Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Adrien Brody, Emily Hampshire, Jennifer Enns, Sirena Gulamgaus, Ian Ho, Hugh Thompson, Gord Rand, Genevieve DeGraves, Trina Corkum, Devante Senior, Allegra Fulton, Eric Peterson, Michael Hough, Jennie Raymond, Dean Armstrong, Dean Armstrong, Steven McCarthy, Christopher Heyerdahl, Gabrielle Rose, Julian Richings, Gina Thornhill, James MacLean, Jeremy Akerman, Briony Merritt, Joanne Boland, Glen Lefchak, Acadia Colan, Sebastian Labelle, Charlie Rhindress, David Rosetti, Lily Gao.
How often do you read a book and wonder just how the area that it mentions, that inviting built up area full of homes, stores, infrastructure, people, children, and stories, actually became one which was built on the remains of the dead, of the suffering, of the graves of tales that only came to life in the dark.
You only have to look at London in the 21st Century and its rush to place Crossrail on the map, and in doing so, the reveal of old pits full of plague victims comes to light, the long dead spilling their secrets again once more on the streets of the capital.
What lays underneath is never fully gone, and as the adaption of Stephen King’s short disturbing tale Jerusalem’s Lot makes clear, the vampire lure that filled the pages for the grateful dead in the author’s early work of Salem’s Lot, and paved a way for the cannon of stories to be dug deeper, to reveal the bare bones of the foundations, and in the television adaption, it’s title altered to give it arguably more gravitas, Chapelwaite is the series that binds almost everything else together.
If you want to understand Stephen King, or even just gauge his obsession with language and the creatures that dwell in between worlds, then you must surely allow yourself to feel the sheer angst that comes with creating, not just a tale, a fictional house, or town, but an entire imaginary state that overlaps that in which you have spent your whole life within.
Absolutely genius, there is no other way to describe the foundation work to which these stories weave their intricate web, and in the televised ten-part series of Chapelwaite the adaption takes its lead from the master of horror; part seductive, part unnerving, completely gothic in its direction, and the pay off, the final scenes of human despair and sadness, make it one of the best television adaptions of the King of Horror’s large volume of work.
With Adrien Brody, Jennifer Enns, Trina Corkum, Hugh Thompson, Gord Rand, and Christopher Heyerdahl giving performances that live up to the pressure of the 19th Century darkness and fear that is illuminated, Chapelwaite is a tale to chill the blood.
Ian D. Hall