On an isolated New England island, supernatural forces target a small town. That’s also the premise of Mike Flanagan’s hit Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass, but while Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold is a fan of Flanagan’s work, she wasn’t thinking about him when she created her new horror-comedy show for Apple TV.
Dippold, who co-wrote the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot with Paul Feig, originally came up with the idea for Widow’s Bay while working on a spec script to get a job on Parks and Recreation. She tells Polygon that some of her biggest influences were Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Stephen King’s writing.
While it’s virtually impossible to write a scary story that doesn’t crib from King’s massive body of work in some way, Dippold points to the smaller details that make his worldbuilding so effective.
“He’s just such a master storyteller,” Dippold says. “It’s a sense of nostalgia, and the atmosphere, and just trying to be as specific as possible. You do the best you can to learn from him, and hope you can catch any of it. I try to touch on any of that feeling.”
Dippold fills Widow’s Bay with King-esque characters, like the surly old-timer Wyck (Stephen Root) or a stoic police officer played by Kevin Carroll. Both of them push back in their own way against the unpopular mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), as he attempts to transform the island into a tourist destination, in spite of the obvious ghosts and demons plaguing the town. Loftis feels like a modern update of Larry Vaughn, Jaws’ misguided mayor of Amity Island, who prioritizes the local economy over human safety.
“We talked a lot about Jaws,” Dippold says. “Like Amity Island in Jaws, we wanted Widow’s Bay to feel cozy and lived-in, but just feel like there’s something lurking underneath the surface.”
Then again, Loftis in Widow’s Bay isn’t quite as unscrupulous as Vaughn, who ignores the very obvious threat of a giant killer shark. You can’t really blame a mayor for downplaying the risk of an alleged demonic curse as local superstition. And once those demons are literally staring him in the face, Loftis springs into action… to the best of his capabilities.
Widow’s Bay‘s greatest weapon is Rhys, who channels a mix of scaredy-cat jumpiness and genuine ambition that feels distinct to this show, and helps strike its unique balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and some genuinely scary sequences). Rhys is particularly talented at screaming in fear, which he does frequently across the show’s 10 episodes, while being pursued by everything from zombies to “sea hags” to a Michael Myers-esque boogeyman, in what quickly becomes a monster-of-the-week format.
“Matthew is such a great actor,” Dippold says. “He has pitch-perfect comedic timing, but he’s never going for a joke. I don’t think when he screams, he’s trying to be funny. He’s just playing the emotion of the scene and being truthful. But he also subconsciously understands what’s funny about the scene.”
For Rhys, Widow’s Bay was a chance to try something new as an actor, while working with excellent directors like Hiro Murai (Atlanta) and Sam Donovan (Severance), who gave him the freedom to experiment.
“I’ve had a lifetime’s practice of screaming: screaming at children, screaming at myself, screaming or howling at the moon,” Rhys jokes. “But yeah, it was very fun. I’d never got to do that in that way. And these are characters in very extreme situations. So sometimes the reaction was extreme.”
As for his own horror influences, the actor names a few classics that may have inspired his performance in Widow’s Bay at one point or another.
“I’m still haunted by the childhood films that I shouldn’t have watched as a child, like Poltergeist, Amityville Horror, Omen, Children of the Corn,” Rhys says. “Classics.”
Widow’s Bay premieres April 29 on Apple TV.