LOCKED AND LOADED

SFX HAVE GOT THE KEY – BUT CAN WE FIND THE SECRET TOO? WE TAKE A TRIP TO KEYHOUSE TO GO BEHIND THE SCENES ON LOCKE & KEY…

- BRYAN CAIRNS

CRAFTING A SUCCESSFUL new TV series can be hellish. Case in point: Locke & Key. Based on the comic book series by scribe Joe Hill and illustrator Gabriel Rodriguez, a pilot was originally commissioned by Fox in 2010; however, the network never picked it up for a full season.

In 2017, Hulu disclosed it was developing a Locke & Key show. A year later, it passed on moving forward with the project. Most recently, Netflix announced it had ordered a 10-episode first season, which actually went into production this past summer. In retrospect, co-showrunner Meredith Averill believes their adaptation benefitted from all the creative labour pains.

“You can stand back and look at the two other versions and see what worked here and what wasn’t working,” Averill tells SFX. “What were the things we were really liking? We decided we wanted to make it more of a family drama with this coming-of-age story with our younger teen characters and focus it more on fantasy rather than horror. The comic is very much in the horror vein, which is a genre I love coming off of The Haunting Of Hill House. In many ways, it was a great training ground for this because that is a show about this family dealing with this trauma and you are unpacking the mystery of what happened to them 20 years ago.”

Premiering in February, Locke & Key follows the Lockes – Nina (Darby Stanchfield) and her three children, Tyler (Connor Jessup), Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott) – a family grieving over the gruesome murder of their father/ husband, Rendell (Bill Heck). They consequently relocate to their ancestral home in Massachusetts. As it turns out, the house contains numerous keys with magical properties… artifacts the siblings must protect from a conniving demon.