CASTLE ROCK Post-Mortem: Dustin Thomason on That Supernatural Twist - Give Me My Remote : Give Me My Remote

CASTLE ROCK Post-Mortem: Dustin Thomason on That Supernatural Twist

October 23, 2019 by  

Castle Rock season 2 salems lot

CASTLE ROCK — “New Jerusalem” – Episode 202 — The Merrills search for answers. Annie (Lizzy Caplan), shown. (Photo by: Dana Starbard/Hulu)

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of CASTLE ROCK season 2.]

For CASTLE ROCK’s second season, the series isn’t just diving into MISERY.

Though the presence of Annie Wilkes (played in the Hulu series by Lizzy Caplan)—one of Stephen King’s most iconic characters—had been much of the focus pre-debut, there was a brief shot in the trailer of a sign acknowledging Jerusalem’s Lot. (The town had previously been referenced in season 1, too.) And by the end of the first hour, Annie found herself crashing into a bat-filled hole in the ground…which led her to the infamous Marsten House from ‘SALEM’S LOT in episode 2.

“Part of what we talked a lot about in the writers room is that Annie is one of Stephen’s most terrestrial villains,” co-creator Dustin Thomason says. “There’s nothing supernatural about MISERY. It’s actually much like SHAWSHANK; there are obviously exciting thrills, but there’s nothing supernatural about either one of those stories. And last season, we took Shawshank [prison] and did something fundamentally supernatural with it.”

But because of MISERY’s grounded premise, the writers were cautious about how to introduce those supernatural elements—specifically ‘SALEM’S LOT’s vampires—into Annie’s origin story.

“Because Annie is so fundamentally human and terrestrial, it was always an important thing to make sure that when Annie bumps up against the supernatural, that it felt grounded and was really helping to tell the story of her journey,” Thomason says. “So as you see in the early episodes, part of the way that turn into the supernatural works for Annie is that [those moments] really lead her to question her own sanity. And it really reinforces some of the memory and time-jumping quality of her consciousness. That felt like the right combination for that character, where we could throw some truly supernatural things happening into her purview. It would only further complicate her own relationship to her sanity, and that felt like the sort of the perfect combination to us.”

Check out more from Thomason, including the real-life influences that inspired the warring clans in the second season…

CASTLE ROCK, Wednesdays, Hulu

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