson also had some pretty high praise.

Last night I saw and loved DOCTOR SLEEP. A truly spellbinding story — scary, shockingly transgressive in places, wildly unpredictable, and dense with highly satisfying ties to the original SHINING film. @flanaganfilm avoids imitation of Kubrick; instead he channels @stephenking.

— N O S ⋊ Ɔ I ᴚ ᴚ Ǝ ᗡ ⊥ ⊥ O Ɔ S (@scottderrickson) October 22, 2019

I watched #DoctorSleep on Monday. I was completely floored by how @flanaganfilm was able to tie the book to The Shining universe that already exists on screen. Fans will be surprised by this movie — in a good way. So many little details that will make Constant Readers giddy! pic.twitter.com/N4Vw9QudQa

— John SaaV’Ger ?? (@johnsjr9) October 25, 2019

More love for Ferguson, but also Ewan McGregor as the adult Danny Torrance.

#DoctorSleepMovie: A hallucinogenic horrorscape, @flanaganfilm channels King’s waking nightmares & familial trauma artfully. Crafts visceral, disquieting dread not too dissimilar to Kubrick’s masterpiece. McGregor & Ferguson give perfectly pitched performances.@DoctorSleepFilm pic.twitter.com/IF6YJhDBTz

— Courtney Howard (@Lulamaybelle) October 25, 2019

With so many Stephen King adaptations lately, it would seem like Doctor Sleep might get lost in the shuffle. Instead, it seems to rise to the top.

It’s been a great yr for Stephen King adaptations but I think #DoctorSleep is the best of the bunch. Thrilled me in ways I wasn’t expecting, made me emotional at times & Rebecca Ferguson is ferocious. What a wonderful celebration of Kubrick, King & @flanaganfilm’s career as well. pic.twitter.com/jQ8ktEeUVE

— Heatherface Wixson (@thehorrorchick) October 25, 2019

#DoctorSleep is The Shining sequel King fans have been waiting for. Kyliegh Curran is a star in the making & Rebecca Ferguson is downright terrifying. Flanagan beautifully meshes Danny Torrance’s haunting past w/ the now present, resulting in the best King adaptation of the year pic.twitter.com/g3iEOt7iyG

— Samhain ?? (@shannon_mcgrew) October 25, 2019

I will note that there are substantial differences between the #DoctorSleep book and the film, but I think the changes that were made in the script to accommodate the story make absolute sense and will make it easier for the audience to digest what plays out onscreen.

— Scare-a Musn-icky ? (@sarahmusnicky) October 25, 2019

At least one early viewer seems the movie lacks enough memorable scares, but still enjoys it overall.

Doctor Sleep will likely give The Shining fans everything they’d want from a sequel (and some things they probably didn’t). #RebeccaFerguson is wonderful and it all looks utterly gorgeous, but it’s not perfect and needs more memorable scares. #DoctorSleepMovie pic.twitter.com/M2jomtq8eE

— Digital Spy (@digitalspy) October 25, 2019

All of this is enough to squash one’s cynicism and start booking their rooms at the Overlook Hotel. It seems our new master of horror is Mike Flanagan. Now, where do we sign up for his decades later follow up to Salem’s Lot?

Images: Warner Brothers

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How many times can we say we’re living in the Golden Age of Stephen King adaptations? It’s not exactly a sentiment that’s going out of style. CBS All Access is developing a TV miniseries based on The Stand with an impressive all-star cast. Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, a movie sequel to The Shining, hits theaters next month. It: Chapter Two was a huge success this summer. And it seems like there’s really just a never-ending parade of new King adaptation announcements, to the point that it’s hard to keep track of all of them. Not that we’re complaining; there’s a reason King is known as the horror master, because he’s stocked with ideas that continue to frighten generation after generation.

One upcoming project that’s captured our interest is the HBO adaptation of one of King’s more recent novels, The Outsider. The book is getting a 10-episode adaptation and stars fan favorite Ben Mendelsohn in a lead role. But what’s it about? The first trailer just dropped, and—as you might imagine—it looks very sinister and spooky.

Mendelsohn stars as Detective Ralph Anderson, who’s tasked with digging into the case, and Cynthia Erivo plays a private investigator named Holly Gibney, who also gets involved. King fans will recognize that character name: Gibney is also a key player in the novel Mr. Mercedes. (Which has also been adapted into a TV series on the Audience network, where Succession‘s Justine Lupe plays Gibney.) The whole cast is stacked, with Julianne Nicholson, Mare Winningham, Bill Camp, Yul Vázquez, Jeremy Bobb, and Marc Menchaca rounding out the cast.

The behind-the-scenes talent isn’t too shabby either. Recent Emmy-winner Bateman is executive producing, alongside Richard Price, who also wrote the teleplay. Price is known for his work on series like The Wire, The Night Of, and The Deuce, and for his novels The Wanderers, Clockers, and Lush Life. That’s a pretty good pedigree, which goes nicely with the HBO of it all. We won’t be surprised if The Outsider breaks away from its horror genre trappings and becomes a critical darling. With talent like that backing it up, it seems destined for some awards recognition down the line.

Luckily, we don’t have too long to wait to see how this all comes together. The Outsider is set to debut on HBO on January 12, 2020.

Featured Image: HBO

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Netflix’s In the Tall Grass greatly expands the mythology of the 2012 short story co-written by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill–about a brother and his pregnant sister who get lost in a grassy field–yet it doesn’t give up all of its secrets easily. The unsettling horror of the grass, where time is cyclical, the dead don’t stay that way for long, and an unearthly rock offers dark insights into this world and beyond, makes for a confusing labyrinth. But the movie does share enough to understand the ending, when a character named Travis helps the other trapped characters escape its clutches. It’s a moment of sacrifice and redemption that not only saves his ex-girlfriend Becky and their baby, but his eternal soul.

