‘Castle Rock’ Opening Credits: A Complete Guide To All The Stephen King Easter Eggs For The Constant Readers

Castle Rock comes from a place of studious Stephen King obsession. And though Hulu’s King/J.J. Abrams–executive produced show isn’t a full-on adaptation of any individual stories, the title credits are a series of pages snagged from his actual work, most flying by faster than Christine mowing down a victim. (The music is a flickery dirge from 14-time Oscar nominee Thomas Newman, who scored Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.) Here’s what the series chooses to highlight right up front, with some context and thoughts.

0:01: The first tome to unfold itself is Needful Things, Sheriff Alan Pangborn’s most significant outing until this series. A reader has circled “the devil” in a note from the town’s Baptists threatening its Catholics over a planned casino night. “There will be no dicing with the devil in Castle Rock!” it reads in all-caps. The “concerned Baptist men” presciently and obnoxiously contend that “decent Christians can smell hellfire and brimstone in Castle Rock this fall.” The words “Psalm 9:17” are underlined next to their actual text: “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.”

On the opposite page is an underlined sentence about the Castle Building, a “graceless brick structure” in use since since 1924. Its all-purpose nature—offices for lawyers, doctors, realtors, a framing shop, and more—is what Molly Strand (Melanie Lynskey) is aiming for with her commercial lease on the old yarn mill downtown, but it also embodies what she’s fighting against, with a half-dozen offices vacant even before the town’s early ’90s cataclysm.

0:02: The Green Mile‘s table of contents, with Part One: The Two Dead Girls underlined. So is the word “mouse” in Part Two: The Mouse on the Mile, connected via arrow to a partially visible musing about Of Mice and Men.

0:04: The underlined header “Chapter 19” in ‘Salem’s Lot, which isn’t real—King’s novel runs 15 chapters, making this a recreated version of the 19th part of Chapter 14: The Lot (IV). Nineteen is a big deal in the Dark Tower saga, so maybe it would’ve been too nakedly fan-service-y to just leave the number by itself without that extra word, who knows. The bit above it is highlighted, when the power goes out as soon as Mark Petrie’s dad insists “the Jerusalem’s Lot telephone service needs no vampires to disrupt it.” Then 19 jumps to Matt Burke and Dr. Cody marveling “how smoothly” big bad Barlow operates, the type of slick antagonist we may face in Castle Rock, too.

0:06: A variant on the map from the front of Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, showing the path of the solar eclipse which happened, in both novels and IRL, on July 20, 1963. Derry is circled, and nearby Haven has an X with the handwritten label “Crash Site,” where the Tommyknockers ship was buried. Also circled is Little Tall Island, the setting for Dolores and King’s Storm of the Century miniseries, the latter title written in red. Castle Rock is highlighted and noted as “Pop: 1500”; a tad below is written “Arrowhead,” the government project from “The Mist.” Just above the Rock, at the Chester’s Mill/Motton town line, is a penned-in “11:44 AM,” the moment Under the Dome‘s titular structure appeared. North of that is Lake Kashwakamak, from Gerald’s and Cell.

0:07: Two big words across torn-up pages: “Dolores Claiborne.” The book takes place across the state, on a coastal island, and never mentions Castle Rock.

0:08: The Shining pages flip slowly by, never sitting still, but you can catch a passage where Jack Torrance remembers his father nearly killing his mother with a cane, bellowing that she had to take her medicine.

0:10: Upside down and ripped in half, the header from Chapter 6 of Part II in Misery, followed by the typewritten “Misery’s Return.” As with all the Paul Sheldon manuscript pages that follow, the N is written by hand because it’s busted on the typewriter, supposedly inspired by the first one King used.

The passage that follows (not pictured) is apt for Castle Rock: “The irritating thing about village life, he thought, was that there weren’t enough people for there to be any perfect strangers; instead, there were just enough to keep one from knowing immediately who many of the villagers were. Sometimes all one really had to go on was a family resemblance—and such resemblances, of course, never precluded the unlikely but hardly impossible coincidence of bastardy.”

0:11: Partial view of a headline-size “Cujo.” The story gets multiple nods in the first couple episodes.

0:13: A map labeled “U.S. Penitentiary, Shawshank State Prison, Maine, New England,” with “Shawshank” underlined and “Maine” highlighted. Different Seasons holds four novellas, starting with “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” but no maps. To the left, typewritten over and over, is Jack’s masterpiece from The Shining: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

0:14: A Shining-referencing scrap with “217” on it, looks like it could be a torn-out page number. Below it, faded, the handwritten Cujo line, “Neither noticed that Cujo’s head had come off his paws at the sound and that he was growling very softly.”

0:15: Excerpt of Pennywise’s It line just before eating Georgie’s arm: “‘They float, it growled, ‘they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here, you’ll float, too—'” “They float, Georgie” is underlined, with the interpretation “been kidnapped by Pennywise” written beneath it. The word “Ironworks” is written in with an arrow drawn to 1908, the year it exploded. With this penmanship, it also looks like 1408.

0:16: From The Shining, Danny’s traumatic scene closing Part Three, with “REDRUM. MURDER. REDRUM. MURDER.” stacked on each other and underlined in red. On the right, the same scrap with 217 on it from a couple seconds ago, now crossed out in red with 237 written beside it, Stanley Kubrick’s version of the hotel room.

Zach Dionne is a Mainer recapping Castle Rock all season.

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