It’s a real shame that FOX passed over Locke & Key, the Joe Hill/Gabriel Rodriguez comic book adaptation from creator Josh Friedman and executive producers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Steven Spielberg. 20th Century Fox TV screened the pilot directed by Mark Romanek at Comic Con, but the cheers simply didn’t prove loud enough for the studio to pass it along to another network. Due to rising production costs and lack of network/cable interest, Locke & Key has been shelved indefinitely and will likely never see the light of day again.

And so I share with you this sneak peek at the pilot that leaked onto the Internet not too long ago. On Twitter Friedman posted a link to the video saying that it “was made by FOX for advertisers months ago (obviously before they decided not to pick us up).” Mirando Otto, Jesse McCartney, Sarah Bolger, Skylar Gaertner, and Nick Stahl star in the haunting promo that successfully hypes the mystical world set forth by Hill and Rodriguez and imagined for TV by Friedman. Though it’s hard to watch because you know the story will never be told on screen, it’s certainly worth viewing so you can at least experience a glimpse of what might have been.

In June Hill had this to say about the premiere episode: “Mark Romanek and Josh Friedman turned in a hell of a good pilot (says a dude who is, of course, completely unbiased). The finished episode is scary, and lean, and emotionally authentic, and has a similar feel to Super 8; it very much has a kind of early 80s scary-Spielberg vibe. It’s also very faithful to the source material. I’m so, so proud of everyone who worked on it and of what was accomplished.”

[Via TVLine]