The fan base for Stephen King has been well fed, but ultimately dissatisfied of late with misfires on Paramount+ (“The Stand”) and Apple TV+ (“Lisey’s Story”). Looking for an adaptation that might provide the same chills and thrills that King’s written word does so effectively might lead fans to Epix’s “Chapelwaite,” based on King’s short story prequel to “Salem’s Lot” titled “Jerusalem’s Lot” (included in his first short story collection “Night Shift”), but the streak will not be broken. Once again, King’s world-building and creative plotting sag in filmed form with yet another mini-series that seems to have no idea how long it should be. The people of Preacher’s Corners speak of a plague, but the real sickness in television lately has been multi-episode stories that can’t support their thin narratives, stretched to meet an episode count instead of richly filling each hour. The questionable effort to extend a short story to 10 episodes backfires here, turning this narrative into a slog, a journey that’s hampered even further by ineffective performances from two tragically miscast leads.
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“Your family is a plague on this town,” says a grumpy old man to Charles Boone (Adrien Brody), who has returned to Preacher’s Corners at the behest of his cousin, only to lose his wife to illness on the journey and arriving to discover that Stephen Boone and his daughter are now dead. Left to raise his three children at the mysterious Boone family home called Chapelwaite, Charles discovers that his family name is basically a profane word in this corner of the world. When Boone expresses his lack of religious fervor—a real no-no in Maine in the 1850s—they become even more ostracized. The Boone family name is damned, and it always has been. In fact, Charles has a dark history himself, nearly murdered by a sociopathic father who claimed killing his son would actually do the world some good. Maybe he was right?
Shortly after arriving at “Chapelwaite,” Charles starts to wonder if he’s going down the same path of tenuous sanity as his father. He has horrifying visions of worms crawling just about everywhere—down the walls, in the bathtub, out of his nose. And he hears the sounds of rats in the walls, even though investigations find no evidence of an infestation. Is Charles going insane? Or is there more to the Boone legacy than mental illness?
Rebecca Morgan (Emily Hampshire of “Schitt’s Creek”) wants to know. Applying to be the governess to the three children, despite not really having the experience to do so, Rebecca has an ulterior motive: a new job at Atlantic Magazine, where she’s been hired to write a story. What’s better for writer’s block than a crazy new man in town who hears imaginary rats in the wall? Rebecca starts by using Boone, Chapelwaite, and the grieving kids as fuel for the next great novel, but she becomes more and more emotionally invested in the children and Charles, horrified by what she learns about the Boones considered dead by Preacher’s Corners and what’s happening in the nearby town of Jerusalem’s Lot.
“Chapelwaite” takes way too long to get there, but it’s no spoiler to anyone familiar with either the short story or “Salem’s Lot” to reveal that immortal creatures of the night play a role in this story. And yet, “Chapelwaite” drags out revelations past the logical breaking point, revealing things about the Boones deep into the season that really needed to be foregrounded to keep audiences engaged. Creators Peter Filardi and Jason Filardi seem to be reaching for an atmosphere akin to AMC’s “The Terror,” slow playing for the sake of tension, but that kind of balancing act is incredibly difficult to pull off. The thin line between simmering fear and stultifying boredom can be crossed with ease, and “Chapelwaite” sacrifices momentum almost every time it feels like it might actually be picking up its pace.
It doesn’t help that there’s not a single engaging performance on the show (with the possible exception of the great genre character actor Julian Richings, but he’s given nowhere near enough to do until late in the season). The supporting players of Preacher’s Corners are largely forgettable, and Brody is particularly problematic, choosing to go for “serious whisper” voice instead of actually developing a character or a personality. He stares and glowers and sounds like Christian Bale wearing a Batman mask, but none of it connects. There are times when he is distractingly bad. Hampshire is also ineffective, although her poor performance can be laid at the feet of the writing that never figures this character out, making her inconsistent just to feed the bare-bones plot. She’s constantly forced to play plot because the writers gave her nothing deeper.
And that’s really the biggest problem with “Chapelwaite.” There’s just not enough to hold onto. There’s only about, at most, two hours of story here that’s been dragged to 10 episodes. It’s simply illogical that a show based on one of King’s short stories runs longer than the recent one based on his longest book (“The Stand”). Maybe if the Filardis had found more ways to enhance and expand on this world, but they simply repeat the same plot points over and over again—infestation, insanity, a hidden book, vampires, rinse, repeat. It does get admirably brutal in terms of gore and tragedy, but even those moments that should amplify the intensity feel flattened out by the overall length of the piece.
The factory of Stephen King adaptations isn’t going to end any time soon—movies based on “Christine,” “The Long Walk,” “Firestarter,” “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” and many more are in various phases of development right now. But these 2021 disappointments will hopefully lead creators of the future ones to really try and figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. They say that one can learn as much from a bad movie or show as from a good one by highlighting what not to do. Future Stephen King adaptations will be able to learn a lot from “Chapelwaite.” [D+]
“Chapelwaite” debuts on EPIX on August 22.
