Jeff Astrof Interview: Shining Vale Season 1 | Screen Rant
Courteney Cox has made her triumphant return to the horror genre with Shining Vale. The Starz series revolves around an author who moves with her family to a small Connecticut town after being caught cheating on her husband, only for the house to seemingly be haunted by a demon, sending her down a spiral of struggling to convince her husband and teenage kids she's not crazy and of the dangers to come.
In anticipation of season 1's finale, which premiered last night, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with co-creator Jeff Astrof to discuss the show's various Stephen King references, break down the devastating finale, and share exciting plans for season 2. WARNING: spoilers for the season 1 finale lay ahead!
Screen Rant: I gotta say, I truly have enjoyed Shining Vale thus far. I watched the finale last night and was blown away by what I saw. So I know a lot of the show up to that point had plenty of nods and winks to The Shining, but this one felt like an almost direct adaptation. Was that always the plan with you and Sharon when you were developing the series?
Jeff Astrof: How I kind of work is we get in there and start writing and I knew where the show was going. About halfway through, I kind of got a much clearer sense of where I wanted to go and then, of course, I've seen The Shining several times through it. I knew once we had that staircase that that's where it was going to go. But I didn't realize when watching that scene in The Shining, I was like, "Wow, it lucked out that we really wrote to that relationship with Pat as Jack and Terry's Wendy." It could have ended a number of ways, but it wound up [with the stairs]. The idea is obviously her going up the stairs and him defending himself, but you also have to kind of morph it into what this show is about.
The movie The Shining is about spousal abuse at its core and this is about, you know there's abuse here, but it's about codependence, it's about enabling and communication. So I knew I saw the staircase in the house, I was like, "Okay, we have to do this." And I didn't kind of know until I got there how it would evolve into that. I was like, "Wow, we could take a lot from this." But how I tried to work with this show all along is it's not a spoof, it's not a satire. I didn't want it to be like Top Secret! or Police Squad!, which is a great show, or any of the spoof Scary Movies. I wanted you not to go, "Okay, we're watching a reenactment here," I want you to be chilled by what's going to happen and what they're saying and Courteney's performance there was so riveting.
Just seeing it on the day, seeing her and Greg play out their relationship, and they have a great relationship. This whole episode, by the way, that scene and the scene at the end, everybody had to call their spouse and other afterwards to talk it out. [Laughs] The performances are so good and so evocative for all of us.
What would you say were some of the biggest challenges, both in this episode as well as the whole season, in finding that balance of all the themes with the horror and the comedy that you had?
Jeff Astrof: You nailed it. The balance is, from the beginning, what Sharon and my first conversation was three years ago. "Can you do something really scary and also really funny?" Some stuff plays better on the big screen with the sound and some people were like, "Oh, what's scary enough?" My thought in the beginning was you write a comedy and you shoot it like a horror and then I kind of dive into the psychology of the characters. For me, writing comedies is easy, it's how I think, I think in joke patterns. I have a horror writer on staff who basically says, "That's not how you set the scare," so it was also setting up scares, but also not doing the same jump scares, that's not in my blood.
My recent flex is how to tell a joke, so I think balancing that was important and also not making it like just a parody, because I think it's a type of show that balances on the head of a needle. And I think that's exactly it, that if you go too far, then it comes to be a spoof, and I didn't want it to be a spoof. It worked itself out very, very well because, you know, using The Shining as a references with a psychological plot, there's not jump scares in The Shining. Maybe when Scatman Crothers gets an axe to the heart, it's not jump scares in The Shining, it's more it makes you uncomfortable and I think that that's what we got. I'm hoping by this point in the story, you're really invested in this couple and the actors really help you get there.
But I'd say as an issue with how you get in three jump scares in an episode while still not being predictable, like, "Okay, here's where she turns, the ghost is there." And also, we didn't really have horror directors, horror certainly takes a lot more time to set up and wait there's meant these lightweight as long but the way in which we get in there a lot of time for the company
You mentioned it briefly earlier, but that ending is really quite the shocker, I honestly did not see it coming. With that setup, are there already plans in the works for more?
