Locke and Key Trailer Thoughts

I finished Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key cycle just in time for the Netflix series. Let’s talk about the trailer.

I love Netflix as much as the next online denizen, but I’m a little disheartened to see that the company’s original content is all starting to look alike. Not entirely, of course, and not every show, but I’d argue that Locke & Key looks like Umbrella Academy looks like Sabrina The Teenage Witch looks like Russian Doll. 

Now, to be fair, that is (by and large) a good thing. I like the look of all those shows, but all the same, I wonder how much creative pressure the Netflix brass is putting on showrunners to adopt the same look: high contrast, rich colors, CW-style casting. (Though on the other hand, maybe this is only the house style for Netflix’s genre programming.

In any event, this looks pretty solid, though if it were me, I’d have pushed for a much more naturalistic aesthetic; something more in line with David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone—desaturated, almost documentary-style visuals with the occasional splash of intense color. 

It also appears that the Head Key admits you into a kind of walkable headspace library-realm reminiscent of Inside Out. Makes sense. I love the depiction of the Head Key from the comics, but a walkable space is probably much more playable and shootable.

As for the comic, I’ll most likely write about it at some point. It took a few issues for it to get under my skin, but by the end, I really got carried away with Hill’s touching, gripping tale of a shattered family trying their dogged best to hold themselves together in the face of a past that continually vomited forth an army of dark demons, both literal and figurative. While reading it, I often chuckled at how the apple (Hill) didn’t fall far from the tree (his father, Stephen King). That’s both a good thing and a bad thing … but that’s a topic for another entry.