Canadian Screenwriter: Film, Television, Radio, Digital Media
Spring 2007 Vol. 9, No. 2.

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 the 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 effecting.”

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 reactions,” 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 Tanya 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 can 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 there are her characters and she has certain feelings about 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 that things have to change.”

As for the rest of the process, Mohan describes it as controlled chaos, saying “You had to be a writer and audience at the same time, and you had to be a real 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 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 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.

“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 rules¾ after she learned them, of course.

Learning the Rules, Then Bending Them
“If you’re going to bend the 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 surprise them,” Walton says.

“In the later drafts of Ginger, the characters were actually taking over the genre. The producer would say ‘I feel we’re not delivering on our monster. What about the guys coming for the werewolf movie?’ We had to match up the beats of the developing relationship story, to the beats we expect if we are coming to a scary show, a monster show. That became the metaphor for Ginger. Being a 15-year-old girl is like being a monster. Becoming a young adolescent female had so many things in common with transforming into a complete other creature. You’re growing hair where you didn’t think there would be hair. You’ve got weird appetites that weren’t there yesterday. You have a whole bunch of stuff going on that wasn’t there three weeks ago, so what’s that about?

“The next level of writing was about finding how your way in could alter and manipulate and make perhaps more interesting a story that we’re all quite familiar with. So the way they set off each other was an intensive process in terms of matching up one story to the classic genre.”

Between them, however, Walton’s not sure there’s much difference.

“I’m not convinced that horror is so rarified from plain drama,” says Walton, who wrote the TV movie, The Many Trials of One Jane Doe. “How do I get you into Jane Doe’s world? You know, it appears that police are allowing women with 99 things in common in the same five-block radius to be brutally, sexually assaulted. How do I make you understand that’s possible? It’s probably the same exercise in every kind of story-telling. For me, I must create a way for you to identify with this world. And it’s not the monster that you need to understand, it’s where that phenomenon reflects your own life.”

Likewise, Mohan, who has “spent years on cop shows, legal shows, sports figures, kids shows, science fiction”, says it’s all about writing and characters. “And you know what people are watching for, characters working things out. From romantic story to whatever, the interesting thing, I think, is that you take that one element or human emotion or passion to the extreme. Science-fiction allows you to do this. Horror allows you to do this. You take something real, ground it, and then you take it to this insane place.”

Switching From One Genre to the Next
Screenwriters in Canada generally have to write in most genres, if not all. Bruce Smith went from writing episodes for the horror television show The Hunger, to the miniseries Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story.

“You do the same thing, throw yourself into the world,” says Smith who is currently working on a TV movie about eh Steven Truscott murder case. “The fun thing about The Hunger was that you were doing anthologies, so you were making little 20, 25-minute movies every week. Themes of the supernatural, horror and degrees of eroticism were common. Each story was its own thing, so in a way, doing Tommy was much like anything else.

“It’s about grabbing the audience and entertaining them and pulling them into this story and world. The biggest difference with The Hunger was just the speed with which you had to introduce new characters and have the story wrap up 20 minutes later.”

The Hunger required a new situation and new characters every episode. So in terms of character development, Smith didn’t have a season in which he could develop someone.

“That’s when you’re challenging yourself as a writer because the easy solution is to stick in stock characters, which is something that doesn’t come naturally to me. And it wasn’t suitable for a series like The Hunger, which certainly is inspired by shows like The Twilight Zone. So you’re trying to push the literary character elements of the genre. You’re trying to write something more engaging that nobody has seen, where maybe they don’t know the twist that’s coming.”

Since this world includes such elements as cannibalism, necromancy, vampires, and a trucker selling sex toys and fantasies, how do you get viewers to buy into these worlds? Smith laughs, says “You assume they are there for the pure escapist thrill.”

Anti-Horror
For Blood Ties, Mohan says his crew will get viewers to buy in by making the series anti-horror. What makes it anti-horror, he says, is that it’s about a relationship played against Huff’s world of the occult “that just happens to be populated by supernatural creatures.” The fact that Blood Ties has a vampire at the centre of a love triangle is what Mohan says drives the show. The central question, however, is who’s really a monster?

“To ask that, we often get into an episode by starting with a myth and then work back to see how it impacts our characters and their relationship arc.”

This, Mohan says, builds resonance for everything happening in the characters’ emotional lives, which are hallmarked by Vicki’s revelations of loosing her eyesight, as well as falling in love with a vampire. In either situation, her life will simply never be the same. That makes it human, and Mohan says, that’s the best basis for story-telling-change.

“I don’t think horror is different than any other genre¾ romance, western, science-fiction, whatever,” Mohan says. “People often write off the genre as a lower art form. But when it invests in primal things, people changing, emotion, and growth, it can be done in a refined and beautiful way.

“It’s about forcing characters to confront things. Certainly Vicki, as a cop, only saw the world in one way until her reality tunnel is blown apart. Here she was going blind, had to leave the force, leave everything she cared about to be a low-rent P.I. Suddenly, she finds herself with a new career, a new reason to live, and a whole new shape to her romantic life.”

Yes, but that romantic life involves a 450-year-old vampire who has killed before. So how does Vicki remain sure her love interest won’t look at her as a nice, light snack? Easy, Mohan says, just follow Huff’s lead and continue turning the genre upside down.

“We have a vampire who’s not afraid of sliver or crosses,” Mohan says. “In fact, he’s religious. It’s not played out in a big way, but these are the things that make people sit back and say, ‘Hold it, I’m not watching your standard Transylvanian vampire who can’t visit the tanning booth.’

“In the mythology, vampires are messy in their blood-taking activities. But here, they learn to survive by taking on lovers, taking blood in small doses, and keeping people close that they can take sustenance from. The problem with his life is that people he cares about always die, if not by attrition, then by taking their blood, which is why he rarely allows himself to feel deeply. Maybe once a generation, there is someone special to him, and this becomes Vicki. That’s why I say it’s anti-horror. The characters are human.”