Stephen King’s Crouch End Ordered as Prime Video Series

Prime Video is heading into one of Stephen King’s strangest neighborhoods. The streamer has ordered Crouch End, a six-part limited series based on King’s London-set Lovecraftian horror story.

Paul Tomalin (The Lazarus Project) will adapt the story, with Tom Shankland directing. Mammoth Screen and Fifth Season are producing the U.K.-based project. Casting and a release date have not yet been announced. TFR is also tracking the reported new Desperation movie, another King adaptation currently in development.

What is Crouch End about?

King’s story follows Doris Freeman as she reports her husband’s disappearance after a night of increasingly unnatural encounters in the north London district of Crouch End. First published in the 1980 anthology New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, it later appeared in King’s 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes. The story previously inspired an episode of the 2006 anthology series Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King.

The new adaptation gives Prime Video a contained King story with room to expand its hidden streets, altered landmarks and cosmic-horror mythology across six episodes.

What We Think

I don’t know if it gets much more exciting than a Lovecraftian Stephen King story set in London. Imagine the dark, dreary skies of gothic London with cosmic horror lurking around every corner. It makes me want to reach for Nightmares & Dreamscapes, H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, or put on In the Mouth of Madness.

Crouch End is a sharp choice because it is recognizable to King readers without being one of his most frequently adapted stories. A U.K.-produced series also has the chance to preserve the story’s disorienting London character instead of sanding it down into a generic supernatural setting. The key will be maintaining the creeping uncertainty that makes the original story work rather than explaining every nightmare.

Sources: Deadline, Variety, and StephenKing.com.