Netflix

In the Biblical Paradise, eating the tree’s fruit gave Adam and Eve wisdom but led to their banishment forever. “Eating” the rock’s knowledge trapped Ross there forever without his humanity, in a place he calls “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Tobin, Ross’s young son, warns Travis–who wanders into the grass after stumbling on Becky and her brother’s car in a nearby parking lot–of that same fate after he kills Ross, but Travis touches it anyway. Why he does so is up for debate. Did Travis believe Ross when he told him the rock would redeem him? Was it a desperate attempt to discover a path out? Was he tempted by it after taking another person’s life? Whatever the reason, when he did place his hand on the rock, it connected him with the underworld that gave the grass its dark power, as red light–resembling the blood that had been spilled on its soil for so long–emanated out.

But unlike Ross, who continued to feed the evil–murdering again and again and even feeding Becky her newborn baby–Travis uses his powers for good. He knows Tobin was right, he could never leave the grass after touching the rock, but the others still have a chance to escape its clutches. “I’m not leaving, but you… you don’t belong here, and neither does Becky,” Travis says, “Don’t let them in.”

Netflix

Whatever “wisdom” the rock gave Travis allows him to send Tobin out, back to the church on the side of the road. There, Tobin is able to warn Becky and Cal to ignore a past Tobin’s cries from the grass. He stops them from ever entering the grass by showing Becky the charm Travis gave him, after Travis took it from a dead Becky earlier. The non-linear nature of time in the grass makes it so everything is happening at once, and since those trapped in it are reborn again and again, it gives Becky a chance to take a different path entirely. This time she chooses to turn around and go home to raise her baby with her family.

Travis is also saved, even though he dies. We see the fate of those who succumbed to the rock’s evil when Becky gives birth in front of it. The ground opens, and it’s revealed those damned souls were absorbed into its roots where they were made to suffer for eternity. They will never escape the grass. They were not redeemed.

But the man who willingly stayed behind to save his unborn child atoned for his sins was, and as he closed his eyes for the final time he looked skyward, to a beautiful blue and infinite bliss. He chose the right path and escaped the grass forever.

Featured Image: Netflix

The post The Ending of Netflix’s IN THE TALL GRASS Explained appeared first on Nerdist.

Naturalle Solutions

These equal parts delightful/equal parts horrifying bath bombs (which we first learned about at Popsugar) come from the Etsy store Naturalle Solutions. Hand-painted and 5.5 fluid ounces in size, the “Dragon’s Blood” scented bomb is made with baking soda, essential oil, colorants, coconut oil, epsom salt, citric acid, sodium bicarbonate, cornstarch, colorant, sugar, grapeseed oil, and essence oil. And while they might make your bathroom look like a murder scene (or from Pennywise’s perspective a dinner table), they won’t stain your tub.

However, to really appreciate them is to see them in action, because as Pennywise’s head foams and fizzes into the water you can basically hear Bill Skarsgård’s maniacal laugh.

 

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Testing out our new Fall & Halloween Collection Penny Bath Bomb. This are individually hand painted with mica and scented with dragons blood..Let me know what you think in the comments below. #fallbathbomb #halloweenbathbomb #spookybathbomb #spookybath #redbath #pennywise #pennybathbomb #characterbathbomb

A post shared by BATH BOMBS / NATURAL SKIN CARE (@bath_bombs_center) on Jul 21, 2019 at 6:09pm PDT

Somehow this is both the best and worst bath bomb we have ever seen. We must have it, even if it freaks us out. Also, if you have a sick/amazing sense of humor, you can use these for your children’s bath time, as they “are made specifically for kids and sensitive skin.”

They can be ordered for $6.99 and won’t take 27 years to arrive. But please, don’t leave a bath bomb near any sewage drains. That wouldn’t be funny.

Featured Image: Naturalle Solutions

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The second season of Hulu’s Castle Rock is set to premiere at New York Comic Con this week, and ahead of that release, the streaming service released a brand new trailer. If you’re unfamiliar, Castle Rock is set in a fictional Maine town frequently referenced in Stephen King novels and short stories. The show plays with characters and stories from King’s world, with a slight inversion; it’s not a straight adaptation of any one story, but is set in an alternate reality where familiar names and faces occasionally turn up. Season two will tell an origin story for one of King’s most famous villains, Misery‘s Annie Wilkes (with Lizzy Caplan stepping into Kathy Bates’ shoes), and, as the new trailer shows, also show us a few familiar locations outside of Castle Rock proper.

In Season 2, a feud between warring clans comes to a boil when budding psychopath Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan), Stephen King’s nurse from hell, gets waylaid in Castle Rock. Misery arrives October 23 on Hulu.

The series was created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, and produced by King himself along with J.J. Abrams, and has—from the beginning—been a Stephen King Easter egg factory. The first season referenced everything from Cujo to Needful Things, and even tossed in some references to The Dark Tower series. This season looks content to continue that trend, name-dropping a considerable number of King-related things in its two-minute run time.

First and foremost, the series continues to cast actors well-known for appearing in other King adaptations. Tim Robbins is the most notable example here. He plays Reginald “Pop” Merrill, patriarch of the Merrill crime family, but you probably know him best from the movie The Shawshank Redemption, based on the Stephen King short story “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” His character name is also a reference; the Merrills are a family named in several King works, like the short story “The Body” (which was adapted into the film Stand By Me). There’s even a character named Pop Merrill in King’s novella The Sun Dog, which was referenced heavily in season one of Castle Rock. Looks like Robbins might be playing the Castle Rock alternate reality version of this character.

A sign for Shawshank Prison also shows up in the new trailer. The prison was the primary setting for season one of Castle Rock so it’s not a surprise to see it again, although it does make for a welcome sight.

