Out of all the TV shows dropping this year, few might be more highly-anticipated among horror fans like Teacup. The Peacock original series from creator, writer, and executive producer Ian McCulloch and produced by James Wan’s Atomic Monster has already earned high praise from the likes of Stephen King, who teased viewers earlier this month with his rave review on X. It’s a bold endorsement to live up to, but it’s one that Teacup is uniquely primed to succeed in meeting thanks to its out-of-the-box premise, verifiable array of acting talent — including Scott Speedman, Yvonne Strahovski, and Chaske Spencer — and just the right dose of gore-filled twists.

Back in May, Collider had the opportunity to visit the newly constructed Assembly Studios in Atlanta, GA, where Teacup based much of its filming, alongside several other journalists, to speak with the show’s creator, cast, and department heads about bringing this Peacock horror mystery series to life. While we can’t divulge every detail of what we saw on the set of Teacup without giving away some major spoilers, we can tease most of what viewers can look forward to from what McCulloch himself considers a “can’t-but-must look horror story.”

Don’t Expect ‘Teacup’ To Follow Every Aspect of the Source Material

While Teacup is technically inspired by the book Stinger by Robert McCammon, McCulloch told us that he wasn’t necessarily interested in a direct, one-to-one adaptation after being approached by Wan’s production company, Atomic Monster. From his perspective, McCammon’s novel, full of “big set pieces” and “helicopters,” didn’t totally align with his desired story approach.

“That’s not what I do,” McCulloch admitted. “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.” Part of that scaled-down approach meant shrinking the environment into more of what McCulloch refers to as a “keyhole epic,” with the series revolving more around a rural farm in Georgia rather than a larger, suburban town.

“Once you show the shark in Jaws, you can’t unshow it,” the creator said. “It’s a big story, but you get to see a very, very small amount, meaning from ground level, meaning from these characters’ points of view and no one else’s. We don’t have a God point-of-view. If our characters don’t know it, we don’t show it.” While very few elements from McCammon’s original novel remain, McCulloch adds that they are still fundamental to this adaptation. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find more than two or three things that survived from the book, but they are the basic building blocks of the story.”

Another major aspect that makes Teacup distinctly different from its source material is pacing. While Stinger is more in line with an ’80s action-horror epic, the Peacock series has a much smaller runtime, lending the story a more intimate feel. “[The] first season takes place over 48 hours, which… I don’t know if we’ll do that again,” McCulloch admitted. “Because it’s really, really challenging.” Given that most of the episodes clock in at around a half-hour, however, the hope is that Teacup has the momentum to keep viewers watching, especially given the interpersonal drama playing out in the setting.

“It’s not a town,” McCulloch emphasized. “These are neighbors. There’s three, all told, four families involved in the first season.” But the people who are living in close quarters with each other don’t exactly have the best relationships (more on that later). “They’re not the closest neighbors,” McCulloch told us. “Some people know each other, some people don’t really know each other, but… 90% of the series takes place on the main family’s farm, and there’s no one within a few miles. To get to the neighbors, they have to ride horses.” This sense of deep isolation, as well as the condensed timeline, forces Teacup’s characters to rely on each other quickly when a mysterious threat begins to rear its head — especially if it means the difference between survival and death.

‘Teacup’ Assembled a Cast of All-Star Talent

When it came time to put together Teacup’s cast, McCulloch admitted it wasn’t an overnight process. “It takes a while, and you have to learn not to get your heart… because it breaks your heart if somebody passes, or somebody’s deal falls through.” Heartbreak wasn’t in store, however, once Yvonne Strahovski was cast as Maggie Chenoweth, a local veterinarian and mother of two (a son, Arlo, and a daughter, Meryl, played by Caleb Dolden and Emilie Bierre, respectively) who finds her science-forward sensibilities directly confronted by some of the strange phenomena occurring on her family’s land.

“She’s on the farm, so it’s intertwined with the story,” Strahovski told us. “The animals are acting strange. That’s straight up in the first episode. That kind of gives us the first clue into what’s going on. But also, she’s the only one that is a medical professional in all of this. And as things start going horribly wrong, we need a medical professional around, because things really go sideways in a really big way, in a physical way.” The strange and mysterious occurrences just so happen to coincide with some tensions happening closer to home, as Maggie finds herself at a crossroads with her husband, James, played by Scott Speedman. Emotions are already fraught, courtesy of a previous betrayal, but there’s limited time for the couple to make efforts at reconciliation, which adds to the “pressure cooker” of their overall situation, according to Strahovski.

For Speedman, who was first introduced to McCulloch through Taylor Sheridan, the initial intention had been to collaborate on a film together, which never panned out in the wake of the pandemic. Teacup, however, presented the perfect opportunity for their working relationship to thrive. Speedman, himself no stranger to the horror genre, told us he read the series’ first three scripts back-to-back, twice over, and immediately wanted to fight for the role of James. “You read a lot of genre stuff, and everybody talks about how you got to base it in the relationships in the family, but nobody does it. You can tell they’re writing to get to the genre stuff, and then it’s like, ‘This has an unsatisfying feel,'” he said. “This was sort of the opposite. … It was very visceral, that we were going to get to know these people in a different kind of way.”

