LOCKED AND LOADED

CRAFTING A SUCCESSFUL new TV series can be hellish. Case in point: Locke & Key. Based on the comic book series by scribe Joe Hill and illustrator Gabriel Rodriguez, a pilot was originally commissioned by Fox in 2010; however, the network never picked it up for a full season.

“You can stand back and look at the two other versions and see what worked here and what wasn’t working,” Averill tells . “What were the things we were really liking? We decided we wanted to make it more of a family drama with this coming-of-age story with our younger teen characters and focus it more on fantasy rather than horror. The comic is very much in the horror vein, which is a genre I love coming off of. In many ways, it was a great training ground for this because that is a show about this family dealing with this trauma and you are unpacking the mystery of what happened to them 20 years ago.”