Hulu

If you’re familiar with Misery, you probably got a kick out of Caplan saying “cockadoodie” in the new trailer. This is one of her trademark words and part of one of the more memorable moments from the 1990 movie.

Hulu

We also see a sign for Jerusalem’s Lot which teases that some of the season will take place in that other fictional Maine town from King lore.

There’s plenty more going on in this trailer that we can’t quite wrap our heads around yet. It looks like we’ll be getting flashbacks to the Pilgrim era, along with some kind of creepy ceremony. There’s a parade, hints of local arson, and more. We can’t wait to see how it all comes together when Castle Rock season two hits Hulu on October 23.

Header Image Credit: Hulu

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The drama’s path towards universal acclaim is fascinating considering its disappointing theatrical run against box office smash hits like Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. However, a 1995 release to VHS and the power of word of mouth changed its trajectory towards becoming a classic. Why do people love The Shawkshank Redemption? In short, the power of Andy and Red’s friendship is the foundation of this endearing narrative.

The concept of finding a person and forming a friendship bond is one of life’s truly underrated gems. It happens every day but that doesn’t make it less of a miracle in a world of seven billion people. And some of the strongest friendship bonds are solidified in bleak times or perhaps forged outside of a person’s normal social scope. Those friendships serve as an affirmation of love, a spiritual awakening, and sometimes the only source of solace in shaky territory.

Andy and Red fall into the category of friendship that blossoms under uniquely horrific circumstances. Outside of prison walls in 1940s America, Andy and Red would have likely never been friends. But incarceration levels the playing field by stripping them of their humanity, autonomy, dignity, and general human rights. Andy and Red slowly find light in each other after being forced into a confined space that breeds despair, distrust, and abuse. Many people cannot relate to being falsely imprisoned or spending decades in prison. But the emotional value that friendship brings during despair is a universal theme.

via GIPHY

This is obviously why many movies center upon friendship. However, it’s hard to examine in the midst of sensitive subject matter without seemingly preachy or overly mawkish. The Shawshank Redemption manages to do this well without falling into typical tropes. Red isn’t a “magical Negro” positioned to uplift his White counterpart but instead a pragmatic man who was naturally drawn to Andy’s personality. And Andy isn’t looking for external motivation or validation regarding his situation. His strength comes from hope and not allowing prison to erase who he has been for years.

“You need [music] so you don’t forget… forget that there are places in the world that aren’t made out of stone. That there’s something inside that they can’t get to, that they can’t touch. It’s yours… Hope.” —Andy Dufresne

Andy and Red’s interactions don’t lead to a whirlwind friendship filled with sweeping platitudes, heroic appearances during times of trouble, and motivational speeches. Their relationship builds out of a necessary trade and slowly transforms to something that feels normal and familiar despite the strife they face in prison. The duo’s matter-of-fact conversations give a deeper look into the real-life consequences of long-term imprisonment, morality, regret, and the merits of maintaining hope, which sometimes put them at odds. However, they always keep it real and respect each other’s brilliance and opinions.

Andy uses his smarts to get beer and a sliver of relaxation for Red and their working crew. He gains a piece of his former life by doing taxes and employs Red to get him out of field work. There are a ton of shady dealings, frustration, and pain, but he has a supporter and someone to confide in through it all.

via GIPHY

Red is not able to stop Bog and The Sisters’ assaults against Andy, but he makes sure a poster of Rita Hayworth is ready for Andy when he gets out of the infirmary. He’s a listening ear, a smuggler, a chess partner, and a comedian when the need arises. Red doesn’t realize it, but his willingness to get Andy what he needs to find a way to pass the time—a rock hammer and various posters—is the ultimate gateway to their freedom. These moments of love and affection are prominent without glossing over the realistic issues that incarcerated people face.

The pair imprint on each other over the years. Red dares to find hope after 30 years of incarceration through several methods—Andy’s relentless pursuit to build a prison library, a gifted harmonica, and finding a productive way to pass the time. He’s in a world where people only use him for what he can do for them, but Andy sews a seed in his soul. Andy learns how to bend the rules of prison to suit his own progression and uses Red as a springboard for his laundering idea. When Andy escapes, Red is proud of his cunning perseverance but also sad to lose a nearly 20-year friendship. It’s almost impossible to not feel a gut punch when Red says he misses his friend while working in the field. Red later steps into unfamiliar and terrifying world. But a promise to his friend restores his hope.

via GIPHY

In the end, they start a new chapter of freedom together in heaven after years of hell. The Shawshank Redemption‘s final moment comprises everything the film set out to accomplish by showcasing hope, love, resilience, and redemption through the magic of friendship. It has the type of impact that will continue to resonate for the next 25 years—and beyond.

Featured image: Castle Rock Entertainment

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We are truly living in the era of Stephen King adaptations. From both chapters of It, to Gerald’s Game, to Doctor Sleep, Pet Sematary, and beyond, it seems like every month brings another one of the horror author’s concoctions to cinematic—or televisual—life. Netflix will help usher in the next big King-to-screen project with In The Tall Grass, based on a novella co-written by King and his son, Joe Hill. The first trailer for the film is here, and like all things King, it’s making us suspicious of something otherwise innocuous. In this case, it’s a giant field.

????????????????????????????????????It’s just grass.????????????????????????????????????IN THE TALL GRASS coming to @Netflix October 4th.??????????????????????????????????? pic.twitter.com/AZBiGVlLeu

— Netflix Film (@NetflixFilm) September 17, 2019

In the Tall Grass tells the story of two siblings named Becky and Cal, who stop in front of a field and hear the cries of a young boy, apparently lost somewhere inside. They venture in to help him, where they discover that the field has sinister properties, which separates and disorients them. Unable to find their way out, the two quickly learn that “the only thing worse than getting lost is being found.”

