The nightmare worlds of M. Night Shyamalan, Stephen King, and David Lynch collided in Tim Seeley and Mike Norton’s 47-issue 2012-2017 comic book series Revival. Any Midwesterner will find the quaint Wisconsin farm community in the rural noir story very familiar. Even if you live in the city, you drive past these communities going to and fro, dotted with barns and sheep and silos. What goes on there? Are you sure you want to know? In the Pacific Northwest David Lynch showed us a local community in the woods (set near Snoqualmie, Washington) in his TV series Twin Peaks. In the Syfy Channel TV series Haven, we met a New England small-town community courtesy of Stephen King. M. Night Shyamalan has written the book over and over on these towns, a la Pennsylvania flavor, whether it’s with Signs and its nondescript blot-on-the-map town or Lady in the Water and its tacky apartment complex community or The Happening with strange goings-on in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania or The Village, whose time and place is part of the village’s (and the movie’s) secret.
Of course these all have something less than quaint in common, something filled with secrets and the supernatural, something powerful and dark. Yet these places manage to seem familiar, and part of you wouldn’t mind setting up residence in, say, Twin Peaks, Washington, or Haven, Maine. Remember the good coffee and donuts at the diner in Twin Peaks? Something is luring you closer. And now television viewers can add the Wisconsin version of this town to the mix in Syfy’s Revival, its adaptation of the comic book for TV.
Check out a trailer for the series below.
A certain “happening” or “event” has taken place in Wausau, Wisconsin, and it’s drawn the attention of the entire world. You can’t die in Wausau, plain and simple. But what is the cause? An old woman is reciting verses from the Bible, speaking of purgatory and rapture. And then, like a scene from Shyamalan’s Signs, a little boy playing on his farm encounters an all-out alien–straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind–walking by, mimicking, and learning the boy’s language like E.T. himself.
A sheriff and his daughter Dana Cypress are investigating this upheaval, this “things like this never happen in my town” incident, as if it were an act of bio-terrorists, including involvement of the C.D.C. Dana is our very likable police officer, a fixture in her community. Familiar to all of us. She is our tour guide on our travels through this world on the edge of its own Twilight Zone. These are simple folk, and otherwise, things are normal in Wausau.
Dana finds her sister with her car parked at a bridge standing near the edge and offers to take her on to school, but she instead accompanies her to her next case. The disturbing old woman staring away from us in a barn… and the end comes too soon for our apparent heroine, Dana. And her sister is next. Or so one might think. After all, we’re in Wausau. And the Revival has begun.
Perfectly cast in the lead role as Dana is Wynonna Earp, Ready or Not, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Melanie Scrofano, and Romy Weltman plays her sister Martha “Em” Cypress, a girl back from the dead. They are a great match to the comic book. Check them out in this trailer for the Syfy/Peacock adaptation of Seeley and Norton’s Revival:
Creepy but not the all-out horror of the similar sounding veins of Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead or Terry Moore’s Rachel Rising, the story is one of the best indie comic horror tales of the past 20 years. And if the TV series is up to he promise of the comic book you should get the feel of Stephen King, David Lynch, and M. Night Shyamalan. Will it be the next Wynonna Earp or Resident Alien?
Look for Revival beginning Thursday, June 12, 2025, at 9 p.m. Central on Syfy, streaming on Peacock one week later.
C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg
