Fans of Gabriel Rodriguez & Joe Hill’s infamous Locke & Key comic books were pleasantly surprised when in December 2019 Netflix announced they would be producing a Netflix Original adaptation of the comic books.
Flash forward to March 2020 and Locke & Key has only been on Netflix a short period of time, but is already a meteoric success.
Matheson, not Lovecraft?
In the original graphic novels, the Locke family lives in a mysterious little town in Massachusetts, affectionally named after our favorite weird fiction author himself.
Indeed, the first story in the comic books bears the title “Welcome to Lovecraft”.
It comes as no surprise that fans were shocked and bemused when the Netflix title card read “Welcome to Matheson”.
What’s Matheson, and what happened to Lovecraft?
Time for a change
Obviously, it didn’t take long for the news of confused and indignant fans questioning the name change to get back to Joe Hill.
Did Netflix force his hand? Was Lovecraft’s controversial history too much for the streaming giant to handle?
Well, not quite. It turns out that it was Joe himself that decided to change the name of the town.
Explaining his reasoning, Joe went on to say that his opinion of Lovecraft had changed since he first put pen to paper on those graphic novels so long ago. He took the opportunity of working with Netflix to make changes to his material that had been long overdue in his mind.
It seems as though his further exploration of who Howard was as a person put him right off the name.
Howard Lovecraft may be one of, if not the most, influential authors in the history of horror and weird fiction, but his work is no stranger to criticism from modern audiences. Racist language has long been cited as a reason why many can no longer enjoy his works.
Whether you are able to separate art from the artist is your prerogative and a topic for another blog post that we won’t dig into here.
If Howard’s off the cards, just who is Matheson?
While Joe no longer felt the affinity with Lovecraft that originally inspired him to name the town in his story after him, he did want to keep the theme of paying respects to an author of the grisly and macabre. That’s where Richard Matheson comes in.
Richard Matheson
The creative mind behind the critically acclaimed novel, I am Legend. Richard Matheson was an accomplished writer who worked on some incredibly iconic books and movies. He counts the novel “The Incredible Shrinking Man” and work on various episodes of “The Twilight Zone” television show amongst his numerous credits.
Many well-regarded authors have cited Matheson as a major influence in their work, not least of all, Stephen King (who it turns out is actually Joe Hill’s father, what a small world we live in).
Sadly Richard Matheson passed away in June 2013, aged 87.
The Town of Matheson
As a big fan of Richard Matheson, it ended up being a no brainer for Joe to rename the town from Lovecraft to Matheson when Netflix came knocking.
The location Netflix chose for filming fictional Matheson is Lunenberg, a small fishing town just off the coast of Nova Scotia in Canada. It may not actually be in Massachusetts, but we feel like they perfectly captured the aesthetic of the region.
Keyhouse, the ancestral home of the Locke family is sadly not a real location. The exterior of the property was created in post-production using CGI techniques.
