Bill Skarsgård Is Creepy in the First Full Trailer for Hulu’s Castle Rock

Stephen King’s body of work as a writer means there are seemingly limitless opportunities for adaptation and combination, and Hulu’s upcoming series Castle Rock aims to take full advantage. The series essentially positions itself as a hodgepodge of every idea that has ever passed through King’s head onto the page; a partial adaptation of many Kingian stories at once, peopled by actors who are familiar with the horror genre or have starred in previous King adaptations. Does that make Castle Rock an anthology of sorts? It’s hard to say, but one thing is certain: It looks pretty damn creepy.

In the first full trailer, which you can view below, we’re given a good look at Bill Skarsgård as “The Kid,” a mysterious individual who is discovered in a cell deep below Shawshank State Penitentiary in King’s home state of Maine. Skarsgård of course played the malevolent entity known as Pennywise in the first chapter of the latest film adaptation of It, so his presence here is curious—could there be a connection to the clownish terror? The brief shot we’re given in the trailer of a bunch of balloons certainly seems to imply that Hulu is feeding into that kind of speculation. The town of Castle Rock itself has certainly played host to all sorts of atrocities throughout King’s fiction, being analogous to a city such as Arkham in the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

As far as the main cast is concerned, André Holland stars in Castle Rock as Henry Deaver, “a death-row attorney who hasn’t returned to his hometown since the townspeople turned on him after an accident—of which he has no memory—killed his father and left him the sole suspect.” He’s joined by King alum Sissy Spacek of Carrie fame, along with actors such as Scott Glenn (The Silence of the Lambs), Terry O’Quinn (Lost) and Melanie Lynskey.

Castle Rock comes our way very soon, hitting the streaming service on July 25, 2018. Let’s hope that the King devotees in the audience are ready to unravel the mystery surrounding one of the author’s most frequently used locales.