‘Locke & Key’: Here’s Why The Netflix Series Changed The Town From Lovecraft To Matheson

Pretty much from the first minute fans of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s comic book series Locke & Key start the Netflix show, they’ll most likely be thrown by one small — but crucial — change. The setting of the series isn’t Lovecraft, Massachusetts as it is in the books; instead, the town’s name has been updated to Matheson.

But don’t worry, this wasn’t the Netflix EPs going rogue. It was a decision by Hill, for reasons that will become apparent in a second.

“I’ve learned too much about Lovecraft in the time since I wrote those first issues to feel the same way about him,” Hill wrote in a newsletter sent to fans. “And the show seemed like a good opportunity to honor the work of another, different master of dark fantasy. So that’s what we did. My idea — don’t blame the TV guys.”

When Locke & Key was released in 2008, the first volume was titled “Welcome to Lovecraft.” That’s a tease of what’s to come down the road in the six volume series, that things start to get a little Eldritch Gods before the saga of the Locke family wraps up. And Lovecraft — an author who was virtually ignored in his own lifetime — has become undeniably influential to horror fiction as a whole, thanks to his psychologically rich stories and deep “Cthulu mythos.”

However, over time controversy has built around the author thanks to a previously under-discussed thread of racism through some of his work. In 2011, the controversy bubbled into the mainstream thanks to writer Nnedi Okorafor, who was unhappy to receive a bust of Lovecraft as a trophy at that year’s World Fantasy Awards. The talk continued to build for years (there’s a very good Salon piece worth checking out about the controversy), with the result being that responsible authors like Hill have taken the time to reevaluate paying blind tribute to Lovecraft.

Richard Matheson, on the other hand, has been both tremendously influential, and so far free of controversy. Though he’s best known for I Am Legend, Matheson wrote some of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes of all time in between dozens of short stories, novels, films and episodes of TV shows. He also passed away in 2013, shortly before the Locke & Key comic book series concluded with its sixth volume, “Alpha & Omega.”

“As part of the process in adapting the story, Joe just aesthetically wanted to make some changes in the material himself,” Carlton Cuse, an EP on the Netflix series, told Decider. “And he was a big fan of Richard Matheson and he felt like Richard Matheson had died sort of around, prior to that time. He just wanted to pay homage to Richard Matheson, and that was the reason for the change.”

In fact, the name of the town was changed earlier than the Netflix series. Cuse and Hill had previously worked on a version of Locke & Key for Hulu, which didn’t go further than the pilot. Thanks to some behind the scenes pictures from that shoot, we know that as early as 2017 Hill had updated the name from Lovecraft, to Matheson.

So there you go! No vast conspiracy to rip a creator’s work from his hands, but actually a thoughtful response and change to something that happened in the real world. Now the big question is, will the Netflix series twist from a Cthulu-esque mythology to “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”? We’ll find out when Locke & Key debuts on Netflix on February 7.

Stream Locke & Key on Netflix