INTERVIEW: Creator of ‘Channel Zero’ on Syfy wants to scare you this Halloween

Channel Zero, the new horror anthology series on Syfy, recently kicked off its inaugural season focused on a scary story about a children’s television program that has odd and unsettling links to a series of deadly events. It’s up to Mike Painter, played by Paul Schneider of Parks and Recreation fame, to return home and figure out what happened when he was young and children in the area watched Candle Cove, a puppet show that is linked to the murder of Mike’s brother.

Nick Antosca serves as the showrunner of the series, and the first season is titled Channel Zero: Candle Cove, which airs new episodes Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Syfy. In addition, he wrote the pilot episode and serves as executive producer. Having written for Hannibal and Teen Wolf, Antosca has bonafide genre credibility, and in a recent interview with Hollywood Soapbox, he revealed the TV project’s origins, its plans for the future and how creepy these so-called “creepypastas” are.

“A couple of years ago my manager asked if I would be interested in adapting Candle Cove for TV,” Antosca said recently in a phone interview. “I had been a fan of creepypastas for many years and Candle Cove in particular, and I thought not only would I love to do that, but there’s a million of these stories and many that are very, very scary, very disturbing and ripe for adaptation. So I thought it would be really cool to do an anthology series where every season we adapted a different creepypasta story.”

Antosca called Candle Cove the quintessential creepypasta, a complex and unconventional series of short fiction pieces in the horror genre. Candle Cove, originally written by Kris Straub, is short, contained and built around a brilliant, simple horror concept, Antosca said. The piece has a sense of a “larger, sinister force out there in the world, and it raises really exciting, disturbing questions.”

The plan is to have Channel Zero run six episodes each season with a new director at the helm. For season one, Craig William Macneill, director of the critically acclaimed The Boy, was tasked with the job.

“So every season is now going to be a showcase for a different, exciting director who brings a cinematic sensibility and a unique voice, so as long as we got green-lit straight to series, I started thinking about who would be the perfect directorial voice for Candle Cove,” Antosca said. “We wanted it to have a sense of creeping menace. We wanted it to be a very, very cinematic show that didn’t rely on jump scares or gratuitous gore but slowly built a sense of escalating dread and used visual storytelling to create suspense and a sense of something lurking outside the edge of the frame. And Craig’s first film, The Boy, was literally perfect for this show. It has scary kids. It has the ‘80s. It has that incredibly restrained, scary sense of something is about to happen, and the world is full of menace.

Antosca said that Syfy has been supportive and protective of the series from the moment they signed on board. The show has a relatively small budget but a lot of creative freedom, and this meant the writers, using Straub’s original vision, could flex their artistic muscles.

“Kris Straub’s original story, which is brilliant, isn’t even told in a structure,” Antosca said. “It’s posts on a message board. It’s basically a modern epistolary short story, so what we really wanted to do was preserve the things that we love about it — the atmosphere, the tone, the sense of something larger and more terrifying at work and also the specifics of this incredibly creepy puppet show. It was really important to us when recreating the puppet show that we stick as closely as possible to Kris’ vision.”

The writers on the series are some of the best in the business, especially when considering the horror genre. Harley Peyton, who wrote a bunch of Twin Peaks episodes, is part of the team. There’s also Don Mancini, the man behind Child’s Play and Chucky. Katie Gruel is a veteran of Syfy’s Dominion, and Erica Saleh has also joined the writers’ room.

Even though season one is finished and ready to be aired, there’s no rest for the weary. Syfy has green-lit the series for two seasons, and Antosca is already stationed in Winnipeg, Canada, filming season two, which is called The No-End House, based on Brian Russell’s creepypasta story.

“It’s really cool and also allows us to have the first two seasons kind of be a proof of concept, so we might say that it’s an anthology show where each season is going to have a distinctive voice,” Antosca said. “You’ll really see that every season is going to be a different movie with a very distinctive voice, different cast, the same writers but a different visual storytelling style. And the second season is being directed by Steven Piet, who is a fantastic director whose movie Uncle John I saw. I must have watched like 50 or 60 movies trying to find the director for season two, and this one kind of leaped out at me. And that said, each season, while it’s going to be very, very distinctive, the first two seasons, in part because they were written in the same writer’s room at the same time, are kind of cinematic companion pieces.”

Growing up, Antosca loved horror novels, especially Ghost Story and Shadowland by Peter Straub. Stephen King was also a huge influence, which comes as no surprise after watching the pilot episode of Channel Zero: Candle Cove. “I’m not actually just a horror writer, or I’m not exclusive to that genre,” he said. “I started writing thriller novels and short stories, and it’s just sort of happened because of my love for the genre that the last couple of projects I’ve done have been horror.”

He added: “You always hope that a show will go on for a long time. At this point, I feel lucky just to have two seasons, which is more than most shows get. I would love for it to run for however long. I mean I could keep making these things for years. Of course, there’s a wealth of material.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Channel Zero: Candle Cove premieres new episodes Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Syfy. Click here for more information.