Writing in Horror

Writing in Horror

Is genre-writing a scary prospect?

by Vern Smith

Although a fan, Peter Mohan had never written about vampires when he browsed the horror section of a Toronto bookstore 10 or 12 years ago. There, he found a novel about a cop and vampire searching for demons downtown, and said, “Hold it, I like all those things.”

Flash forward, and Mohan is showrunning Blood Ties, adapting Tanya Huff’s “Blood” novels for the small screen. The series–which debuted on Lifetime in the U.S. in March, and will eventually air on CHUM in Canada–revolves around Vicki Nelson, a cop turned private detective suffering from a degenerative eye disease, and her love interest, a 450-year-old vampire. Upon said revelations, the focus of her agency becomes more about ghost-busting and less about fraud and adultery. But as appealing as the gist of it was the day Mohan read the back-cover copy inside Book City in Toronto’s Annex, the kicker was that this story was set nearby. And above all else, it meant the job of establishing normalcy would be a little more seamless in giving way to supernatural revelations.

“This is a quintessential Canadian show in a way that many others aren’t because we don’t push a Canadian agenda,” Mohan says. “It’s just a cool story that happens to occur here. We can make shows that travel with real streets and locations in establishing shots. It’s just centred in this place to ground this world.”

Previously, Mohan worked on such shows as Due South and Mutant X and wrote scripts for La Femme Nikita, PSI Factor, and Highlander. As for horror, he’d written episodes of Friday the 13th: the series, and produced FOX TV’s Eerie Indiana: The Next Dimension. He’s also been working on a “kickass” vampire feature film over the past few years. The important part was that Mohan was already up to speed on Huff’s Blood franchise, as well as the genre’s hallmarks, when Kaleidoscope Entertainment serendipitously came calling.

“I’ve liked a lot of horror writers–King at times, McCammon, Clive Barker’s books of blood,” Mohan says. “I still remember as a young kid reading ‘Dracula’–the texture of the paper, an onion-skin paper, it was so affecting.”

Personally, Mohan sees the genre through a psychological lens filled with fears about life, death, intimacy, and generally “opening oneself up.” In terms of the evolution of Blood Ties, he describes a larger story arc involving fate, Vicki, her new partner, the vampire, and her former boyfriend/partner on the Toronto police force.

The joy of writing about vampires in Toronto

“Things that happen in the first episode are drawing her down this path inexorably,” Mohan says. “This is partially why she runs into every ghost and ghoul in Toronto’s dark supernatural underbelly, of which we all know a deep streak exists.”

Speaking of Hogtown sin-bins, both real and perceived, Mohan worked on the eighties cop show Night Heat, in which Toronto became a generic North American city. Oddball landmarks were deployed, such as Ryerson’s circular ice rink embedded with large stones. But like a fair bit of drama sold to U.S. networks, Night Heat steered clear of the Leafs, Corey Hart, newspapers, and sundry Toronto reference points.

So it’s particularly refreshing for Mohan to write about Toronto as if it were, well, Toronto. And setting Blood Ties where it actually takes place works well for a show that must first lull folks watching at home into normalcy before the supernatural revelations begin.

“I’ve done 450 hours of TV, often having to pretend Toronto is Chicago, New York, wherever, so it’s great to write a show where they’re chasing monsters in the Annex,” Mohan says. “That’s the crazy thing about horror. The more you ground the story in something mundane, commonplace, the more you open your eyes to another level. By setting this in a very realistic Toronto with realistic cops who never thought there was anything like this, there’s a whole new world. Even cold cases that seemed insoluble–suddenly they’re looking at things differently.”

For Dennis Heaton, who also worked on Blood Ties, helping audiences establish normalcy was also job one with Fido, a zombie feature that debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. In Fido, it was a 1950s fictional small town, Willard, whereas Blood Ties is contemporary. In either case, Heaton describes a mandatory process of making that world as ordinary as possible.“You want to ground your audience so that when your character moves into the supernatural and then the unreal, they start to have reactions to that world, and your audience is having the same reaction,” Heaton says.

