Hulu came out this week with Castle Rock, a new television series that takes place within the world of Steven King’s stories and settings. Some characters are familiar, but the creators of the show, Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, craft their own dark storylines within the realms Steven King first dreamt up. Castle Rock pays both homage to King’s previous works as novels and their adaptations, as well as the actors who’ve appeared in these adaptations. It cuts an original swath through King’s nightmare world and heads to the center of it in the town of Castle Rock itself.

Castle Rock is executive produced by both J.J. Abrams and Steven King, and features a stellar cast of strong actors filling out the roles. Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason both came from the criminally underappreciated WGN series Manhattan, which was a brilliant character piece set in and around the secret American brain trust racing against the Nazis to create the first atomic bomb. These guys know their way around strong character work, and it shows in the pilot episode, “Severance,” that they co-wrote together.

Some of the first images of the pilot are meant to confound us, and put us on edge, but it’s a nice little piece of misdirection. The car parked in the woods, with the man inside wearing a mask, could be a killer ready to hunt his prey. After a moment it’s clear that’s not the case. The man is sheriff Alan Pangborn and he’s getting ready to search the Maine woods for a missing boy named Henry Deaver. Henry has been gone for the last 11 days, smack dab in the middle of the dead of winter. Everyone presumes the elements have killed Henry by now, including Pangborn who merely searches for the boy’s body at this point. If the name Alan Pangborn sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the main character of the King novels The Dark Half and Needful Things, both of which seem to have a huge impact on the town of Castle Rock when we see it in the present.

Pangborn is surprised to find Henry standing in the middle of a frozen lake, but Henry has no memory of what’s happened to him since he’s been missing. Henry’s father, a local reverend, was found badly beaten, and died three days later. In the aftermath, the town blamed Henry for his father’s death. 27 years later, Henry is a lawyer representing death row inmates in Texas. Andre Holland plays Henry with world-weariness and sadness that reflects both the troubled past he escaped from back in Castle Rock, and the injustice of a judicial system that seemingly murders people accused of murder. A mysterious phone call asking him for help at Shawshank Prison draws Henry back to Castle Rock.

Meanwhile in Castle Rock, it’s Shawshank Prison warden Dale Lacy’s (Terry O’Quinn) last day of work before retirement, only he’s got something else in mind besides the party his co-worker’s will throw him. Instead of heading to work, Lacy drives to the same lake sheriff Pangborn found Henry, ties a noose around his neck that’s connected to a tree, and drives off of a bluff decapitating himself. Why did he do it? It’s especially confounding after watching him lovingly prepare breakfast in bed for his blind wife Martha (Frances Conroy), only hours before he commits this terrible act. It seems Warden Lacy had a dark secret he was protecting, one he could no longer keep hidden once he retired.

In a wing of Shawshank Prison that’s gone unused for 30 years, a corrections officer finds a mysterious shaft that leads down to a hidden room where an emaciated man is locked in a cage. Who is this stranger the prison has no record of, and who’s been keeping him company down there all this time? It’s clear someone locked him up for a purpose, but why? It’s the discovery of this unknown prisoner that brings Henry back to Castle Rock. Are these two men connected in some bizarre way since neither seems able to answer questions of how they came to be locked up in an abandoned wing of a prison, or for Henry, where he was before Pangborn found him standing in the middle of a frozen lake.

The pilot episode does a wonderful job setting up the world of Castle Rock. It’s a dilapidated place that’s seen its better years come and go. There’s a menace roiling just below the surface, much in the same way David Lynch reveals the hidden dark underbelly of Lumberton in Blue Velvet. The town of Castle Rock seems to be a nexus of strange goings on, almost as if there’s an ancient curse on the town that it can never fully shake off. The atmospherics of both the town, as well as the interactions of the characters in it, makes it clear something isn’t right here, and hasn’t been for a long time. Henry feels it when he returns. Henry’s own personal mystery is woven right into the complicated tapestry of the town.

Michael Uppendahl’s direction is filled with wonderful camera angles, reveals, and reversals meant to add emotion and depth to the story. There are times when the camera work drives home the importance of a moment or the emotional state of a character. The pilot is filled with homages to the world of Stephen King. These tips of the hat include moments and musical cues from The Shawshank Redemption (which Castle Rock initially leans heavily on), as well as Cujo (through the appearance of a dog), Carrie (simply through the presence of Sissy Spacek), and the dilapidated nature of Castle Rock, which harkens back to the destructive ending of Needful Things. If the direction and writing weren’t enough to garner interest on their own, the cast is ridiculously talented.

“The Kid” is played by Bill Skarsgård (most recently of the new It remake). It’s unclear how long he’s been locked up or why he’s been trapped in the prison if there’s no record of him anywhere. He and Henry are on a collision course as the two men are drawn toward each other, but what is the connection between the two? Not only does “The Kid” seem like he’s not all there mentally, but there appears to be some sort of power in him. Between possibly forcing a mouse to kill itself (which made me think of The Green Mile) and escaping his prison cell and apparently killing some guards, there’s more to “The Kid” than his emaciated body and closed off mind suggest.

The person who really stood out to me was Scott Glenn as the former sheriff Pangborn. Based on King’s novels, Pangborn has been through some rough shit by the time Henry comes back, and Glenn channels the same off kilter vibe he played so well in The Leftovers. He’s troubled by his past experiences in Castle Rock, but Henry is equally uncomfortable to find him shacked up with his mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek) who is in the early stages of dementia. These two men seem at odds, but based on Pangborn’s experiences fighting evil in Castle Rock, it seems pretty certain these two will be working closely together to figure out what the hell is going on as the series progresses.

Is “The Kid” the embodiment of evil the show seems to be insinuating, or is there something else in play? Is the 27 year gap between Henry’s sudden emergence out of thin air onto the middle of the frozen lake related to “The Kid’s” discovery in the bowels of the prison? If so what is it that links these two together and draws their paths toward a confluence? Whatever is in store on this season of Castle Rock, I have faith that both Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason will deliver an interesting story based on their previous work. Castle Rock is already shaping up to be one of the most interesting Stephen King “adaptations” we’ve seen in awhile.