Chilling shows make Sunday TV’S fright night
“It’s a psychological horror. It’s driven by suspense.”
DAVID WILCOX ON 666 PARK AVENUE
Halloween is coming a little early this year. Things start going bump as soon as Sunday night, with the debut of the new 666 Park Avenue (Citytv and ABC at 10 p.m.) and the much anticipated return of Dexter (9 p.m. on The Movie Network).
Things gets even scarier with the return of The Walking Dead on Oct. 14 on AMC and then, just three days later, the second-season debut of American Horror Story on FX Canada.
Clearly, we like our thrills and chills. We’re perhaps more accustomed to getting them at the local multiplex but, more and more lately, they’ve been coming directly into our living rooms.
It’s not exactly a new phenomenon. From Twilight Zone on through The X-Files, horror has always been a part of the television landscape. It just seems that much more so lately. And it follows that, in tough times, there is a certain cathartic quality to having the snot scared out of us in such an ultimately harmless fashion.
Werewolves, we can deal with. It’s the economy that has us quaking.
David Wilcox, the 666 Park Avenue showrunner, has long been a horror fan.
“It’s the kind of genre that really has a direct connection with the audience,” he says. “And that has great appeal to me.
“I’ve thought for a long time that there could be a show in the horror genre that could work on television because it’s so successful theatrically. And when I was introduced to the books of 666 Park Avenue, I thought this could have the DNA that could really work on network television and could be a very scary, yet character-driven supernatural (series).”
Like Dexter, 666 Park Avenue is based on a series of books, in its case the connected stories of doomed souls who occupy a hellish Manhattan apartment complex.
But the books are only the immediate source material. The show draws on an entire history of horror, both on the page and on the screen.
“I would say that absolutely it’s Stephen King-influenced,” says Wilcox. “Who can’t be influenced by Stephen King when you’re doing work in the genre? But it’s also so much more than that. We were influenced very much by, clearly, Rosemary’s Baby and the films of the ’70s and ’80s that were much more psychologically driven horror, movies like The Shining, The Omen . . . even films like Blue Velvet.”
Unlike the movies, or more per- missive cable television, Wilcox and his team don’t have the luxury of the genre’s traditionally visceral visuals.
“We don’t have the tool of gore and blood and that kind of spectacle, so it has forced us to be a lot more clever about how we tell these stories,” Wilcox acknowledges.
“There are people who love to see blood and murder and mayhem and all this sort of stuff, and there are other shows, like on cable, that have that freedom to do that. For us, it’s a different kind of work. It’s a psychological horror. It’s driven by suspense. It’s driven by mystery.” Dexter has always managed to do both, to deliver the more cerebral shocks and all the eviscerated entrails. The serial-killer thriller returns for its seventh season with one burning question still hanging in the air — and this is a spoiler if you haven’t seen last season — what will police lieutenant Debra Morgan do now that she knows that her adoptive brother slices up bad guys on the side? “I think it is without a doubt the most fundamentally game-changing a development as we’ve had since we started telling this story,” says series star Michael C. Hall. “One of the things that we’ve always been able to count on is that Dexter’s secret is his own, and it’s not anymore. It’s been so invigorating to play these scenes, to be preoccupied in ways that Dexter’s never been required to be preoccupied. And to, in the seventh season of the TV show, have that genuine sense is pretty remarkable, I think.” It’s an important development in this particular season, which could be the next to last, since the whole cast is contracted for only one more year. On the other hand, it promises to shake things up so significantly it may breathe new life into what was in danger of becoming a relatively stale scenario. But Hall is clearly ready to move on to other things and, given the gulf between Dexter and his previous role on Six Feet Under, there is no telling what those things might be. He certainly seems resolved to end the saga on a high note. “I think (Debra) finding out does sort of make an end game feel a little more palpable and imminent,” he says. “I think the plan is to do this season and a final eighth season, and I think to really tell this story of the two of them negotiating their relationship in this new landscape requires about that much time. “So, yeah. It feels about right.” Rob Salem usually writes Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays. Email: rsalem@thestar.ca; Twitter: @robsalem