Chapelwaite First Look: How Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” Became a TV Series

There’s something in the walls of the large old house. Rodents, most likely. Or maybe it’s just the new occupant’s imagination. The source of the scraping and whispering actually turns out to be something neither the characters nor the audience expects—and the same may be true of this new series itself.

Chapelwaite draws its inspiration from Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” a name that may sound familiar even to those who aren’t among the author’s Constant Readers. ’Salem’s Lot is his best-selling 1975 novel about vampires infiltrating a contemporary American small town, which happens to be the same town mentioned in the short story. But the two tales have little else in common except that patch of isolated New England real estate. The tone, the plot, and even the time period are vastly different.

The thing plaguing Adrien Brody’s seafaring Captain Charles Boone in the new Epix series, set to debut later this summer, might hint at why bloodsuckers generations later might be drawn to a region with such grim history. The threat in Chapelwaite, like the short story, is the stuff of campfire tales or pastoral legends. Or maybe it really is the lead character’s own grief-stricken mind. “We play with that intentionally to keep our audience guessing,” said Peter Filardi (The Craft and 1990’s Flatliners), who cocreated the series with his brother, Jason Filardi (Bringing Down the House). “Is it a haunted-house movie? You learn in the pilot that Charles was also suffering from what appears to be some psychological issues, a madness that all of his other relatives suffer from. What is the danger? Well, it keeps sort of evolving.”

The premise of the show sticks closely to King’s: Boone inherits an old estate from his last surviving relative and decides to start a new life in the ancestral family mansion, a rundown structure known to the locals as Chapelwaite. The sounds within the walls lead him to uncover other Boone family secrets that trace back to the Puritan age, a time of witchcraft, superstition, ancient curses, and original sins—and a vanished community with the biblical moniker of Jerusalem’s Lot.

King’s story, first published in his 1978 anthology Night Shift, was the author’s way of filtering Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James through the lurid lens of Weird Tales magazine. As these first-look images and first teaser clip reveal, the vibe of Chapelwaite is American gothic with an emphasis on the “gothic.”

Expanding King’s short fiction into a 10-episode series meant adding several more characters and story lines, which is why the Filardi brothers gave a family of three children to the widowed Boone, along with a new confidante: a free-thinking woman named Rebecca Morgan, played by Emily Hampshire (best known as the hotel manager Stevie from Schitt’s Creek.)

Morgan is a disruptive presence in Preacher’s Corners, the nearest (populated) town to Chapelwaite. She’s a college-educated woman, a journalist who writes for The Atlantic, and her outspokenness is a threat to the Old World patriarchal establishment that rules the region. 

If it feels surprising to see Hampshire in a period piece, the showrunners say that was part of the reason they chose her. “She’s known for comedy, but we’d seen her other stuff, like [the series] 12 Monkeys, and we really liked her ability to go back and forth between comedy and drama,” said Jason Filardi. “She’s wonderfully quirky in real life.”

“We have this strange world, and she’s a modern bolt of energy in it,” added Peter.

Rebecca defies the will of her family and decides to become a governess and teacher to the newcomers, in part because the town has chosen to shun Boone and his children.

For one, the community has an age-old grievance against the Boones who first built Chapelwaite and are said to have exploited the town for their lumber operations. The town’s other problem is they don’t like that Boone’s children are not white.

The community’s prejudice against women and people of color are just two of the elements in this story from long ago that feel disturbingly contemporary. Some things don’t change, no matter how many centuries pass. The Filardis describe the show as a clash between new ways of thinking and regressive old habits, and the way the past can overpower and corrupt hard-fought efforts to change for the better—all wrapped up in supernatural mythology.

“My brother and I grew up in Mystic, Connecticut, which is an old whaling town, and we always wanted to do a New England story and a whaling story. So we made Charles Boone a 19th-century whaling captain. As many of those sailors did way back in the day, they often stopped on islands and fell in love and had families,” Jason Filardi said. “We wanted to bring children into it, which would give us not only a richer character for Charles, but also more danger to the show. When horror affects the family, it’s a little more horrific.”

In the story, Boone’s late wife was Polynesian, from the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. She and their children often traveled with him, so their two daughters and young son grew up seeing the world and the many different people who inhabit it, along with experiencing their many languages, faiths, and customs. When their father retreats to New England after the death of their mother, they aren’t particularly comfortable among the repressive, homogeneous townfolk either. 

Then their battered new home starts to terrify them too, and they have seemingly nowhere to turn that feels safe.

Only their father and their governess, Rebecca, can be trusted. But those two are vulnerable to the power of Chapelwaite as well. “Being a Stephen King series, things don’t turn out well for the family,” said Peter Filardi. “The house has a dark history and reputation. It’s said that anyone who lives in Chapelwaite or spends time there is either a lunatic or runs the risk of becoming one.”

Those are just legends, of course. But Chapelwaite is about what happens when legends turn out to have truth behind them.

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