Don’t Overlook the Castle Rock Finale end credits scene

If Hulu’s Castle Rock has anything to say about it, the third time could be a charm for the spookiest Stephen King book of them all.

For Constant Readers and casual fans alike, the Castle Rock finale end credits scene is certainly not to be missed.

We open on an overhead shot of Jackie Torrance (Jane Levy) as she mulls over the most recent addition to her novel. Her first line? “The axe felt right in my hand.” Sure it did. Astute fans will note that the weapon Jackie used to cleave the murderous professor’s skull in two back in episode 8 of the series was a felling axe, the same type that her uncle Jack Torrance used to terrorize his family back at the ole Overlook Hotel. Funnily enough, Jack never got to use his axe, but Jackie did.

Having bounced back from her murderous moment, Jackie is taking a sabbatical from her taxi business. She’s at some sort of hipster coffee location that inexplicably still allows cigarette smoking (?!) and she’s having a grand old time typing up her recent exploits into novel form. She reads a passage aloud to her buddy Dean (Charlie Tahan), and he calls it a “horror thing.” Yup. It’s one of the greatest “horror things” of them all, dude. Because if this end credits scene means what I think it means, Castle Rock Season 2 is gearing up to come play with one of King’s most iconic horror stories of all time.

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There were plenty of Shining references and Easter eggs within the first season of the show, none more obvious than Ms. Torrance herself, but the finale itself primed viewers for a REDRUM reveal by placing a callback in a pivotal scene. As young Henry tries to escape his cockadoodie father, he backtracks through his telltale prints in the snow, giving him the jump on crazy. The move was directly lifted from Danny Torrance escaping his father in the Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the novel.

Now, anyone who saw Ready Player One this summer knows that King was notoriously disappointed with Kubrick’s version of the story. Kubrick kept the central conceit of the novel, but scrapped many plot points – evil topiaries! – and altered the ending entirely. What resulted was a classic film that lives on in the minds and hearts of horror and movie enthusiasts, but it wasn’t canon.

King was so displeased with the Kubrick film that he executive produced and personally wrote the entirety of a 1997 Shining miniseries starring Stephen Weber and Rebecca DeMornay. However, that series was doomed to fail given that the censored nature of network TV generally doesn’t jive well with the bloody and disturbing themes of a Stephen King novel.

Castle Rock has a chance to finally do The Shining justice. Sure, the Hulu series is meant to be an amalgamation and reinterpretation of of King’s stories, but as it seems it intends on shifting out West for round 2, it makes sense that the primary focus might be on an old, creeptastic hotel up in the snowy hills. And there’s more than just one novel to plumb for source material. King’s follow up to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, picks up with Danny Torrance decades after the traumatic events of his childhood. So Ms. Jackie Torrance has a cousin kicking around with a story of his own to tell. Perhaps they’ll cross paths.

‘Castle Rock’ Season 1 is available in its entirety on Hulu.