![]() ![]() ![]() And the comic ran for five years, so there’s plenty of story to be told. Innumerable magic keys hiding in a giant evil house is a conceit that could drive a whole lot of plot. Then she promptly steals the most important and powerful of all the keys, leaving Bode and his siblings scrambling to figure out how the keys work, how to stop her, and what their dad’s dark past has to do with his strange death. ![]() She reveals to him that the house is full of keys, each with an amazing supernatural property. The moment the family moves in, Bode meets a glamorous woman who’s been trapped in a well on the Locke property, a villainous siren with a penchant for lounging around in satin nightgowns like she’s posing for the cover of a young adult novel. In response, his grieving wife Nina ( Scandal’s Darby Stanchfield) moves the family into the very house that somehow led the student to kill her husband, a properly Victorian ancestral mansion called “Key House.” Surly teens Tyler and Kinsey and wide-eyed kid Bode ( Jackson Robert Scott, fresh from being clown-snatched in It) are all mourning the death of their father following his strange murder by a troubled student. Locke & Key kicks off with the Locke family moving to the stereotypically gorgeous coastal New England town of Matheson, Massachusetts. Locke & Key styles itself as a complex family drama, but it can’t pull it off Netflix’s Locke & Key is a weakly written teen TV drama with some clunky supernatural elements thrown in - far less impressive than its tight, tense predecessor, and at many points frustratingly clumsy. In the show, Lovecraft has been renamed to the less obvious Easter egg Matheson - and while that’s a less offensive reference, the change inevitably reflects something about the show’s tamer nature. ![]() In part, this is because the comic benefited from looking and feeling otherworldly it was originally set in a town called “Lovecraft” to emphasize its connection to the Weird genre of horror fiction, where reality perpetually bends to open doors to the supernatural. The show is more a watered-down, much blander version of the comic than a satisfying page-to-screen transition. Hill even won the Eisner Award - the comics industry’s equivalent of an Oscar - in 2012 for his writing on the series.īut where the Locke & Key comics gained a reputation for its beauty and complexity, the show, co-created by veteran screenwriters and producers Carlton Cuse ( Lost) and Meredith Averill ( Haunting of Hill House), offers little of either. The series was especially praised for its emphasis on human drama, and the fact that the family dynamics drive the plot as much as its supernatural horror. Written by horror novelist Joe Hill, son of Stephen King, and drawn by artist Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key ran for five years (2008–2013) before reaching its conclusion. Locke & Key also fits that description perfectly - but many significant differences exist between the Netflix adaption and the comic it’s based on. The show’s 10-episode first season was released Friday on Netflix, and it’s tailor-made to please fans of other Netflix series like 2018’s Haunting of Hill House and the popular Series of Unfortunate Events - both of which mixed horror-fantasy with a story about dysfunctional siblings uniting to solve a family mystery in a setting with gothic Victorian overtones. But at last, the long, long-anticipated adaptation of the cult comic has finally premiered. Locke & Key has had an unusually convoluted road to the screen, with a decade of production twists and no fewer than two previous pilots filmed and discarded. ![]()
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