Syfy’s ‘Channel Zero’ will return later this month for its second season, ‘No-End House‘. This season centers on Margot Sleator, played by Amy Forsyth (The Path), a young woman and her best friend Jules (Aisha Dee), who visit the No-End House, a bizarre house of horror that consists of a series of increasingly disturbing rooms. When Margot returns home, she realizes everything has changed.
Ahead of the show’s September 20th premiere Nick Antosca (Hannibal, Teen Wolf), writer, showrunner and executive producer of ‘Channel Zero’, gave us insight into ‘No-End House’, which is based on Brian Russell’s “creepypasta” tale by the same name.
According to Antosca, ‘No-End House’ “takes a familiar horror concept and then takes it in an unexpected direction.” He also said, “I think the people will be interested in the character’s journey.”
When we asked “One of the characters in the trailer states that there are 6 rooms in the No-End House. But in the story, there are 10, what made you decide to narrow it down to 6?” He had this to say: “We decided to reduce the number because we wanted to give enough time and attention to each room and we didn’t want to spend too much time going from room to room. On the page, nine, ten rooms work really well. On screen, I worried that it would become redundant. We want the characters to get through one iteration in the house in a single episode. Doing nine rooms in a single episode would have been doing a disservice to the rooms.” After that, he said, “We constructed the house around how we could most effectively exploit the vulnerabilities of our main characters. The house in Russell’s story is more of a horror nights sort of fun house, but I wanted to incorporate some other interactive things I was aware of like Sleep No More, escape rooms, certain installation art pieces, so we took it more of a direction rather than a traditional haunted house, more of a nightmarish art installation.”
When it comes to horror on the show he said that he is “interested in is based on is an atmospheric dread.” He continued and brought up IT and ‘Twin Peaks’. “We all saw what happened this weekend with ‘IT’ this weekend. There is a desire for horror storytelling right now. Audiences crave it and they want it on TV too. It’s just a different kind of horror storytelling. I think ‘Twin Peaks’ is a good example of that. The reason that has been so sticky and people still respond to it after so long. It uses the TV medium to create a world of pervasive atmospheric dread.” He also stated that he wanted to give the feeling that “the deeper you go you inside the house, the deeper it goes inside you.”
As for the characters, “What Margot goes through is a metaphor for a young person struggling to find herself and find her future in an uncertain world.” He also mentioned that “Everything is driven by living in a world.” He continued, “with John Carol Lynch, we were really able to make the father into a sympathetic figure. We had him in mind pretty early on.”
When we asked what inspired the look of each room, Antosca responded, “Over all, it was kind of the art installation vibe. The first room, I was a fan of this sculptor named Sarah Sitkin, this artist who works out of L.A. that I really admire. She does these sculptures like heads opened-up, split apart. And I wanted her to recreate that for the first room of ‘No-End House’ where they see their own faces then sees them desecrated. Sarah came in and created those sculptures. She did work throughout the season. She was our artist in residence on ‘No-End House. Then, the design of the rooms themselves comes from, to some degree in the script. But, in terms of production design, it comes from conversations between Me and Steven and our production designer which was really good. Like the triangle in the triangle room was Stephen’s idea. One room that looks like the inside of a pool came from the pool in Margot’s back yard associated with her life and the trauma she experienced recently. Room 3, which is the corridor from the dream is a little bit connected to a corridor that we saw in ‘Candle Cove.”
Fans will be happy to learn that ‘Channel Zero’ has already been picked up for seasons 3 and 4. We may be getting even more of the series in the future, Antosca did confirm that webisodes have been discussed and may a possibility in the future.
On how every season will be different: “We want every season to be a different flavor of horror. We want every season to give the viewer a new experience. You should be able to rely on ‘Channel Zero’ for a sense of dread, but the delivery of that dread be different in every season. And sometimes it’s about unpacking a mystery other times it’s about living in a world. The ‘No-End House’ is about living in a place of existential horror.”
Don’t miss the premiere of ‘Channel Zero: No-End House’ on September 20, 201, on Syfy! You can pick up your copy of season one, ‘Channel Zero: Candle Cove‘, on Septemeber 26th.
