Joe Hill Interview: NOS4A2 Season 2 | Screen Rant
Warning! Spoilers for NOS4A2 season 2 ahead
NOS4A2 is a ruthless horror series that’s an adaptation of Joe Hill’s best-selling novel and season 2 just wrapped up in a major way.
NOS4A2 tells a powerful story that spans generations and mixes together the human with the supernatural in a way that Joe Hill does so well in his works. Hill’s novel already contains moving characters, but the television series gives them new life thanks to exceptional performances by Ashleigh Cummings as Vic McQueen and Zachary Quinto as the horrifying Charlie Manx. Season 2 of NOS4A2 digs even deeper into these characters and the supernatural lore that fuels the show.
Season 2 of NOS4A2 is set nearly a decade after the events of season 1 and, even though Vic McQueen has grown up and moved on with her life, she’s still unable to escape from her eerie connection to Charlie Manx. This season heads into very personal territory as Vic’s son, Wayne, becomes a bargaining chip between his mother and Charlie. The season finale of the horror series doesn’t hold back and it looks like the future will have some serious changes in store. Joe Hill took some time to discuss not only NOS4A2’s season finale, but what lies ahead for the series, his opinions on the boom of anthology horror, and the undeniable mark that horror has had on the comics industry.
ScreenRant: NOS4A2 has been running for two seasons now. Is there anything that you’ve been surprised to discover about this story as you’ve been viewing it through this lens of television?
Joe Hill: I've really enjoyed the experience. I think the whole team—Jami [O'Brien], Ashleigh [Cummings], Zach [Quinto], Jahkara [Smith]—were all just so enthusiastic about these characters and this story. I'm really happy with how this season turned out. We produced a lot of inventive, exciting episodes that were able to explore who these characters are in a creative way. It's been a great ride.
ScreenRant: You came up with the Hour Glass Man for the series. What has it been like to be able to expand on this story in new ways or add in new characters?
Joe Hill: However, in terms of broadening the world and coming up with other powerful creatives and making it all gel together, a lot of credit has to go to Jami O'Brien—the showrunner and lead writer, who wrote some of the show's very best scripts. Jami came up with this idea of Parnassus, a bar on the night road where strong creatives go to hang out, trade secrets, and make bargains with one another. Originally that started almost as kind of a joke, but the more that we talked about it, the more it seemed like a fascinating idea to explore. So I started thinking about who else might be in a place like that, with Charlie realizing that he underestimated Vic in season one, which leads to him wanting to enlist people who might be able to help him take her out in season two. That just became too exciting of a possibility to not explore. I love the Hour Glass Man!
ScreenRant: Would you be interested in going even further and writing an episode of the series, or would you prefer to keep things separate there?
Joe Hill: If we're lucky enough to get a third season, which is far from certain, I would love to write an episode! It's just an issue of logistics and time. I'm a relatively slow writer and I often find myself—there’s a metaphor I fall back on a lot where I say it's like I'm running through a field of tall grass and there's a tractor behind me. I can hear it getting closer and closer, and if I stumble and don't get up quickly enough then that tractor will run me right over. That's kind of how it feels with all of the projects that I've agreed to, you know?
If I felt like I could do it and stay ahead of the tractor, then that'd be great, but I've always felt that that tractor was too close to be able to commit to writing an episode during the first two seasons.
ScreenRant: The end of the second season has nearly gone through all of the material from your novel. Is it exciting to think that the show will need to forge its own path and develop new material?
Joe Hill: Absolutely, although while there's the novel, NOS4A2, there's also the graphic novel, The Wraith. Speaking for myself, I would love to see "Con Air at Christmasland," which is basically the plot of The Wraith graphic novel. I think that'd be an extraordinary story to tell, maybe even as a standalone picture. But who knows if anyone has the appetite for that? Jami made the world of the novel much, much bigger. She's made it clear that there are more people out there—like Jolene in the first season with her roller skate—who are good and need protecting. However, there are also people out there like the Hour Glass who are very bad and need to be stopped.
When you look at Vic and Maggie, you see this kind of Butch and Sundance duo that have the skills and the aptitude to go after the bad creatives. Will they? Well that seems like a solid direction for another ten episodes! There are of course all of these creative questions that we'd like to tackle, but then they come up against real-world concerns, such as whether there's a big enough audience.
ScreenRant: And the novel still explores that to some extent. Certain characters pass away, but there's a real generational aspect that's present with Wayne and how he could rise to the occasion and grow up to help fight this threat, too.
Joe Hill: Totally! Another thing that I think a third season could get into is the fact that Maggie is still in that hotel where we last saw the Hour Glass. In the first season Maggie is a very isolated character who's been abandoned by her family who rejected her because of her sexuality. She deals with her loneliness and anxiety with alcohol and drugs. In the second season she's great! She's still a little bit of an addict though, but what she's addicted to now are her own powers and her ability to explore this world full of other people like her. It's easy to imagine that that thread eventually leads her into some trouble and that she and Vic might need to team up again.