The film is written and directed by Vincenzo Natali, who’s known for films like Cube and Splice—both horror tales with unique, cerebral spins. (Natali has also directed episodes of TV series like The Strain, Hannibal, and Orphan Black.) It stars horror veteran Patrick Wilson (of The Conjuring movies and Insidious), along with Avery Whitted, Laysla De Oliveira, Rachel Wilson, and Will Buie Jr. as the resident “creepy King kid.”

In the Tall Grass will premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas later this week before arriving on Netflix on October 4. It’s a part of Netflix’s larger original Halloween programming slate, which began earlier this month.

Header Image Credit: Netflix

The post Netflix’s IN THE TALL GRASS Trailer Brings Another Stephen King Tale To Life appeared first on Nerdist.

The first season of Hulu’s Castle Rock was a real exercise in mood and dread. Set in the fictional Maine town that’s featured in a number of Stephen King short stories and novels, the first season was related to King’s world without being an adaptation of any specific source material. Familiar names and references popped up, but the series made it pretty clear by the end that this was an alternate-universe version of events. That made for a bit of confusion, but also opened up the possibilities for future seasons. And indeed, that setting is part of what makes us so excited for season two, which will tell a story inspired by King’s famous novel Misery, with its own unique spin.

The first trailer for Castle Rock season two shows us what this version of Misery will look like and how it will differ from both the book and the 1990 movie.

Castle Rock continues its tradition of casting actors known for previous King adaptations, brining Tim Robbins–of Shawshank Redemption fame–into the fray as a character named Reginald Merrill. (If you’re familiar with King, you’ll recognize the surname “Merrill” from Stand By Me and Needful Things.) The cast also features Eighth Grade‘s Elsie Fisher as Wilkes’ daughter, Joy, Captain Phillips’ Barkhad Abdi, Paul Sparks, Yusra Warsama, and Matthew Alan.

You’ll also probably recognize another familiar name in that trailer: the sign for Jerusalem’s Lot, another fictional Maine town of King’s invention that’s the setting for his 1975 vampire novel, ‘Salem’s Lot. How that town fits into the second season of Castle Rock will be apparent when the first episode premieres on October 23.

Header Image Credit: Hulu

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Stephen King’s pop culture reign is far from over. The prolific author is still coming up with fresh ideas in his latest horror novel The Institute.  The novel will become a Spyglass limited series even though it just hit shelves on September 10. Because – let’s be honest – does Stephen King really need to prove his brand-new book is worthy of a TV show? As Collider reports, Emmy Award-winners David E. Kelley (Goliath) and Jack Bender (Under the Dome) will direct and executive produce the upcoming show.

The Institute follows Luke Ellis, a Minneapolis kid who is kidnapped after his parents’ murders. He wakes up at a place called The Institute in a room that looks almost identical to his bedroom. He meets other kids with special powers like telekinesis and realizes they all ended up at this strange place under identical circumstances. Luke forms a friendship with Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery, and begins to understand more about The Institute and its horrible purpose. Institute director Mrs. Sigsby is determined to extract their abilities and will punish anyone who resists her experiments.

via GIPHY

And, for those who go to the Back Half, there is no return. The Institute synopsis also hints that the good guys will not prevail this time around, so it’s not looking good for this gang. This novel has the type of kid-centered story that fans are currently enjoying in the IT movie franchise and in shows like Dark, Stranger Things, and Rim of the World.

There’s no confirmation on when the series will drop nor casting decisions. It’s not clear how old Luke is, but he’s presumably a pre-teen so the actors should fall within that age group. For now, Stephen King fans can get into The Institute novel and get ready Doctor Sleep to get their fix.

Image Credit: Simon & Schuster

The post Stephen King’s New Novel THE INSTITUTE Already Has An Upcoming TV Series appeared first on Nerdist.

SPOILERS for It Chapter Two Contained Herein! You Have Been Warned!

Throughout IT Chapter Two, Pennywise taunts both the adult Richie Tozier (played brilliantly by Bill Hader) and his younger self (played in flashbacks by Finn Wolfhard) with threats that he is harboring a big “dirty secret.” While neither character ever actually comes out and says what this secret is, it is fairly obvious by the end of the film that Richie is a queer character, and that he has harbored a longstanding crush on his childhood friend Eddie Kaspbrak all these years.

Richie carving “R+E” on the Kissing Bridge in Derry at the end of the film pretty much cements it. Still, it seems that some fans still don’t want to admit what’s right in front of their faces. But if there was any doubt that IT Chapter Two meant for Richie to read as LGBT, one fan just pointed out another huge visual cue to his being a closeted queer character.

Writer BJ Colangeno noticed that the shirt adult Richie wears is very similar in style to the shirt that actor Mark Patton wears in an infamous dance scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street Pt. 2: Freddy’s Revenge. One shirt is bright yellow and the other mustard color, but it is pretty dang close, and I doubt it’s a coincidence.

There are people out here really trying to deny Richie Tozer’s homosexuality in #ITChapterTwo while he’s wearing Jesse from A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2’s shirt. pic.twitter.com/iMoINAMQ4x

— BJ Colangelo (@bjcolangelo) September 9, 2019

So what does this reference to an ’80s horror classic have to do with Richie’s sexual orientation? Nightmare 2 has long been seen as the biggest mainstream horror film ever made with an LGBTQ subtext. In fact, the entire movie can be viewed as one big allegory about repressing one’s true sexual orientation… so much so that it’s hard to read the movie as about anything else.

Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton), the only male protagonist in the entire Nightmare franchise, moves into the Elm St. house, and Freddy Krueger begins to possess him. Although he has a gorgeous girlfriend, when Freddy begins to take over, he runs to the bedroom of his best friend, the high school hunk. Whom he promptly kills. This is after he goes to a gay bar in the middle of the night and finds his high school coach there, whom he also kills. (There is also an exploding parakeet for some reason.)