Jeff Astrof: Oh, yeah. It's very funny, because I'll give you a little insight that anybody outside my head would say I probably shouldn't. [Laughs] I always thought that, if for some reason Greg and Courteney didn't want to do a season 2, I would have this as the end of the Phelps and then somebody else moves into the household and do it like an anthology. Just because that's my always my mindset is like, as a writer, it has to be like, "What if this is over?" But it was not written that way, there are a lot of loose threads, hopefully enough to weave a new garment out of. But yes, I set up a crazy season 2.
The challenge that I learned from my other horror writers is, "How do you keep people living in a haunted house?" There's not great season 2s of horror shows, they're usually anthologies because people know the house is haunted. So, we had to keep it vague enough that maybe it's not haunted, maybe this was mental illness. I want to find out what happened with the family and hopefully our audience will too. I will say this, I think in watching a show, like any of these web shows that have cliffhanger endings, you don't want to piss your audience off and not have a satisfying ending, but you also want to leave enough open.
So I left enough open so that if/when we get an ask for a second season, there's another story to tell going with the Phelps family and seeing what happened after we last saw them and there's a lot to explore. Especially, like you said, with Gaynor now, you know that was something just because midway through the season, I saw what a powerhouse Gus was and I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna turn the season on her," I really thought she delivered.
I was quite amazed by her arc throughout. You've mentioned a lot about horror in the writing, but I'm curious what it was like really finding the look of the show, because it has quite this unique aesthetic to its visual style.
Jeff Astrof: That was all in the beginning, all during the pilot, and the only person who had done horror in the whole thing was our editor and by the time the editor gets to it, it's too late. [Chuckles] But a lot of the look this has to do with we were shooting anamorphic lenses so it was going to be that widescreen format and it was really finding that house. It's a house in South Pasadena and we could not find a house, we thought we'd have to shoot in three locations of the outside, the inside and the backyard and then there was this one house that our construction coordinator's assistant, I think, was looking for housing. She found one for sale and was like, "This is a weird house," and so the house you see in the house was brilliantly rebuilt on stages after the pilot, that's not the same house that you see between episode 1 and episode 2.
The house just has the low ceilings, the peeling wallpaper and the stained glass and that really led Nicole Brown, who was our DP, to kind of — on the day, I was like, "This is too dark, this is too dark" and she was just like, "Trust me." We did a lot of play with light, but the thing is that I wanted to create a house and have it be in this balance of they go in there, but you kind of want to be like, "I can see how this house is beautiful," but you'd also say like, "There's no chance I would live here" and when you go into the original house at the time, we were like, "How many people died in this house, those dead people are still here." That was kind of the thing, but the you're kind of like, "Yeah, I can see fixing this." And that was the kind of feel, so that's the whole feel to the show is it looks like a '70s horror movie.
It's fortuitous, I've watched so many old like in the '70s and '80s and they're filming in houses that look just like that, so I think that was very fortuitous to us. Then, once you have that matte canvas, I told my directors, "Okay, the canvas is set, we have a big canvas, go paint it how you want it," so the episodes are a little bit different, but you know you're in the same world. It's like shooting a regular family, so to speak, like a normal type of family in a house like ours, that's half the work, just the creep to it, and you can get away with a lot more without having to do a jump scare, just to even be in that house [is terrifying].
The atmosphere of that house really does lend itself very well to the tensions and the scares of the show. I'll be curious to see what locations you terrify us with hopefully in the next season.
Jeff Astrof: I will say this. There's a good hint to it in the very end of the finale.
That brings me to my final question. Mental hospitals and such are a very tricky thing to depict in media in general without steering too far into offensive territory. What was like for you finding that right tone and delivery for that moment?
Jeff Astrof: It was a great set design and it should look like Pat is freaking out and the second season would really explore how women have been treated for mental illness. We wanted to explore that with first season more with the history of the house, but there were these houses and there were eras where these were women really had mental illness or were treated for demons. We thought, "Wow, what a perfect [setting]" and it offers so many, obviously, horror references to asylum stuff.
Your question is very good, because I had two people in my writers room who've had close relatives undergo treatment and said, "You can't just play this flippantly." So that's a challenge for me as a comedy writer, you have to give a serious amount of respect to the fact that these are people, and I think we'll try to find that, again, in the filming and the acting and thankfully, I have actors who can do this comedy and drama at the same time.
Shining Vale season 1 can be streamed in its entirety on Starz now.