Chapelwaite episode 1 recap – “Blood Calls Blood”

This recap of Chapelwaite episode 1, “Blood Calls Blood”, contains spoilers.

After the recent Lisey’s Story got a bit lost in the tangled undergrowth of its own backside, it’s up to Epix’s Chapelwaite, adapted from the short story Jerusalem’s Lot, to carry the torch of small-screen Stephen King adaptations. The good news is that the premiere, “Blood Calls Blood”, suggests we might be onto a winner. The bad news is that nobody seems to pay much attention to Epix originals, so there’s a decent chance nobody will see it either way.

Chapelwaite episode 1 recap

But for the benefit of those who’re watching, this moody hour-long opener sets the scene very well, beginning in true King fashion with a demented father, believing himself to be possessed, attempting to bury his son, Charles, alive. The timely intervention of a neighbor narrowly saves Charles’ life, and we don’t see him again until he has become an extremely well-cast Adrien Brody, a severe-looking mariner who, in 1850, lays his late wife to rest at sea from the deck of his whaling ship, flanked by his daughters, Loa (Sirena Gulamgaus) and Honor (Jennifer Ens), and his son, Tane (Ian Ho).

Following this loss, Charles plans to relocate his family to the titular Chapelwaite, an ancestral home and adjoining sawmill he has inherited from his cousin, Stephen, located in small-town Maine, once again in classic King fashion. The tropes continue apace. Chapelwaite is, according to the former housekeeper, Ms. Cloris, the site of terrible misfortunes that befall seemingly anyone who goes near it, most of all the Boones, who the locals believe to be cursed. There is evidence to this effect. Stephen’s daughter, Marcella, fell down the cellar stairs to her death, and in that dank room, where Charles ventures despite having been told not to, he discovers a bloodstain, a bath adorned with leather restraints, and worms dangling from the ceiling. That night, eerie scratching in the walls suggests rats, but the local exterminator can find no evidence of an infestation. Things are not boding well, to say the least.

And everyone seems to know it. The town of Preacher’s Corners isn’t doing particularly well anyway – there is a mysterious illness floating around that has driven many of the townsfolk to quarantine, in a sadly topical turn – but the place holds Chapelwaite and the Boones in particularly low regard. This is before Charles and the kids ride into town and the locals realize that his children are half indigenous. When he stops by the constable to report that the house has been vandalized, the lawman couldn’t care less. Apparently, the town almost threw a party when Stephen committed suicide, which is news to Charles – Ms. Cloris had said he “died of grief”, which I suppose is the same thing, in a roundabout way.

The only person who does seem interested in the Boones is Rebecca Morgan (Emily Hampshire), a young scholar who is being commissioned to write a story for a prestigious magazine, and thus applies for the governess job that Ms. Clovis refused outright. Despite her mother’s distaste for the idea, she makes a good first impression with Charles and the children, though not necessarily Loa, who has been mute since the death of her mother and seems to know more than she’s letting on, in a worryingly ghostly sort of way.

It isn’t just Charles’s children who’re subject to bigotry, of course, which Charles discovers when he goes to check on the state of the sawmill and finds that Daniel Thompson (Michael Hough), the ostensible foreman, has allowed his whole team to slack off completely while getting paid more, except for Able Stewart (Devante Senior), the young Black man who maintains the ledgers. Charles isn’t having that, so he gets Daniel to sling his hook, offers his men as much money as they’re prepared to work for, and gives Able a pay rise for managing the ledgers. Charles has designs on running the sawmill like a whaler, which is ambitious and probably not going to happen (we also get our first mention of Jerusalem’s Lot here, but it remains unexplored for now.)

You can quibble with “Blood Calls Blood” a bit since Rebecca schooling the Boone kids on the traditions of All Hallow’s Eve by introducing them to a pendulum that can summon ghosts is bonkers. She’d have been out of the door if I was Charles, but you know how it is – a Stephen King story has to contrive a way for things to go bump in the night, and that cellar door isn’t good to anyone locked up tight, is it? Coming on the back of that bizarre endeavor, Rebecca’s suggestion that the Boones attend church in order to make a good impression with the god-fearing townsfolk seems like a setup, and plays out like one when Alice Burroughs (Jennie Raymond) and her pastor father Samuel Gallows (Eric Peterson) insinuate Charles’s children can’t be Christian since they’re not white. But Rebecca’s annoyance there seems earnest. According to her, whatever plague is besieging Preacher’s Corners stems from Stephen and two of his stable hands, which she obviously considers to be hearsay. But there’s obviously something amiss with the family, and it’s Loa, predictably, who sees it in her father.

She’s probably right. But there’s something else lurking around the Chapelwaite grounds, something that seems hostile to those who might look to do the place or its occupants harm. When a sauced-up man from the Preacher’s Corners tavern saddles up to burn the house to the ground, his cart is upended, his throat is slashed, and his blood is collected in a bucket by a shadowy figure who obviously has some use for it. Between the house, the locals, and Charles’s obviously tattered psyche, there’s enough bad juju in this new adaptation to fill more than a bucket.