New Castle Rock Season 2 Teaser Revealed by Hulu

The world of Stephen King came alive in the Hulu series Castle Rock last year, and now season 2 is getting ready to drop. To promote Castle Rock‘s next installment, Hulu has released a new teaser, which you can watch above!

This new teaser is centered around new cast member Lizzy Caplan (Master’s of Sex) as Annie Wilkes, the crazed nurse serial killer from King’s famous 1987 novel Misery, which spawned the Oscar-winning film starring Kathy Bates as Wilkes. The teaser shows Wilkes trying to maintain the illusion of being a domesticated woman and benevolent caregiver, even while something dark and violent is steadily bubbling up from inside her. In this version of Wilkes remixed for Castle Rock seems to give the unstable serial killer nurse a family, which will certainly complicated her urgings to kill.

A montage of footage at the trailer’s end teases much more intrigue for this upcoming season. The setting has moved from Castle Rock Maine to “Jerusalem’s Lot,” which is of course reference to the setting of King’s 1975 novel Salem’s Lot. That book saw a writer return to his hometown, only to realize that it’s being taken over by vampires. Tim Robbins appears as Reginald “Pop” Merrill, the owner of the The Emporium Galorium junk shop, which appears or is mentioned in King stories like Pet Sematary, The Sun Dog, and Needful Things. Heroes star Greg Grunberg makes an (uncredited) appearance; Captain Phillips star Barkhad Abdi and Yusra Warsama play Somali siblings created for the show – a community leader and doctor, respectively. By some of the darker implications of the teaser, Salmen’s Lot will not be a welcoming place to the Somali people.

Finally, a shot of Caplan’s Annie Wilkes bloodied and tied to a bed is a nice big twist on Stephen King fan expectations of Misery’s storyline!

While this new Castle Rock teaser is intriguing, a lot of viewers may be thrown by the total lack of connection between this new footage and the events and characters of season 1. Castle Rockis structured to be an anthology series a la American Horror Story, but season 1’s final episodes were admittedly a lackluster resolution to all the mystery Easter egg references that season 1 was packed with. There was even a big tease of a possible Shining connection to be explored in the next chapter, though so far there’s no sign of that happening.

Still, Lizzy Caplan is a great actress and her performance as Annie Wilkes looks like it could hold this season together – even if the broader storyline about Salem’s Lot hate and violence against outsiders doesn’t land well.

Castle Rock season 2 premieres on October 23rd, on Hulu.