Anyone who read Brian McCreevy's monstrously clever horror novel "Hemlock Grove" knows what viewers are in for when the Eli Roth-produced Netflix series is unleashed in April. For everyone else, you're going to get a pretty good idea, thanks to a brand new trailer for the series that just debuted online. Television is having something of a horror moment, between "The Walking Dead," "True Blood" and "American Horror Story," and it looks like those viewers who still have a thirst for blood will have something to look forward to.
The book (and the series) concerns a young man named Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron), a gypsy and rumored werewolf, who comes to the Pennsylvania steel town of Hemlock Grove around the same time that a young girl is viciously murdered. Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgard), a member of the influential Godfrey clan that practically runs the town, becomes Peter's chief adversary and eventual ally as they try to figure out who was responsible for the murder(s).
While McCreevy's novel focuses mainly on the younger characters, it has an unprecedented sense of scope and scale, sometimes feeling like a dense Victorian novel, while also embracing gothic romanticism and, of course, horror. Virtually every monstrous touchstone is accounted for (everything from reanimated corpses to werewolves to ghosts to god knows what else), but smartly reimagined and placed amidst the economically depressed industrial sprawl of the once-flourishing Pennsylvania steel country.
The brief trailer seems to have everything from the novel accounted for, including the generous heaping of sex and intrigue, and we're optimistic given the cast (it includes Lili Taylor, Dougray Scott and Famke Janssen) and the supervision of Eli Roth, a director who certainly knows a thing or two about what goes bump in the night. (He also directed the show's pilot episode.) Netflix will release the first season in one large burst, in April, and should the series prove popular, there will be more adventures in Hemlock Grove to come – McCreevy has already finished the second novel, and the third book should be completed soon. [Live For Films]