Now here’s a tasty treat to start your morning kids. The folks over at UGO.com have posted a juicy three page interview with SPAWN creator Todd McFarlane. He chats about all sorts of fun stuff, including another SPAWN feature, the TWISTED TALES anthology series on Fox, as well as toys, books and lawsuits oh my!
Here are some highlights:
UGO: Is [the new non-HBO sponsored Spawn animation] using continuity from the Spawn cartoon or is it all new?
TODD: There are some wink winks to the first three seasons but the story essentially picks up five to six years later. Essentially Spawn has gone dormant, so no one has seen or heard from him in a while and then something happens which wakes him up. To me it’s the reinvention of Spawn. I’m less concerned with the continuity of it as I am as using it as a bridge to the story I am writing for the live-action movie. That one is sort of devoid of all comic book stuff. It’s a true spook movie in the vein of The Exorcist, or more recently with a movie like The Grudge or something like that. It’s not like anyone is running around in costumes, there are no superpowers or villains but more of a scarefest. There is only one scary thing in those movies and this case it would just be Spawn. There is no Clown and there is no Violator. None that stuff. There is a boogeyman in the midst of a movie like LA Confidential. How would LA Confidential be different if shadows are moving?
UGO: How is [the planned television series] Twisted Tales going?
TODD: That is taking some of the same elements I was talking about with Spawn and just going around Hollywood a little bit. It’s always been part of my frustration with Hollywood that they will tell me to come in and give them some creepy stuff and then I give it to them and they go “Jesus Christ, that’s really creepy. We wanted broadcast creepy.” I’ve found that over the years my definition of creepy and theirs isn’t quite the same. I’m trying to scare people, not gross them out, I don’t have any interest in blood and guts, Freddy Krueger and co-eds getting their heads cut off. None of that appeals to me…Twisted Tales is an anthology show, but they don’t get the idea that a half-hour drama that doesn’t have any continuity would work. In my mind, done right, I think you could scare people with a bizarre show. It’s like looking at a car accident, I know I shouldn’t be looking at it but I just got to turn it on every week to see how they are going to mess with me. You will never be able to figure it out because we don’t have any continuity. I can do a bizarre western, then jump to a sci-fi, then do three in a row that happen in Canada, Mexico and the US. If you like one, you might not like the one the week after or you might like it five times better. When we were kids, we had The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, and then as I was getting older there was Night Gallery. It’s all in the vein of that.
Broadcast creepy? Man, sometimes I just want to bang my head against a f*ckin’ wall!
Anyway, you can check out the rest of the extensive interview here. It’s good stuff, and good for ya too, peeps!
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