Courteney Cox’s recent role in the latest Scream movie might have been a foreshadowing of sorts, because it seems she’s squarely back in the horror world. In the new trailer for her Starz series Shining Vale, Cox suffers from writer’s block, befriends a fancy ghost, and wields an ax à la Jack Nicholson.
Shining Vale combines family drama and horror-inflected comedy, with thematic elements that both pay tribute to and satirize the horror genre. Cox plays Pat Phelps, a wife, mother, and author going through a professional dry spell. Greg Kinnear takes on the role of Pat’s good-natured husband, while Gus Birney (Dickinson) and Dylan Gage (PEN15) play their kids.
The trailer begins with the Phelps family moving into a spooky mansion after Pat has an affair. “This move is really going to be great for us,” Kinnear says on the drive—but it doesn’t take a horror movie buff to surmise that it will not, in fact, be great for them.
The Phelps’ new home is your run-of-the-mill haunted house: a dark, creaky old Tudor decorated with cobwebs and stained-glass windows. Multiple murders have occurred there, of course. When Cox observes that it’s cold in their unfamiliar abode, their realtor (Sherilyn Fenn) replies in a comically matter-of-fact tone, “I mean, the house has been empty for nearly two years. She’s probably not used to having people inside of her.”
Naturally, Pat sets up her office in the scariest room in the house, an attic filled with sheet-covered furniture and multiple crystal chandeliers. She still can’t seem to break her writer’s block, until one day when her barking dog (another classic horror movie trope) leads her to the house’s otherworldly inhabitant: a cigarette-smoking rich lady ghost played by Mira Sorvino.
Sorvino’s Rosemary, a '50s housewife turned murderess, becomes Pat’s unlikely muse. Only Pat can see her, and the two form a surprisingly fruitful creative partnership, albeit at the expense of Pat’s sanity. Possibly possessed by Rosemary, she finds herself writing dozens of (utterly filthy) pages of her new book without remembering it.
“You wrote, ‘Suck a hot dick?’” Cox asks Sorvino, reviewing the new pages that appeared in her manuscript. “Suck a hot dick? That was all you, darling,” Sorvino replies.
Throughout the trailer, dry humor is interspersed with genuinely frightening imagery. The video ends with flashes of broken glass, a partially buried corpse, and a creepy little girl.
Shining Vale comes from Divorce creator Sharon Horgan and Trial & Error co-creator Jeff Astrof. It premieres on Starz on March 6.