To Speedman’s credit, he’s very much aware that his character, a failed author and current high school English teacher, is starting from a very unlikable place when Teacup’s story begins, but it was a challenge he felt prepared for at this stage in his career. “The audience is not going to love me, that character, and I’m going to have to fight through eight episodes to hopefully have an arc of winning not only my family back, my wife back, but the audience as well.” But James also finds himself tested — not merely in his marriage, but as the type of protector he’s forced to become for his kids. “When something like this [happens], whether it be a real threat or some supernatural threat as this show has… everything kind of goes away, and it’s all about this instinctual thing about protecting your family, which really, he goes into that mode very quickly. And that’s sort of his redemptive arc, if he has one.” Getting to tackle some emotionally heavy moments with Strahovski as a scene partner, too, was a thrill. “She’s ready to go at all times, which was really exciting to me. So I knew to bring my A-game the days I was working with her,” Speedman said. “I just trusted her… It’s odd how fun these weird emotional scenes can be.”

Those strained interpersonal dynamics aren’t just confined to the Chenoweths’ marriage but also play out with some of their neighbors — including farmer Ruben Shanley, played by Chaske Spencer, who told us he was approached to read for the role after McCulloch saw his performance in The English: “I don’t think I’ve ever played a family man like this before, so it was something new to me. And if there’s something new, I try to go for it because it’s new territory.” His character, is described as being a man of few words, and a far cry from the actor who plays him. “He keeps a lot of his emotions inside. So a lot of stuff, I’m holding in, which is a bit of a challenge,” Spencer added. As the story goes on, Ruben is also forced into teaming up with one of the last people he would ever prefer to look into the circumstances of these strange events. One of the show’s early scenes, which was screened for us, finds Ruben and James stumbling on a particularly grisly sight on a nearby farm — leading to a bit of a whodunit among neighbors, as everyone tries to suss out who’s really responsible.

“It’s pretty fraught,” Speedman added, when speaking about his character’s relationships, “and they have to work together to try to deal with this malevolent force. But then their relationship, with the stress, comes up, and they have to deal with things that have happened and the sins that have taken place.” Amid the rising horrors happening on their farm, is it even possible for some of these characters to bury the hatchet in such a short period of time? “They’re going to have to,” Speedman said. “Going through this, and saving each other’s lives, kind of brings you into this other reality.”

14:13 Related Atomic Monster’s New Horror Series ‘Teacup’ Will Be the “Fastest Slow Burn” on Television Series creator Ian McCulloch and co-stars Chaske Spencer and Scott Speedman tease their “keyhole epic” coming to Peacock in October.

Some of ‘Teacup’s Biggest Mysteries Are Too Good to Spoil
Image via Peacock

While a lot may have been on display during our visit to Assembly Studios, some of Teacup’s biggest secrets have to remain under lock and key. What we can tease, however, are the wildly intricate practical and visual effects that help bring some intense and uniquely beautiful moments of horror to life. The KNB EFX Group, who have done prosthetic work on previous series like The Walking Dead and Lovecraft Country, were joined by CoSA VFX, who previously lent award-winning efforts to projects like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Westworld. The results range from viscerally gory to strikingly iridescent, all contributing to the series’ overall mood of unsettling eeriness.

“You get body horror and you get creature design, but not in the way that you would think,” said McCulloch, highlighting another divergence between Teacup and its source material. “The book had creatures with clones of claws, scorpion tails, things like that.” Expect the show’s horror to be more grounded — and while McCulloch did throw around the “elevated” word, he mentioned it in the sense of wanting to earn those scares from the audience, spooling out the mystery through episodes helmed by directors E.L. Katz (The Haunting of Bly Manor), Chloe Okuno (Watcher), John Hyams (Sick), and Kevin Tanchareon (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). “Everything about the show is a reveal,” McCulloch said. “Every time we answer a question, we try to ask another question… As much as it’s science-fiction, horror, drama, it is a mystery.”

With the state of streaming being what it is today, is Teacup only intended to be a one-and-done season? Not if McCulloch has anything to say about it, and he teased how the story is poised to expand beyond its initial scope, provided it earns that renewal for a second season. “If we’re lucky enough to have a Season 2, it’s keeping it as grounded as Season 1. So widening the iris, but not throwing out all the rules.” Not only will viewers get a definitive answer about why the show is called Teacup in the first place, but it would seem that the first season is only the beginning of the horrors that await these characters.

Teacup premieres October 10 on Peacock.

Teacup is a horror-thriller TV show set to premiere on Peacock in October 2024. Produced by James Wan, the series is inspired by Robert McCammon’s 1988 novel “Stinger.” The story revolves around a group of neighbors in rural Georgia who must unite to confront a mysterious and deadly threat. As tensions rise and strange occurrences unfold, they struggle to survive against an unknown and terrifying force.Release Date October 10, 2024 Seasons 1 Creator(s) Ian McCulloch Directors E.L. Katz Character(s) Maggie Chenoweth , James Chenoweth , Ruben Shanley , Ellen Chenoweth , Donald Kelly , Arlo Chenoweth , Meryl Chenoweth , Nicholas Shanley , Izzy , Valeria Shanley Expand

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