SPOILER WARNING

This leads directly to the show’s most disturbing sequence to date. Trapped in his hellish prison job for the foreseeable future, helpless as his fellow guards beat and dehumanize the prisoners — and quite possibly tainted by the touch of the Kid — Dennis Zalewski snaps. Grabbing his gun, he methodically marches through Shawshank, murdering every officer and official he finds. When he finally reaches the warden’s office, he finds Deaver there. “I wanna testify,” he says … before a flashbang grenade drops them both to the ground and a shotgun-wielding bull blows him away.

It’s a gorgeously fucked-up sequence, in large part because it’s just so very Stephen King-ish — and not in a way we’ve really seen before on screen. This kind of killing spree is a staple of the Master’s work: Seemingly ordinary men just lose it one day. They pick up a rifle or an ax, slaughtering their way through as many people as possible, offering one final deadpan non sequitur before someone puts them down like a rabid dog. (The town history of Derry, where It takes place, is full of rampages like this.)

And there’s nothing about Zalewski’s affect here to suggest that if he’d gotten away clean, he wouldn’t have just gone down to the bar for a drink, complaining about a rough day at work. It’s not quite the banality of evil, but there’s a workmanlike quality to it that gets right under your skin. Murder is so routine it barely registers.

Isn’t that what Zalewski himself tells Deaver? “Bad things happen here because bad people know they’re safe here,” the guard warned the lawyer when he tried to downplay the potential to open a prison-wide investigation. “How many times can one fuckin’ town look the other way?” In his desperation to expose Shawshank’s horrors, the man turned himself into one of those horrors. He had to become the prison in order to destroy it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. The ending was impressive.

During another flashback, we see Molly invite young Henry up to her room to hang out. Her neighbor leads a sheltered life, most likely an abusive one. So he’s baffled by her meticulously curated posters for period-appropriate college-rock bands. (“What are ‘Violent Femmes’?”)

He’s even more flustered when Molly drops this bomb on him: “I know what you do in your room. Touching your thing. It feels like fireworks.” The moment is cut short when Daddy Dearest starts hollering for Henry to come home, but this sudden and relatively explicit swerve into adolescent sexuality is a welcome sign that Castle Rock will take that element of Stephen King’s work seriously. (The recent It adaptation excised the book’s infamous orgy scene entirely, but replaced it with a weird scene of a bunch of guys leering at a girl in her underwear instead … as if that’s somehow an improvement.) Carnal knowledge is a huge driver of the author’s character development and horror craftsmanship alike. Kudos to the show for having the courage to even try to tackle what can be a danger zone onscreen.

I reviewed the third and final episode of Castle Rock that Hulu launched all at once last week for Rolling Stone. This was the weirdest and best.

The bigger question facing Castle Rock is how much it wants to tap dance between the Master’s raindrops. Strong performances by the cast in general, and by the remarkable, dead-serious Andre Holland in particular, make the show watchable if you don’t know your Randall Flagg from your Kurt Barlow. But if you’re a fan, hearing Lacey talk about “the dog” and “the strangler” most likely gave you a bigger thrill than anything else narrative-wise. And when you think back through the King mythos, it’s not hard to come up with another character who had the ability to inflict disease and cause death with a just glance of his own dark, intense eyes. Is the show content to be a superhero-comic-style nostalgia act, where the main dramatic drive is figuring out when your favorite villains are about to return? Or does its portrayal of an economically devastated small town where the biggest source of jobs is a privatized prison provide fertile enough ground to grow evils all its own?

I reviewed episode two of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s still a show finding its sea legs.

If the premiere is any indication, it’s not the diverse strands of the Stephen King Extended Universe that’s holding this thing together: It’s Moonlight veteran André Holland. His character Henry Deaver is a just a black American from a lily-white small town, raised with a heaping helping of old-time religion and unexamined trauma. He’s not dreading an encounter with a demonic clown – the lawyer just wants to make sure that his client gets the legal representation the Constitution guarantees. He’s a careworn man trying his best, not a hero undertaking a quest. This is Mr. Holland’s opus: He acts like doesn’t know he’s in a highly anticipated television event from the creators of Lost and The Shining. He makes Castle Rock feel like a drama, not the haunted-house ride at the county fair.

And while Holland gets the meatiest material this time around, he’s surrounded by actors capable of moral and emotional seriousness. His mom is played by Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek. Pangborn is played by Scott Glenn, who’s brought grizzled gravitas to everything from The Silence of the Lambs to The Leftovers. Molly Strand, the suburbanite pill-popper who briefly shows up? That’s Melanie Lynskey, who hasn’t met a role she couldn’t crush since Heavenly Creatures. Frances Conroy, a solid player in both prestige dramas (Six Feet Under) and guilty genre pleasures (American Horror Story), cameos as Warden Lacy’s blind wife. And the Kid? It’s Bill Skarsgard, dialing his performance as Pennywise from It down several notches but still weird and wall-eyed as ever.