In short, whenever Jesse is confronted with his own sexuality, his repressed Freddy comes out to play. Needless to say, it’s not subtle at all. And all that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to that movie. That the costume designers for IT Chapter Two would go out of their way to give Richie a very similar shirt seems quite telling of how they see the character.

New Line Cinema

Richie Tozier being gay is something fans of the novel IT have always theorized about. In the book, Richie’s reaction to Eddie’s death can be viewed as those of someone harboring romantic feelings for the other. Especially as he gently kisses his cheek as Eddie dies at the end, and seems the most unable to cope with the loss of his friend. But what was merely hinted at in King’s novel is made pretty explicit in the film to anyone who is paying attention. The 1990 mini-series doesn’t deal with it at all, sweeping every seemingly controversial aspect of the book under the rug.

Does Richie go on to finally live out his life an out LGBTQ person after the defeat of Pennywise? We never find out, but it seems he is the most shaken of all the Loser’s Club by the end of the film. And that’s no doubt due to losing one of his great loves. But the fact that Richie’s struggle is taken seriously and not just reduced to mere subtext is one of the best things about IT Chapter Two.

Images: New Line Cinema

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What makes for a good haunted house story? It’s not an easy feat to pull off. The scares should be tactical and believable, as the setting dictates. The descriptions should be detailed, transportive; should emulate the precise feeling of walking down a hallway, unsure of what lurks around the corner. It sounds easy to breathe terrifying life into the bones of a creaky old manor, but getting it just right is the key, and so few horror writers or creators have successfully done it.

Horror maestro Stephen King has written his fair share of spooks, but he never really attempted a dense haunted house story until 2002, and not in his usual medium, but as a television miniseries. That three-part event series was Rose Red, about a mysterious home in Seattle that can’t stop growing—even though no living soul is building it. The series was inspired by a very real—and allegedly haunted—house, and served as a melting pot for some of King’s prime horror influences. And though it’s a victim of the limitations of early 2000s television, Rose Red is one of King’s most ambitious and fascinating works; a haunted house story that both wears its influences on its sleeve and weaves its own terrifying, grotesque mythology.

Here’s a look back at Stephen King’s Rose Red, it’s many references and allusions, and why it’s one of the best haunted house stories of all time.

It pays homage to Shirley Jackson

Penguin Classics

King has been very blunt about why it took him so long to dip into the haunted house genre: because he was convinced the best haunted house novel had already been written. In his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, King called Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—along with Henry James’ Turn of the Screw—the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years.” Jackson’s novel—about a team of investigators and psychics who go to a famous haunted house to either prove or discredit its status—is a clear influence on Rose Red, which follows a parapsychology professor named Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis) who leads an expedition into an allegedly haunted Seattle mansion. Same as Dr. Montague in Hill House, Dr. Reardon assembles a team of psychics to join her: Annie Wheaton (Kimberly J. Brown), an autistic teenager with telekinetic powers; Cathy Kramer (Judith Ivey), an automatic writer; Emery Waterman (Matt Ross), a psychic with retrocognition; Nick Hardaway (Julian Sands), a telepath; Pam Asbury (Emily Deschanel), a psychic television host; and Victor Kandinsky (Kevin Tighe), a psychic with precognition. Along with a descendant of the family that built the house—Steven Rimbauer (Matt Keeslar), who also happens to be Reardon’s lover—they explore the famously contorting mansion, and almost immediately encounter the angry spirits that live there.

It’s not just the basic plot that mimics Jackson’s novel, but also the structure. Rose Red opens with a passage not unlike the famous paragraph that opens The Haunting of Hill House, about the very nature of hauntings:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

The inspiration makes a lot of sense when you consider the origins of Rose Red, which grew out of an idea King had in 1996 to adapt The Haunting of Hill House into a feature film. Though that idea didn’t pan out, imbuing his project with the spirit of Jackson’s storytelling is part of what makes Rose Red so potent. It’s what he chose to expand on that gives his story its own unique stamp.

It’s inspired by a true story

WikiCommons/Roxanna Salceda

King didn’t just borrow inspiration from Shirley Jackson, but he also infused Rose Red with the real-life mythos surrounding the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. If you’re unfamiliar, the home is a real structure that’s still standing in the northern California city, which was built by Sarah Winchester beginning in 1884. Sarah was the heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—a famous gun manufacturer, which sold a large amount of the rifles used in WWI and WWII—after her husband’s death from tuberculosis in 1881. She inherited about half a billion dollars when adjusted for inflation, and used the money to build a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion. Sarah was superstitious and was left shaken by an encounter with a Boston-based medium, who told her the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles needed a home. This inspired her to build her mansion—and to keep building it, because she believed if she stopped, she would die.

The result was a home full of strange hallways, maze-like properties, and other tricks and dead-ends that were meant to confuse the spirits. As promised, the home was continuously built until Sarah’s death in 1922, when all projects halted abruptly. Today, the Winchester Mystery House—as its been branded—is a popular tourist destination. It was also very clearly an inspiration for Rose Red.

Like Sarah Winchester, Rose Red’s fictional widowed heiress Ellen Rimbauer had her home built until her death. And like the Winchester house, Rose Red was full of dizzying rooms and riddles. However, in King’s lore, Rose Red never stopped building itself—those dead ends showing up seemingly out of nowhere, the ghouls intent on ensnaring houseguests and growing their numbers. It’s a fun twist on a piece of American folklore, and one that King uses to a very creepy effect. The ghosts in Rose Red—of Ellen, her maids, her children, and many others—are depicted as zombie-like phantoms. They make the idea of being trapped in this house even more terrifying and relentless.

