“Everybody who grew up at a certain time has a story of being really scared by something they saw in The Dark Crystal,” says Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a stalwart writer of genre television and executive coproducer on a new Netflix series premiering this week, based on that 1982 movie. He ain’t lying. Dark Crystal was an epic fantasy told with sophisticated puppets, directed by the muppet creators Jim Henson and Frank Oz. If you ask a Gen Xer to name the first movie that freaked them out, Dark Crystal’s a likely answer. Boomer parents saw Henson’s name on it and figured, hey, muppets, cool.

Not cool, it turned out. Nobody expects the Skeksis Inquisition. Here was a family movie that included giant terror-mollusks, cute hobbit-like critters getting the mystical life force sucked out of them by giant squawking crow monsters, and a road adventure through the foothills of the uncanny valley. It was a singular creative achievement that today lurks menacingly under an entire generation’s collective psychological bed.

Lucky Generation Z, then, right? Because Gen X is nothing if not willing to inflict its traumas on its children, and Netflix is here to help. Yes, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance will, like its progenitor, freak you and your kids right the hell out in all the best ways. “We had a mantra in the writers’ room: It sure ain’t The Happy Crystal,” Grillo-Marxuach says. He and his writers described their medium as made of equal parts foam and darkness.

“We look to the spirit of the original and what Jim Henson and Frank Oz were doing,” Grillo-Marxuach adds, “and we are trying to match that spirit.”

Showrunners Will Matthews and Jeffrey Addiss originally met with Lisa Henson, Jim’s daughter and the head of the production company (her father died in 1990), to pitch a sequel to Labyrinth—another classic Henson Gen X freakout property. She said no thanks. Then Matthews and Addiss worked up a pitch for a movie sequel to Dark Crystal … and Henson told them she wanted a TV series prequel instead. It was their story arc for that show that ended up in front of Netflix.

What no one expected was that Netflix (which declined to make a representative available to speak for this story) would yes-and the team into a two-year-long workaholic fever dream. At that point, the Henson folks had been thinking about animating the show—making a cartoon. According to Addiss, Netflix told Lisa Henson the network wanted live-action. Puppets, just like the original. Lisa Henson told the streamer to start adding zeroes to the budget. Puppets are slow and expensive. Netflix, putting its reported $12-billion and climbing annual spend on content to work, said yes anyway. It might’ve helped a little that, like traditional animation, puppets are easy to dub into other languages—30 of them, in 190 countries. “It’s so rare that you have an opportunity to watch something with no humans,” Addiss says. “If you’re a German child watching, let’s say, you’re going to feel it’s made for you.”

The original movie took place after a sort of apocalypse in the world of Thra, the darkening of the eponymous crystal that’s the soul of the Thra. The new series happens, Matthews says, before that end of the world, at the peak of Thra civilization. Both the diminutive, adventurous gelflings and the corrupt overclass Skesis (the crow monsters) get multiple storylines and characters. “Dark Crystal is a world show,” Addiss adds. “You want to be in that world. But we move plot fast. We burn through it.”