Hulu’s Castle Rock teaser unites all your favorite Stephen King tropes

Hulu has revealed its Super Bowl trailer for Castle Rock, the latest TV series to venture into the labyrinthine world of Stephen King’s many horror novels — and though it’s only 40 seconds long, it offers a satisfying taste of the macabre for King fans looking to return to the dark heart of Maine.

The town of Castle Rock features in dozens of King’s novels and short stories, apparently serving as a homing point for the state’s overpopulation of supernatural infestations and evil entities. And the teaser for its new starring vehicle finds Moonlight’s André Holland playing attorney Henry Deaver, summoned to the town by a mysterious phone call made from the notorious Shawshank Prison — which most viewers will recognize as the titular setting of 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption.

As we learned in a previous trailer, one of the prison’s inmates, played by It’s Bill Skarsgard, seems to have been caught up in a mystery that’s subsuming the entire town, and which is accompanied by a host of tropes that will be familiar to King fans — everything from bloodthirsty dogs (Cujo) to creepy groups of children (Children of the Corn), ominous mist (The Mist), and a wide-eyed Sissy Spacek (Carrie).

Castle Rock is created and written by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, who previously collaborated on the WGN America series Manhattan. It represents the second collaboration between King, producer J.J. Abrams, and Hulu; the first, the Kennedy assassination mindbender 11.22.63, was critically praised as fun historical fanfic.

If you missed the first Castle Rock trailer, check it out below.

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