The cast is stacked

ABC/Buena Vista International Television

Even if the ghouls don’t lure you into Rose Red, you should be interested in the cast. Nancy Travis is perfectly strange as Joyce Reardon, a woman who grows more and more unhinged on her quest for righteousness. Veterans like Kevin Tighe and Judith Ivey give the story some weight, and Julian Sands is deliciously creepy and on-point as the psychic who seems to see and know the most about the dangerous mess they’ve all wandered into. Matt Ross—who’s now perhaps best known as a director of films like Captain Fantastic—is one of King’s most vicious and deplorable characters, a doomed mommy’s boy with an ugly worldview who mocks and derides his fellow psychics with a sneering grin. You’ll also recognize Westworld‘s Jimmi Simpson as a journalist who tries to unravel Reardon’s project–but is swallowed by the house before he gets the chance—and Melanie Lynskey as Annie’s loving sister. Emily Deschanel pops up in a brief but important part, shortly before her role on Bones made her a big name. The whole thing is anchored by Kimberly J. Brown, who you might recognize from Disney fare like Halloweentown. Annie is an arguably problematic character—King has a storied history of associating mental illness and other handicaps with psychic or magical abilities—but she’s treated with tenderness by all of the main characters, and she really does give the series its heart.

All of these things blend together to create a series that is largely imperfect but enchanting all the same. A story that wears its influences loudly and proudly, but marries them together in a peculiar and distinctly King way. The most successful aspect of is that, by the end, it feels like a real place—and a dreadful place. What else could you want from a haunted house story?

Header Image Credit: ABC/Buena Vista International Television

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In 1989, Pennywise the Dancing Clown took joy in terrorizing the kids of small town Derry, Maine. Twenty-seven years later, the teenagers who once defeated him are all grown up, and in a storyline that rings all too true for those of us who have grown apart from friends in our past, they’ve lost their close childhood ties. It’s more than just growing up and moving on: leaving Derry means forgetting Pennywise and the bonds that came with the friendships forged one fateful summer. But blood oaths never die, and so despite the group’s reluctance and literal distance, the Losers—minus one—return to face their demons once again.

IT Chapter Two is not a sequel, but rather a concluding act. And while it once again focuses on the friendships that we all fell in love with in 2017, we appreciate them differently than we did in Chapter One.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for IT Chapter Two

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Despite the horror connotation that comes with murderous clowns, nightmarish visions, and deadly jump scares, IT has first and foremost always been about friendship—something Chapter One drives home with the same vengeance as Bev impaling Pennywise in the head in one of the Losers’ first encounters with the clown. After all, as Bill comes to realize after the aforementioned encounter: Pennywise knows he can prey on them if they’re separated because they’ll be more vulnerable. It’s a thread that we’re repeatedly reminded of watching Chapter Two.

Each Loser is forced to confront a traumatic memory from their past and while it’s something they need to experience on their own, they don’t truly heal from their scars until they can find comfort in each other’s presence. Similarly, it’s not just that the Ritual of Chüd won’t work unless all the Losers are together. It’s that even when they’re technically in the same place and remembering what was once important to them, there’s no merit to those memories unless they have each other to lean on.

One of the most heartwarming scenes in IT Chapter Two takes place in a Derry restaurant where the adult Losers reassemble for the first time since childhood. Before things take a grotesque and traumatic turn, the night is filled with laughing, jokes, and a camaraderie that comes with the comfort of being reunited with people who not only shared a past, but also shared a formative experience.

It’s a stark contrast from how we’ve been introduced to our adult Losers in this time period—each of them seemingly happy and successful but, like the evil that lurks underneath Derry’s sewers, each of them disenchanted and unhappy with how their lives have turned out. Although none of them actually want to be back in the place that caused them so much trauma, their reconnection is proof of how important their relationships are. (And, as we see by the end of the film, how much they would have positively impacted their adult lives had they not drifted apart.)

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When Bev hands Eddie a fence rod from outside the Neibolt house, she tells him, “It kills monsters if you believe it does.” But unlike the first film, what the Losers need to kill IT is more than just the belief that nightmares aren’t real and that good can outweigh evil. No one is 13 anymore, and that loss of childhood imagination means they have to work harder and dig deeper to find the strength to combat Pennywise’s horrors.

It’s something that they struggle with, even while they battle the murderous clown, and it’s not until Eddie gets mortally wounded that the group fully comes together in a way that allows them to be victorious. If IT Chapter One taught us that strength doesn’t come from bullets or knives but from people who believe in us and are willing to fight for us, IT Chapter Two teaches us that even though we think we’re strong enough to forget the past, that doesn’t mean we don’t need it anymore.

This is why King’s story resonates so strongly. Not all of us have traumatic memories that we’ve tried to repress, and not all of us grew up in a town we wanted to desperately flee from. But we can all connect with the story of that friend who moved away. We can all connect with the regret and guilt that comes with forgetting how important someone is. We can all connect with realizing how much we’ve taken for granted by being shaped by friendships during our formative years. When everyone comforts Richie after Eddie’s death, the group hug makes your heart swell not because of what’s just happened—but because, just like the Losers, we’ve finally remembered just how much these friendships mean to them.

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IT Chapter Two is a film stands on its own not because it tells a different story, but because it fills out a story. That’s what allows both Chapter One and Chapter Two to function as a complete whole, rather than just two halves that we know had to be divided simply because the content was just too much for one movie.

Featured Image: Warner Bros.

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Not that a movie about a cosmic child-eater that looks like a clown isn’t weird enough, but It Chapter Two has some extra weird bits. Most of those weird bits come directly from Stephen King’s novel It, written in 1986. While the first movie touches on the more celestial side of Pennywise, Chapter Two goes full boar. One of these aspects is the Ritual of Chüd. Note the umlaut; I’m not talking about Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. This is an ancient Native American ritual and the only thing said to defeat Pennywise. But, like…what is it?

Beware STRONG spoilers ahead for It, It Chapter Two, and the novel.