Finally, there’s the not-so-good Warden Lacy, played by Terry O’Quinn. All the emphasis on Lost‘s unanswered questions makes it easy to forget all these years later, but the actor was an absolute godsend for that show — an MVP who could play a wily survivalist, a Wolverinesque badass, a failed hero, a bitter old man and an embodiment of pure evil with equal nuance and skill. Yes, the Warden commits suicide by driving off a cliff with a noose around his neck (“guillotining himself with a Lincoln,” as Henry puts it). But we’re in King Country now, and even if you discount supernatural shenanigans, the flashback toward the episode’s end indicates we haven’t seen the last of him.

I’m covering Castle Rock, the new “songs in the key of King” series on Hulu, for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s not sit-up-and-take-notice stuff like The Terror was, but it’s promising.

Pennywise is one of modern horror’s greatest monsters
He’s the original killer clown from outer space and the most infamous villain in Stephen King’s bibliography, which is saying something. (All apologies, Randall Flagg.)  Pennywise the Dancing Clown is the form most frequently taken by a malevolent entity that’s been haunting the entire town of Derry, Maine for centuries; it’s lurked beneath the land since it hurtled through the cosmos and crash-landed on Earth from another dimension millennia ago. This shape-shifter can transform into its victims’ worst nightmares, feeding on both their fear and their flesh. Its preferred target: little kids, whose vivid imaginations give it an extensive menu of terrors to choose from. This also explains the monster’s default mode: What kid doesn’t love clowns? (At least before It more or less singlehandedly ruined their image, that is.)

But in addition to being one mean, multifaceted predator, Pennywise has exerted a malign influence on the entire town. He himself – or It Itself – only emerges from hibernation once every 27 years or so for a feeding frenzy that lasts roughly a year to 18 months. But Its presence in the sewers beneath Derry radiates an evil that makes the small town the murder capital of New England … and generates a sort of willful amnesia among the population. Such forgetfulness keeps folks from reflecting on their sleepy burg’s history of atrocities, disasters and mass murders. It also prevents people from connecting the dots when the creature resurfaces and kids start going missing en masse.

Overall, Pennywise combines a killer look and set of powers with one of King’s strongest concepts: a fairy-tale troll that hides out not under a bridge, but an entire city – a ghost that haunts not just one house, but all of them. As our foremost chronicler of small-town American evil, King has a royally good time with the idea.

I wrote a primer on It — the book, the miniseries, the movie, Pennywise, Tim Curry, That Scene, you name it — just in time for the release of the new blockbuster film adaptation for Rolling Stone.

3. The Dead Zone (1983)

David Cronenberg is the man who made “body horror” a thing; Stephen King’s tales of terror derive much of their power from down-to-earth Americana. An odd couple, to be sure. But the Canadian auteur brings out the best in the story of a New England schoolteacher (professional weirdo Christopher Walken, pitch-perfect) who awakens from a five-year coma with the ability to see the future of anyone he touches. Co-starring Martin Sheen as a blustery, right-wing politician rising to power via blue-collar populism and ready to trigger World War III – imagine that! It’s cerebral but not chilly, complex but compelling – and as eerily prescient as its psychic protagonist.  STC

I wrote about The Dead Zone for Rolling Stone’s very gutsy ranking of Stephen King movie adaptations. The Top 10 is going to throw you for a loop.

This September, Lillis stars in director Andrés Muschietti’s highly anticipated adaptation of horror master Stephen King’s signature work, It. She plays Beverly Marsh, the sole female member of a close-knit gang of teen outcasts called the Loser’s Club. During one long, nightmarish summer, the Losers find themselves face to face with the child-murdering, shape-shifting entity that’s haunted their small town for centuries – a creature that most frequently takes the form of a sinister clown called Pennywise, played by Bill Skarsgård.

“We actually weren’t allowed to see him until our scenes, because we wanted the horror to be real,” Lillis recalls. “Everyone had different reactions, but all of us were like, ‘Wow, what did we get ourselves into?’ One look at him, and… you know, he’s a really scary clown that wants to kill us. I was a little bit shocked,” she laughs. “But then he went up to me afterwards and was like, ‘Hi, how’s things?’ He’s really nice, but I didn’t know how to react.”

Lillis had no such trouble connecting with her fellow Losers, who include Jaeden Lieberher as ringleader Bill Denbrough and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard as class clown Richie Tozier. “I spent all my summer with them, so we got really close. We still keep in touch, send messages to each other.” That closeness helped Lillis connect with her own character. “I relate to Beverly – the way she deals with her emotions, and the way she was around the Losers. I felt that way around the actual actors.”

I wrote a little profile of Sophia Lillis, aka Beverly in the new IT movie, for Rolling Stone.

Over at Rolling Stone, I spoke with writer/showrunner Brian K. Vaughan about Under the Dome, his ambitious summertime 13-episode adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. I’ve interviewed Brian for a pretty wide range of publications — Wizard, Maxim, a cover story for The Comics Journal, and now RS — and the local-boy-made-good feeling I got when I saw his name listed right after Stephen King and Steven Spielberg in the executive-producer credits was pretty delightful.