Widow’s Bay became an instant fan favorite for many reasons—its endearingly odd characters, its scary yet charming setting, its blend of monster-of-the-week frights with a deeper narrative about the island’s curse. And while the Apple TV show is definitely its own unique creation, it also paid loving homage to certain horror greats, including the master of New England horror himself, Stephen King.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Widow’s Bay director (he helmed five of the 10 episodes) and executive producer Hiro Murai, who worked in close collaboration with creator-showrunner-executive producer Katie Dippold, spoke about how King’s influence helped shape the series.
For starters, Murai said watching The Shining with his dad when he was nine is “one of my earliest horror-movie memories.” But King’s impact on Widow’s Bay started with the setting, an island 40 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s not King’s Maine, but it’s geographically close.
“We’re playing in a sandbox that he built,” Murai said. “That Northeast setting, the extraordinary happening to ordinary people. This genre is his playhouse. We’re obviously doing a comedic slant and picking characters that we identify with in that space, but the frame of it owes so much to Stephen King.”
Though some of the Widow’s Bay winks were quite obvious—not just to King’s work, two other big ones were John Carpenter and Jaws—Murai said, “We tried not to do too many things where it was a conscious homage or a pastiche. What’s so great about those original pieces, like Stephen King movies or some of these John Carpenter movies that we’re referencing, is they evoked a very visceral, raw feeling.”
For Widow’s Bay, “We tried to reverse engineer that feeling rather than doing the aesthetic hallmarks of it. And ultimately, the premise of the show is insane horror tropes are happening to boring, normal people. So the visual language should also feel matter-of-fact and grounded in some way. We try not to get too wrapped up in like visual hallmarks.”
You can’t deny, though, that the island’s resident Boogeyman looks straight out of Halloween—or that Matthew Rhys’ character, Mayor Tom Loftis, owes a debt to the clueless mayor of Amity Island.
“Jaws does something really cool that we borrowed from a lot, where on the surface it’s this idyllic town; it’s nostalgic America with this beautiful summertime weather,” Murai said. “There’s something about it that feels overly idyllic, and there’s an undercurrent of tension and danger underneath. That contrast was really important to us in building this world.”
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