In King’s novel, the Losers Club performs the Ritual of Chüd twice, once as children and once as adults. Or they think they do, anyway. In a nutshell, the ritual allows people to enter The Macroverse. Defeating Pennywise is contingent on belief. It’s a psychic battle of wits; since Pennywise feeds on fear before feeding on flesh, his opponents must break down his hold on them. In the novel, Bill Denbrough learns about the Ritual of Chüd and convenes with Maturin, the magic space turtle.

Now, I know what you’re gonna ask. Yes, I am over six feet tall. But you might also ask who in the universe is Maturin the space turtle. Well, he’s one of King’s nigh-Lovecraftian deities (not unlike It itself). He is It’s diametric opposite. Yes, he is a turtle from before time. He spends most of his existence asleep in his shell, but once he had a stomachache and woke up to vomit out the known universe. Like ya do. While Maturin doesn’t interfere with the affairs of humans very often, he did intercede with young Bill Denbrough and gave him advice on how to defeat Pennywise.

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This advice led to the Losers fighting Pennywise through belief. They believed the metal silver had magical qualities, given how often characters killed werewolves and stuff with it in movies. And because of this belief, silver did affect Pennywise. Beverly shot It in the head with a piece of silver from her slingshot and Pennywise fell down a pit. Twenty-seven years later, the adult Losers’ Club didn’t have the same belief. However, through the second Ritual of Chüd, Bill and Richie Tozier are able to enter It’s mind, though they get lost. Eventually, Bill enters It’s body, locates his heart, and crushes it, killing Pennywise forever.

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The movies employ bits of this, but they change specific pieces. The biggest change is that Maturin the space turtle no longer appears in any real way, though turtles appear in the background throughout. The second major change is that nobody mentions the Ritual of Chüd in the first movie at all. In the second movie, Mike Hanlon learns about it from a local Native American tribe and he basically drugs Bill to show him. But the bulk of the second film has the individual Losers recovering artifacts from their past in order to perform the ritual. Which I guess they do? It seems unsuccessful, though they do eventually defeat Pennywise. Though It spends much of the third act as a massive spider-clown centaur, the Losers shrink it through bravery and ridicule until it becomes a tiny little clown boi.

Frankly, it’s surprising It Chapter Two would reference the Ritual of Chüd at all, and it certainly diverges quite a bit from the novel. However, its tenets remain in both installments and it does allow our heroes to defeat the monster. It’s just a bit muddied, in any medium.

It Chapter Two is in theaters now.

Featured Image: Warner Bros.

Kyle Anderson is the Editor at Large for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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How do you recreate one of the most iconic horror performances of all time, 40 years later? That’s the dilemma writer/director Mike Flanagan was faced with in adapting his new film, Doctor Sleep. The movie, based on the book of the same name by Stephen King, is a sequel to The Shining, and incorporates elements of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece, right down to exacting replicas of those famous sets. At the center of Doctor Sleep is the story of Danny Torrance, who was a little boy in The Shining, but is now a grown man dealing with the same addiction that sent his father, Jack, down a spiral of violence. Ewan McGregor plays the grown-up version of Danny—a role originated by child actor Dan Lloyd—and was given the enormous task of bringing King’s updated take on the character to life.

Nerdist went to the Atlanta set of Doctor Sleep in the fall of 2018, where we caught up with McGregor and Flanagan, who discussed the opportunities and challenges that come with bringing Danny Torrance back to the big screen. For Flanagan, whose projects often center on the lasting effects of generational trauma, it was a natural choice to tackle Doctor Sleep. The film opens with a grown Dan Torrance struggling with alcoholism, like his father, and at his absolute rock bottom; after years of using alcohol to mute his psychic condition (the “shining”), he’s almost totally removed from reality. “The different ways [Dan] tries to suppress [his trauma], and to dull that shine with alcohol and with removing himself from people, it’s almost like a bingo card for all of the things I really like about stories,” Flanagan explained. 

Warner Bros. Pictures

Doctor Sleep maps Dan from his bottomed-out state as a drinking alcoholic to his recovery as a sober alcoholic, who finds solace in AA meetings and in his new role as an orderly at a hospice facility in New Hampshire. There, he uses his newly renewed shining abilities to comfort patients drifting to death, and is given the nickname “Doctor Sleep.” Around this time, he also develops a psychic connection with a little girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran), who also has the shining, and who is being stalked by a villainous, energy-draining villain named Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). Dan’s bond with Abra renews his sense of purpose, and gives Dan an arc that McGregor called “quite a nice journey for a character in the space of one movie.”

Flanagan was drawn to McGregor after first seeing him in the 1994 film Shallow Grave, and knew he was perfect for the part after the two met up in the editing room of Flanagan’s Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House. What was meant to be a half-hour meeting turned into a 90-minute conversation between the two men, where they discussed just about everything but the script itself: sobriety, their mutual love of Kubrick’s film, their personal lives. “It was really about the ideas of the movie that spoke to us as people, instead of a clinical breakdown of the character and the story,” Flanagan said. “I’ve never really had a meeting like that before.” After countless meetings with a number of high-profile, talented actors, Flanagan went with McGregor based on a gut feeling. 

King was also impressed by McGregor and gave the casting his blessing, which is the ultimate compliment given how personal The Shining is to the author, who wrote it in the midst of his own struggles with alcoholism and addiction. McGregor, who is 17 years sober himself, said that he didn’t do anything specific to get into the role, although that shared experience with King must have helped. “Stephen King‘s experience with the subject matter is dripping out of the novel,” McGregor said, adding that both the novel and the script communicated everything he needed to know about inhabiting Dan, including the most painful aspects of his journey.