“You set it up and here’s your real world and now you’re faced with a vampire and your characters going through disbelief until it’s proven. You draw your audience in through your protagonist. If you’re set in a fantastic world, then your audience is going to have a certain disconnection from reality.”

Adapting all that horror

Blood Ties is also an adaptation for the small screen, so slicing the pie among a group of writers that included the author was another trick entirely.

With author Huff writing one episode, Mohan says the Blood Ties crew stayed true to the central literary dynamic by having the author in on story meetings and pitch sessions.

“Given the time constraints of television production and how quickly you have to get a script turned around, it’s better to have so many hands on deck,” adds Heaton. “You put your script forward and you’re getting feedback from maybe five or six people. You still have to filter that information, but it helps you focus the script faster.

“When you’ve got six people and they’re all saying this doesn’t work, you know it doesn’t work. Then you also have that assistance in finding out how to improve it and get it done, so your writing time is reduced from two or three weeks to three or four days because there are so many people cooking the script with you.”

Still, putting literature on TV can be brutal on the original artifact, so what about having the author in on the deed?

“Tanya’s been really good with us in the sense that these are her characters and she has certain feelings about how they’re produced,” says Heaton. “She gave Peter a lot of freedom to transform it from her literary world into television. It was a positive experience to work with her and get notes from her about whether we’re deviating from her course, because she also understands the things that have to change.”

As for the rest of the process, Mohan describes it as controlled chaos, saying, “You had to be writer and audience at the same time, and you had to be a hard audience. To win people over we had to bring them along by creating something emotionally real. Vicki is a hard sell to the supernatural. Bit by bit, she becomes more exposed to proof. If she’s accepted it, I think our audience will accept it. By that point, I think they will be invested in her character and her entanglements.”

Character-driven horror

Seeing horror as a genre that historically invested little in such entanglements, Karen Walton was reluctant when her soon-to-be-co-writer, John Fawcett, started nagging her about a werewolf flick in the mid 90s.

“I was brand new to screenwriting,” Walton says. “All I knew how to do was character-driven stuff. It’s what interested me in writing films, making character-driven films. My first concern was that unless you were Mr. Cronenberg, they weren’t making a lot of horror through Telefilm. I also had a business concern which was that I had yet to do my debut feature. I’d just started, and I
wasn’t sure about going down a genre road, which, at the time, Canada was not exactly known for. I’d already been through one experience where a producer tried to develop a sci-fi project and the reaction was that this sort of plotline stuff had already been covered by The X-Files. It was a flat no, so my experience, which was limited, made it seem like a reach.”

It was only after Walton and Fawcett agreed on a character-driven werewolf film connecting the whole deal to puberty that Walton actually got to the writing part six or eight months later. Good thing, too, because the film in question turned out to be the wildly successful Ginger Snaps franchise that went on to include Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back, a prequel.

Says Walton, “Here’s what happened: John said, ‘I want to make a teenage-girl werewolf film and you should write it.’ I said, ‘Why would I write that?’ And he said, ‘Write a horror movie that you would want to see.’

“It became a coming-of-age horror film. In the popular parlance, horror had not yet quite had its renascence that Scream triggered about two years later while I was still developing Ginger.”

A decided non-aficionado, Walton had to learn the rules of the genre, then come to an understanding of “why I, as a girl, wasn’t running out to watch horrors.” Ginger Snaps has since converted her, but back when she was just sitting down to get to writing the first installment, she had to find “the emotional truth of a story that I could be interested in, a relationship I was intrigued by.”

That relationship gave Walton a way into a genre that at the time was admittedly foreign. She says it also gave her real people to work with as opposed to rote B-horror players she had been familiar with “that were basically about where they fit into the body count.” From there, she just had to manipulate the rules–after she learned them, of course.

Learning the rules, then bending them

“If you’re going to bend rules in a classic genre, you have to understand why, what you’re going to do, and how you’re going to both meet the expectations of the genre and surpass them,” Walton says.

See the Spring 2007 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete article.