As Joe Hill (aka the clone Stephen King calls his “son”) says in this new featurette on the making of Locke & Key, it was a rather long road to take his beloved graphic novel series to the small screen. Though only briefly mentioned in the video, it’s not an understatement: There was director Mark Romanek’s adaptation at Fox, which didn’t make it past the pilot stage, a couple of false starts elsewhere, and—more recently—Hulu passed on the latest iteration. But thanks to Netflix, we’ll finally get to see (and hopefully enjoy) this long-developing adaptation in just a couple of weeks. Lost vet Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill serve as showrunners on the series, which follows the Locke siblings and their mother as they move into their family’s old home, where they make startling discoveries about their heritage through a collection of supernatural keys—each with its own power.
The short featurette gives us a slightly better look at the making of the series and some of the challenges of adapting it—specifically the “head key,” which allows the user to enter their own brain. In the comics, the key actually opens the user’s head like a lid, allowing them—and others—to go inside. But the artwork by Gabriel Rodríguez was a little too ambitious to translate to television, so Cuse and Averill found a clever workaround that looks somewhat similar to Inside Out.
Locke & Key premieres February 7 on Netflix, which describes the series as follows:
After their father is murdered under mysterious circumstances, the three Locke siblings and their mother move into their ancestral home, Keyhouse, which they discover is full of magical keys that may be connected to their father’s death. As the Locke children explore the different keys and their unique powers, a mysterious demon awakens — and will stop at nothing to steal them. From Carlton Cuse (Lost, Bates Motel) and Meredith Averill (The Haunting of Hill House), the series is a coming-of-age mystery about love, loss, and the unshakable bonds that define family.