Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. In this story from Stephen King, a psychic child with a bullying father is drawn to a sprawling old building, built by the rich and thrumming with undying evil. The building needs the child’s psychic energy to fully unleash its horrors, but a kindly adult psychic stands in the way. No, it’s not The Shining — it’s Rose Red, the 2002 ABC miniseries currently burning up the Hulu charts. But hey, if it ain’t broke, am I right?
Fans of Uncle Stevie (I’m certainly raising my hand) will recognize many of the beloved horror maestro’s signature touches in this story of a professor determined to prove the existence of psychic phenomena by leading a gaggle of seers and mediums to an infamous haunted house. The recurring power of evil, the idea that some places are just bad, the psychic child, the psychic guardian, the sins of America’s robber-baron past, Cliff Clavin-esque factoids about the paranormal, and of course the promise of seeing something scary when you see the words “Stephen King’s” before the title of a movie or show — it’s all there. But is the whole greater than the sum of its nostalgically familiar parts? Let’s head inside that haunted house and find out!
Opening Shot: A sailboat glides across the waters of Puget Sound in the early evening light, superimposed first by a chyron reading “Seattle 1991,” then by the title card: “Stephen King’s ROSE RED.”
The Gist: Professor Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis) is an odd duck. As a parapsychologist who investigates psychic phenomena, she’s a sensational figure on the campus of her college, as well as a controversial one. Students and faculty alike resent the drain on department resources that her still unproven research creates, and she’s on the verge of losing her job over it.
Fortunately she has a Hail Mary in play. Joyce wants to conduct a thorough psychic and scientific examination of Rose Red, a crumbling — or as someone else puts it, “metastasizing” — mansion built in the heart of Seattle by an oil baron for his wife decades earlier. Since construction began, dozens of people, mostly members of the now-fallen Rimbauer oil dynasty and mostly women, have died or disappeared on its grounds. It’s also rumored to expand on its own, to the point where even making an accurate room count is impossible, as it grows or shrinks from day to day. (About a third of the episode is just Joyce lecturing about the house and its history over flashbacks and slideshows.)
Alongside her younger boyfriend, Steven Rimbauer (Matt Keeslar) — the heir and owner of the house, a fact he’s well aware as the likely reason they’re sleeping together at all — Joyce assembles a team of psychics to investigate the house with her. They include Vic (Kevin Tighe), a nebbishy “pre-cognate” who can see the immediate future; Pam (Emily Deschanel), who can get a reading off objects she touches; Cathy (Judith Ivey), an automatic writer who channel messages both from beyond and from the minds of others nearby; Emery (Matt Ross), a cynical mama’s boy who can glimpse events in the past, especially bloody ones; and Nick (Julian Sands), a handsome and soft-spoken all-around psychic.
The final and most important member of the group is Annie (Kimberly J. Brown), an autistic teenager with telepathic and telekinetic powers that rival the X-Men. She’s been brought there by her caring older sister, alternately known as Rachel, Sister, or Sissy (Melanie Lynskey), in hopes that the fee they collect will get her into a private school for kids like her. (Autistic ones, I think, not psychic ones; this isn’t actually the X-Men, after all.)
Their antagonists this episode are not yet really whatever forces lurk in the evil house, though those forces call to Emily in particular. Rather, they’re Dr. Carl Miller (David Dukes), Joyce’s department head and nemesis, and Kevin Bollinger (Jimmi Simpson), an ambitious reporter for the student newspaper who’s been exposing the, let’s be frank here, silliness of the imperious Joyce and her fantastical “research” at Miller’s direction.
But when Miller sends Bollinger to Rose Red to lie in wait for the research group and chronicle their inevitable failure, Rose Red gets other ideas. What happens does not bode well for the team — especially with a time bomb like the ultra-powerful Annie in their midst.
What Movies and Shows Will It Remind You Of?: Oh boy, where do we even start? Despite the viciousness and intensity of his most famous works, Stephen King has never hidden his enthusiasm for good old-fashioned popcorn-tossing put-your-arm-around-your-girl chillers of the sort he caught during double features in his youth. That’s more or less what he’s written here, and he wears his influences on his sleeve. Arrogant to the point of eccentricity (in one memorable moment she smears blood on her department chair’s face to prove a point), Travis’s character is basically Vincent Price in drag. The story is equal parts Ghostbusters, Ghost Hunters, his own The Shining, The Haunting of Hill House, and The House on Haunted Hill, and those last two are invoked explicitly during the course of the premiere. There’s also a heaping helping of the legend of the Winchester House — a sprawling and allegedly cursed mansion, continuously expanded and remodeled by a rifle heiress with a guilty conscience — which was itself adapted into the Helen Mirren vehicle Winchester in 2018.
Our Take: If you’ve seen one of the miniseries Stephen King made with ABC decades back, you’ve seen them all — and that’s not a bad thing. Even the best of them (The Stand, which is genuinely good across the board, and It, which is worth it if only for Tim Curry’s terrifying Pennywise the Dancing Clown) have a kind of cheesy haunted-hayride vibe to them you just don’t get from horror on TV anymore, which is either prestiged up or done in the hyperviolent style of a network police procedural about serial killers. Writer King and director Craig R. Baxley aren’t trying to do anything more than give you a few nights of thrills and chills before bedtime.
They largely succeed. True, there’s nothing scary in this horror show per se, though we catch a glimpse of some zombie-like apparitions through their reflections that reveals some really creepy monster makeup designs. It’s more about establishing a vibe where something could pop out and say “boo!” at any time — which they do, in the form a bloody refrigerator, a swarm of bees, creepy whispers, a rainstorm of boulders.
Sometimes the show gets in its own way even there, as it does with the decision to reveal Rose Red’s backstory via Joyce’s long presentation, instead of an actual you-are-there period-piece episode. (That’s almost certainly how it would be done today.) And the fact that the team doesn’t even set foot into the house in this pilot will probably irritate some people — though not for long, as you can roll right into the next episode at will. So instead of getting a few nights of thrills and chills before bedtime as originally intended, you can get a few hours of thrills and chills on a lazy October weekend afternoon.
Sex and Skin: Other than a brief and coitus-free scene of Joyce and Steven in bed together, none, though between Nancy Travis, Matt Keeslar, Melanie Lynskey, Emily Deschanel, and Julian Sands, there’s plenty of eye candy on offer.
Sleeper Star: Making the most of his handful of lines, the late Julian Sands will remind you why he was so quietly beloved. His character Nick exudes charm, warmth, skill, compassion, confidence, and genuine mystery, generated almost entirely by the subtle way he smiles, by his artlessly ruffled hair, by the quiet purr of his voice. The man instantly improves everything he’s in, and this is no exception.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Rose Red is a dangerous place to conduct psychic experiments,” Emery warns. That’s a warning for the characters; for us in the audience, it’s a promise and a guarantee.
Our Take: STREAM IT. With some caveats, of course. No one is going to mistake Rose Red for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining anytime soon, or Mick Garris’s comparable ABC miniseries The Stand for that matter. As representations of neurodiversity go, too, this is well intentioned, but very much a product of its comparatively ignorant time. But Travis’s throwback mad-scientist character, the game and likeable supporting cast, the ‘90s nostalgia, and the pleasantly Halloween-y atmosphere — plus the promise of, y’know, actually going inside the haunted house next episode — make it worth a “let’s throw something on” binge. Not every horror thing you watch has to be Hereditary, you know?
This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.