You may think you know what Cape Fear’s story is, but the Apple TV show, from the beginning, is completely different from the story you may expect. Sure, each adaptation of John MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners changes the story a little — the 1962 movie toned down the action to more palatable to mainstream movie audiences, while the 1991 movie added more morally gray elements to Max Cady’s revenge quest. But the changes to this miniseries are even more fundamental. Instead of convict Max Cady seeking revenge against a lawyer for testifying against him, this series’ Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, is after two lawyers: Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson), the prosecutor who put him in prison, and his now-wife Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), who just happens to be Max’s former defense attorney who advised him to take a plea deal — and was sleeping with Tom. That’s a massive, and some would say melodramatic, change to the story, but according to showrunner Nick Antosca, that was always part of the plan. “Our version of Cape Fear is full of new surprises for the audience,” Antosca tells Inverse. “And I also think honors what Scorsese and everybody else who made in the originals did then.” Cape Fear showrunner Nick Antosca wasn’t afraid to shake up the story fans have loved for decades. | Lisa/AFF-USA/ShutterstockThis approach is true to Antosca’s unique vision about what makes for a good adaptation. “An adaptation should be like the nightmare that you have after you experience the original and go to sleep,” he says. “You remember how it made you feel, you remember key details and visceral things from it and they might be rearranged or they might be different and they might reflect new fears and new concerns.” It’s a radical view, but it has the blessing of Hollywood royalty. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg are both executive producers on the series, and these big changes were pitched to them from the get-go. “When we first dared to propose a new version of Cape Fear, we went to Marty and Steven and asked for their blessing,” Antosca says. “[We] pitched this version where Max is exonerated and released because his conviction is overturned, and where the Bowdens are both his defense attorney and the prosecutor in the trial. Their happiness, their perfect life is built on his suffering.”Scorsese and Spielberg gave their blessings, and “gave guidance and notes throughout the whole process,” Antosca says. “When we did the cast reading the first time the whole cast was together, Marty unexpectedly popped up on Zoom and told the cast how excited he was and blessed the project and encouraged them to make it their own and make it new.”Martin Scorsese, director of the 1991 Cape Fear, gave his blessing to this new series’ approach. | Universal/Kobal/ShutterstockThis Cape Fear is set in Savannah instead of North Carolina, where the Cape Fear River runs. This actually is a return to form for the story — the 1962 movie was both set and shot in southeastern Georgia.“I had shot in Savannah once before and loved it,” Antosca says. “We shot it for something else though, so we couldn't capture the qualities that make Savannah, Savannah; this very haunted feeling and this kind of like humid, swampy, Spanish moss, like Southern intensity. I thought Savannah would just be the perfect place to tell this story about the ghosts of the past returning for vengeance.” Adding to that haunted vibe is the unique direction, which experiments with ever tool in the cinematic toolbelt, including inverted colors, split diopters, special effects, and a pounding motif-driven score. Antosca, who wrote the first episode, cites inspiration from Haneke’s Cachet, the 2020 series Losing Alice, and 2013 Dutch movie Borgman. But one of these inspirations is unlike the others.“The show The Curse was one of my favorite shows of the past few years and that influenced both the storytelling here and the cinematography a little bit,” he says. One of his biggest inspirations, though, was giallo horror. “I thought about the style of this show as southern giallo sometimes.”So step aside, southern gothic, there’s a new subgenre in town, one predicated on ultra-stylized, brooding, occasionally over-the-top psychological thrills that may be completely different that everything else but in the best way. If this Cape Fear is the nightmare you have after watching a previous version, then we don’t want to wake up any time soon. Cape Fear is now streaming on Apple TV+.