ScreenRant: You talked about your many other projects and the tractor that’s bearing down on you, but I also really loved your episode of Creepshow. Have you been able to do more writing for the second season?
Joe Hill: I don't want to spoil anything about what's coming, but I'll definitely say to stay tuned for the upcoming season of Creepshow! Greg Nicotero and the team around him had a hell of a good time making the first season. It was very popular, both as a hit on Shudder and also when it migrated over to AMC. The Creep will return for another issue, so to speak, and I've love to get my hands in more!
ScreenRant: I’m also a tremendous Tales From the Darkside fan too, and really liked what your approach to the series would have been. Does Creepshow satisfy that need, or would you still be interested in doing your own anthology series with more of a throughline?
Joe Hill: I think there's only so much room in the media landscape for these kind of shows. You've got Creepshow to take a hardcore horror angle. There's Black Mirror for more of a science fiction angle...Even though there are suddenly all of these streaming services, I feel like the appetite for anthology shows is only so broad and so deep. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to write a TV show. I think that could be great fun. I took my swing at Tales From the Darkside, and I whiffed. That one didn't happen, so I'd probably try to so something different.
ScreenRant: You’ve also got a big presence in comics and you even have your own horror line of comics coming out with DC’s Hill House Comics. That's super exciting. Can you talk a little on the kinds of stories you’ve been trying to tell through that?
Joe Hill: I've just had so much fun with all of that. When I talk about "Hill House," what I'm really trying to replicate is that feeling when I was 14 or 15 years old and going to those old mom and pop video rental stores. We had one in Bangor, Maine and the horror section was just this wall of videos and most of them were just absolute trash that went straight to video. Those cheap slasher flicks that would star people like Frank Stallone and Tawny Kitaen. And I love that stuff. I love it. So my idea for "Hill House Comics" is to recreate that feeling of stumbling upon a stack of those '80s horror videos that you've never seen before, which hopefully turn out to be good. They give you the pleasures of discovering that new horror story that you didn't know that you needed.
We had a great time putting those comics out. We did one with an author, Carmen Maria Machado, called The Low, Low Woods that almost combines David Lynch's sense of place—his eccentric sense of place—and David Cronenberg's take on body horror. I think it was a real breakthough. She's [Machado] been so great and there's terrific art by Dani. Mike Carey, who's quickly building up his legend within the horror genre with books like The Girl With All the Gifts. He was of course the lead writer on Lucifer for about 1000 issues. He did a great one called The Dollhouse Family that is really chilling, cerebral British horror. Laura Marks and ghoulish grandmaster, Kelley Jones, they had their sort of feminist horror opus about gaslighting called Daphne Byrne. It's just a really interesting selection of unique horror stories.
You know, Vertigo used to tackle this sort of thing, but only really in their first decade before they drifted away from it. But there's always been a major appetite for horror in comic books. I always remind people that horror, not superheroes, was the most popular genre in comics through the 1940s and into the 1950s. It probably would have remained the dominant genre, if not for the hearings on juvenile delinquency that led to the creation of the Comics Code, which essentially wiped out horror from comics until the 1990s.
There's a great book called The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju, which covers how the comics industry was nearly destroyed by those congressional hearings and how horror comics were especially wiped out. It's such an interesting read, largely because every cultural clash that we've had since then—whether it was about hair metal and gangster rap in the '90s, or violent video games in the '00s, or even if Elvis was going to "ruin kids"—in all of these arguments we've been having the same fight for 70 years and it all began with horror comic books. The subject matter keeps changing, but the arguments are always the same.
ScreenRant: It’s been an exciting time for Locke & Key as well, but there was also word of a crossover comic happening with Sandman. What has it been like to be involved with something like that?
Joe Hill: I'm writing it now! Gabe [Rodriguez] is still working on another Locke & Key storyline called "In Pale Battalions Go," which sets up the Locke & Key/Sandman crossover [Hell & Gone]. Originally the Locke & Key/Sandman crossover was scheduled for October, but I was always thought that was a little ambitious since Gabe and I are both just so damn meticulous and take our time. Then you throw in COVID and you wind up in a situation where everything is taking three or four months longer than expected. I still think we'll have the first issue out before the end of the year, but it will probably be December.
ScreenRant: It must just be such an honor for Neil Gaiman to be interested in letting your world mesh together with his own.
Joe Hill: Absolutely. He's the kindest for letting us do it and we're going to try to honor his work by doing a crossover that's more than just a gimmick. We're telling a story that hopefully is a big plot point for both universes and is able to emotionally enrich them both.