Warner Bros. Pictures/Jessica Miglio

In addition to being an addict and a psychic, Dan is also, most importantly, a son. His relationship with his parents and his traumas are integral to his characterization. In fact, McGregor said that when he went back to watch The Shining in preparation for the role, he didn’t study Dan Lloyd’s performance as Danny, but instead focused on Jack Nicholson’s as Jack. “There’s not very much I can pick up from the kid in The Shining because I don’t know how similar we are to our five-year-old selves when we’re adults, but we are similar to our fathers in many ways,” he explained. “So it was more interesting for me to look at Jack in that respect.”

It was clear from McGregor’s rapport with Curran, who was also on set during our interview, that the bond between the two is very strong, and key to unlocking the character of Dan and how he moves on from and reconciles with his past, on both a personal and familial level. Fans of the novel will know there’s more to that relationship than originally meets the eye, and it has ties to exactly what McGregor spoke about regarding fathers and sons. Curran, who’s 14, said she read parts of King’s The Shining so that she could better understand Dan, and also said that her favorite part of working on the film was sharing scenes with McGregor. “Abra is, in many ways, stronger than Dan,” McGregor said. Curran added, “She’s a tough cookie.”

How that bond translates to screen, and other secrets to McGregor’s portrayal of Dan Torrance, will be revealed when Doctor Sleep arrives in theaters on November 8.

Feature Image: Warner Bros. Pictures/Jessica Miglio

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With It Chapter Two coming to theaters this week, it’s sure to bring the scares. In honor of that, we combed through film, television, and comics to bring you the the definitive top ten adaptations of horror icon Stephen King’s expansive works.

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After two long years of waiting, It Chapter Two finally arrives this week. Soon, audiences will become reacquainted with Pennywise and the terrified citizens of Derry, Maine. But can the second chapter live up to the bonkers success of the first installment? After all, the first movie dealt with arguably everyone’s favorite part of the original Stephen King novel, the “kids” portion of the book. But with an all-star cast as the adult Loser’s Club, everyone was even more hyped than before.

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So far, it seems like the response to this second installment is more muted than for the first, but still leaning positive. The highlights seem to be Bill Hader’s performance, as well as the returning kids from the first film. Still, almost everyone says the running time is way, way too long. The film clocks in at nearly 3 hours! Here’s what the first batch of reviews have to say, starting with our very own Kyle Anderson:

“Even though the movie feels cluttered, the heart of the characters and their story is still present. The metaphor of troubled adults dealing with their childhood trauma, literally returning to the moment of their greatest strife, is particularly strong.”

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Peter Debruge of Variety says the movie is ultimately worth it, despite its length and the amount of time it takes to get to the final confrontation.

“Muschietti has a strange narrative challenge to overcome here: On one hand, he’s obliged to compress all the plot that King could indulge in more than 1,100 pages (which explains why other killings and the local police’s dead-end investigations don’t make the cut), while on the other, he’s motivated to delay the final confrontation between Pennywise and the reunited Losers Club for as long as possible.”

Slashfilm’s Chris Evangelista calls the film “messy,” but nevertheless feels the film’s humanity shines through in its storytelling.

 “It Chapter Two, a lengthy, messy, not-always-successful sequel, is one of those rare Stephen King adaptations that acknowledges that there’s more to King’s work than things that go bump in the night. There’s humanity.”

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Dorian Parks from Geeks of Color still likes the first chapter more, but still finds a lot to love in its follow up.

“I might love the first movie a little bit more, but I still thoroughly enjoyed this movie as a whole. Andy Muschietti did a great job of not only staying faithful to the source material, but also adding fresh spins and ideas to this adaptation of a Stephen King classic.”

Another “not as good as the first, but still worth your time” review is from William Bibbiani from Bloody-Disgusting. 

“So it isn’t as good as It Chapter One. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good time. The filmmakers have assembled a cornucopia of nightmare fuel, or at least a heck of a lot of amazing jump scares, and they’ve set them all in a row to get knocked over, domino-style. You won’t be bored. There’s too much insanity for that.”

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Sarah Musnicky of Nightmarish Conjurings praises the concluding chapter as a fitting conclusion to King’s epic tale.

“Overall, It Chapter Two is a film that does a great job of concluding the story leftover from the previous installment without leaving the audience hanging. The film has so much heart and you can feel how much reverence Dauberman and the Muschiettis have for the source material. It is full of laughter and pain. Fun and terror. Fear and triumph.”

Despite liking the film overall, IGN’s Jim Vejvoda seems to echo other critics in their sentiments about the film’s pacing and length. But the incredible cast makes it a worthy follow-up.

“The heart of the first film is still there in It Chapter Two – it’s just buried under a layer of self-indulgent bloat. Director Andy Muschietti constructs a series of scary show-stoppers anchored by the compelling performances of his adult and teen actors.”

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Although the New York Times’ A.O. Scott found that there was some joy to be found in the performances, it ultimately wasn’t enough to cut through all the bloat for him. A long book doesn’t necessarily work as a long movie it seems.

 “An 1,100-page novel like “It” can be a breathless page-turner. But this 2-hour-49-minute movie drags more than it jumps, wearing out its premise and possibly also your patience as it lumbers toward the final showdown.”

Having less kind things to say overall is Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt, who calls this movie a “bloody, silly, overwrought sequel.” Ouch.

“Hader and Ransone do a lot to mitigate the long slog from one relentlessly ghoulish set piece to the next; their dry, side-mouthed humor brings much-needed levity in a movie that seems determined to reduce accomplished actors like McAvoy and Chastain to so much panicky meat-snack for Pennywise.”

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But there are other critics who love the scale and ambition of this film, as noted by Empire’s Alex Godfrey:

“It is glorious to see this stuff envisioned on such a huge and self-assured scale, a joy to have a film of this size trading in this sort of genre carnage with such uncompromising and unapologetic style.”

So ultimately, it looks like if you loved the first It, you might still want to return for the second. But you just might not love it as much as the first.

Featured Image: Warner Brothers

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