Castle Rock Featurette Reveals the Key to Bringing Stephen King’s World to Life

The second season of Stephen King‘s Castle Rock debuted on Hulu earlier this week, with the above featurette seeing the cast and crew of the new season discussing what makes King’s works so special. While other movies and TV shows adapt specific King storylines, Castle Rock stands apart as it borrows elements from all across the author’s library to craft an all-new experience for viewers. While only the first three episodes are currently available, Season Two is shaping up to be even better than the last. Learn more in the featurette above and check out Castle Rock now on Hulu.

In the new season, 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.

Capturing the essence of King’s works isn’t merely done through naming your characters after his creations, with showrunner Dustin Thomason previously revealing to ComicBook.com that the most important element to honor was the complexity of those characters.

“The way that Stephen has redefined horror as a genre over the last 50 years has been by really leading with character,” Thomason pointed out. “At some level, I think what’s important to Castle Rock, of course there will be thrills and there will be horror and there will be moments of visceral tension, but at its core, it’s a character story. I think that, for us, was always really important, that we would be able to create characters and episodes where emotionally you felt connected to them in the same way that you do to Stephen’s characters. That sympathetic fear, that you could only really be afraid for someone if you care about them.”

He added, “So, at some level, that was the motto of the show, was that in the same way that Stephen gives us these kinds of Dickensian characters and then throws them into crazy horror and thriller situations, that that was always what we were going to be doing in this show.”

Fans might know Wilkes from King’s Misery, though the new season reimagines the character less as a one-dimensional villain and more as a complex figure whose devotion and passion can merely become misguided.

“I think it’s that almost hopeful quality of Annie’s, and the love she has for her daughter, that makes us care about her even as we watch her both be terrorized and then eventually become terrorizer,” the showrunner noted. “It’s a cliche but I embrace it, because it is a cliche that I think Stephen helped invent in the genre, which is that characters matter more than scares and that the scares will come when the characters feel robust.”

Check out Season Two of Castle Rock on Hulu now.

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