‘Teacup’ Showrunner Explains Why Horror Series Will Be “99.8% Different Than the Book” [Set Visit]

Writer, producer, and showrunner Ian McCulloch (Yellowstone) will be the first to tell you that “Teacup,” Peacock‘s upcoming horror mystery series executive produced by James Wan, draws very little from the novel that inspired it, Robert McCammon’s Stinger. Stepping foot on set in Atlanta, Georgia earlier this summer only reinforced how drastically different the new series will be from its ’80s action horror novel origins.

The first two episodes of Atomic Monster and UCP’s series “Teacup“ premiere on Peacock Thursday, October 10, followed by two episodes weekly through Halloween, delivering a puzzle box of strange happenings, human drama, and more body horror than you’d expect.

The first drastic departure from McCammon’s novel is its new setting: rural Georgia. Stinger, initially published in 1988, takes place in a town called Inferno, Texas, and blends sci-fi, horror, and western genres together for a wild, otherworldly siege amidst racial tensions and gang wars in a dying town.

“Teacup,“ by comparison, takes place in the present and scraps most of Stinger for a far more intimate horror mystery. 

Ian McCulloch didn’t want to recreate Stinger beat for beat, instead using it only as loose inspiration. The showrunner explains the series’ origins, “Well when Atomic Monster first came to me, they said, ‘Hey, do you want to adapt this book?‘ I said, ‘Oh, that sounds cool.‘ And I read the book and said, ‘Hey, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to write you a script, and it’s going to be 99.8% different from the book. If you like it, we’ll do it. If you don’t like it, then no harm, no foul, and we won’t do it.’ Obviously, they liked it. Yes, it’s based on the book. We talked to Robert McCammon about it before we moved forward, and he read the first script and signed off on it.”

“But what I didn’t want was, I didn’t want to do a direct adaptation word for word,“ McCulloch says of the drastic story shifts. “It’s not interesting to me. The book exists; it’s there. I don’t know if you have read the book or know, but it’s big. It’s what I would call maximalist horror. I mean horror fiction. It’s an entire town. It’s big set pieces. It’s helicopters, it’s different alien things that you see. I think it came out in ’88, and you can see the inspirations behind it. You can see Terminator, Alien, and The Outsiders. You can see all that stuff.

“It’s like a big, really great B movie. That’s not what I do. I said, ‘Well, what if we made it a minimalist?‘ If we take everything out of it, does the idea still hold up? It’s like when you take a big song, and then they do an acoustic version. If it’s still good, it’s a good song. I said, ‘What if you take the town out of it? What if you take seeing anything out of it?‘ Everything we’ve done with the show since we started, which was two or three years ago, is less is more, less is more, less is more. It’s like once you show the shark in Jaws, you can’t unshow it. So it was like, how do we do it without showing anything? How do we do it without it being a town? How do we do it?”

“My greatest fear is like, ‘Oh, that’s a guy wearing lobster claws,‘” McCulloch reflects over having a man in a creature suit had he faithfully adapted Stinger. “And then, who cares? So it was taking, it’s not my turn to phrase, but whoever came up with it is pretty brilliant, basically making it a keyhole epic, meaning you only get to see a very small amount. It’s a big story, but you get to see a very, very small amount, meaning from ground level, from these character’s points of view and no one else’s. We don’t have a God point of view, and if our characters don’t know it, we don’t show it. It was taking the basic conceit of the book and seeing if it would work. To my mind, the book exists. If you want the experience of the book, go read the book. This is a very different thing. To everybody’s credit, they let us, me and my writers, go as far as we wanted. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find more than two or three things that have survived from the book. But they are the basic building blocks of the story.”

“Every time I thought of anything that went big, it didn’t work, and it just didn’t feel like our show,” McCulloch adds. “And the more grounded it is, the more you buy into these characters. It being an ongoing series, it’s all about wanting to go on the journey with the characters. The scares, if you do too many of them, then people become numb to it. If it becomes too big and they have lobster claws, then you don’t care because you don’t believe it. The less is more is also, I think, an interesting limitation, but it’s also about how we keep people invested for as long as possible and as deeply as possible.“

Running time plays a huge role in how McCulloch approached the series. He explains. “Our running time is so short for each episode, except maybe one episode is longer. It’s a perfect length for this, I think. That’s another thing; the book takes place over 24 hours. The first season takes place over 48 hours, which I don’t know if we’ll do that again.”

It sounds like “Teacup” isn’t planned to be a limited series, and its overarching mysteries will only continue to expand if further seasons are ordered up. McCulloch teases, “By the end of the season, you realize, oh, this is far bigger than what you’ve seen. The trick at the end of the season is how do we make it bigger… if we’re lucky enough to have a season two, it’s keeping it as grounded as season one. Widening the iris but not throwing out all the rules. So, yes. That’s how you keep it an ongoing series as you go.”

That likely isn’t too surprising, considering that the first season takes place in rural isolation. The characters live on farms, including the central Chenoweth family, played by Yvonne Strahovski, Scott Speedman, Emilie Bierre, and Caleb Dolden. “It’s a very, very secluded farm,“ the showrunner says of the Chenoweth household. “90% of the series takes place on the main family’s farm. There’s no one within a few miles to get to the neighbors; they have to ride horses because they’re deeply isolated.”

Of course, that it’s a mystery series means that the threat is a safe guarded secret. While we know not to expect the scorpion-like creature from the novel, it remains to be seen how McCulloch will interpret and evolve the lethal entity trapping the characters in place in “Teacup.“ One thing is clear, though; something is utterly decimating animals- and sometimes humans- in the woods. And it’s going to be gnarly.

“You’re going to get body horror, and you get creature design, but not in the way that you would think,“ McCulloch teases.

Stay tuned for part two of Bloody Disgusting’s “Teacup“ set visit, including character details from Yvonne Strahovski, Scott Speedman, and Chaske Spencer.

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