The Following: Scream Creator Kevin Williamson on the Focus on Media Violence and Making "Pulpy Fun"
"I think people should chill out."
by Roth Cornet JANUARY 17, 2013
Kevin Williamson entered the world stage with a fresh, fun take on a genre that many of us grew up loving. 1996's Scream was by turns hilarious, wonderfully Meta and rich with "inside baseball" horror fan references and, in moments, legitimately terrifying. The film called out the rules of horror and in so doing, redefined them. The screenwriter then went on to write and produce two of the franchises sequels, and develop six television series including The Vampire Diaries and the upcoming, more adult-themed, look at serial killers and cults, The Following, set to debut on Monday, January 21 on FOX.
The creator had the initial idea for The Following when he was researching Danny Rolling, known as the Gainesville Ripper, while penning the original Scream. Rolling murdered five students on a college campus in Florida, and when he read about him, Williamson has said that he thought, "Wouldn't it be terrifying if rather than a drifter, this was a charming professor who was killing these women?"
The seed of that idea serves as the foundation for The Following. Kevin Bacon stars as Ryan Hardy, a former FBI agent who was charged with hunting down and capturing Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), a charismatic, Edgar Allan Poe-obsessed literature professor/failed author turned serial killer. In the eight-years following his incarceration, Carroll has been able to amass a group of would-be-killers and lost souls to do his long distance bidding. Hardy is called in to consult to stop the string of murders that results.
At this recent TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour, the dominant topic of conversation was "violence in entertainment". Certainly, that has been part of the national dialog in recent weeks, and we've been paying attention to and covering how that unfolds here at IGN (and will continue to do so). What was unique at the TCA press tour was that all manner of depicted violence seemed to be lumped together. Attempts were, seemingly, made to tie fantastical television series and the recent real-world tragic shootings together.
We were able to sit down with Williamson directly after the panel for The Following, where he was, repeatedly, asked the same question about a link between violence in the media and real world brutality. We were able to speak with the writer a bit more about his take on the topic, the tropes of horror, what we can expect from this series, and people needing to chill.
IGN: You know, I grew-up watching horror films and one of the things that I want to touch upon is that what struck me as I was listening to the line of questioning in that panel, is that the tropes of the genre are being misunderstood. A few things jumped out at me in that regard. One, was of course everyone wants to talk about the recent school shootings and it's natural to want to search for a cause and solution. But in my mind, the two are truly unrelated. It's not like they're making a comparison to the fictional The Silence of the Lambs, or even referring to a real-world serial killer. I wanted to get your take on that.
Kevin Williamson: Well, it’s so hard; I’m so sensitive to it. First, because I knew it was coming. When something so senseless happens, everyone’s trying to make sense of it. But you can’t, because that is the nature of it being senseless. It’s almost too easy to go to television, and go to the video games, and go to the movies and cite that their cumulative impact is what’s causing it. It’s just not true. But how do you tell a mother that whose lost a child and is trying to make sense of all this? I do have a strong opinion about it. I’m a Hollywood writer, so it’s kind of obvious what side of the fence I would fall on in the debate. I have a very, very strong opinion about what does cause it, but I'm not sure that now is the time for me to share. If you want to come by my house for dinner, I’ll be happy to let you in on it. I’ll debate it all the way through dessert and coffee. But I don’t know that I want to put myself out there and go down into that rabbit hole.
IGN: I think what’s interesting is that a movie like We Need to Talk About Kevin is looking at the causes for and evolution of that kind of violence. specifically. And it is a very serious film, so I feel like you could spend the entire press conference for that film on this topic. A show like The Following isn’t dealing with that kind of a killer, or that kind of violence. That’s where I think that line of questioning gets really murky, because it just lumps things together, which can confuse issues. Also, the tone of this show is fantastical and pulpy.
Williamson: Also, what constitutes too much? Going back to the violence question. So we can’t write stories about the good guys versus the bad guys anymore? Or we can’t show violence at all? I just don’t understand who gets to draw the line. There’s such a…I’m going to the dinner conversation here, and I should stay out of it. Because I have a great argument for it.
IGN: Now I really want to hear that argument.
Williamson: You know I don’t have a defense for it. I just simply think that I grew-up watching Kevin Bacon getting an arrow through the neck in a bunk bed at Camp Silver Lake… wait, no…
IGN: Camp Crystal Lake.
Williamson: Yeah, I knew as soon as I said it. [Laughs] Silver Lake is where I had dinner last night. Anyway, I grew up watching things like that. And I think that when you have these horrific ideas and stories to tell, I think that fiction is the only place that you can explore these things. They aren’t allowed in the real world, it’s unacceptable. So that dark storytelling, that dark fiction, those books that I read as a kid, those thrillers about serial killers and all those scary books I read, that’s just fiction.
IGN: Right, well, also to be fair, there are a great many true-crime non-fiction books as well, and it seems odd to assume that just because you’re reading them that you’ll become a criminal.
Williamson: No, clearly not. I mean I can’t stand the site of blood. I’m very squeamish. I hate real life violence, I run from it. Two people get in an altercation and I just feel uncomfortable. I just want everyone to love everybody. But to say that we can’t tell these horrific stories of just of murder and mayhem, and the thrill ride of watching the murder mystery of it all, doesn't make sense. To me that’s the fun. It’s storytelling. It’s about a roller coaster ride. I love things that go bump in the night. I love the adrenaline of being goosed, and I love scary, I love that. I love to be scared as an audience member.
IGN: Sure, and that's the appropriate outlet for that part of the human psyche. You know, Bates Motel, the set-in-the-contemporary Psycho prequel, is here as well.
Williamson: I’m dying to see that.
IGN: Oh, it's so good. But the one thing that really struck me was that, I know that you were looking at the Gainesville murders and Danny Rolling and Psycho, the book at least, was originally looking at Ed Gein, who was very clearly, completely insane. What struck me was that these real life killers have been very sanitized. And I do think that there’s an interesting inclination to want to, in the same way that we do with vampires, who were once depicted as physically monstrous, give them a large intellectual capacity and a charisma that isn’t always in line with these actual killers. These actual men are, primarily, bats**t crazy and talking to themselves. With some exceptions.
Williamson: Right. Right and you watch Criminal Minds and just look at their profiles and their cases of the week. I hired some writers from there, and we were discussing it, and the reality is that most of these killers, in their psyche, it’s all about sex. It’s all about sex. For the men it all comes down to that. But that’s sort of not what you see when you see Criminal Minds, because that’s not accepted, but the violence is. It’s just interesting where we draw the line in our society. Even in our TV making. So those stories don’t always really get told.
But you know, I don’t know, I’m telling a fanciful story. It’s very high concept. It’s meant to be scary, it’s meant to be maybe not for the faint of heart. And in the six-act [TV] structure, the way that you can shock people sometimes is with a really strong visual. I find that sometimes people don’t like that stuff, and the show is not for everyone. But I it's think for people who really just want to jump and be jolted and who love good scares, and love good jumps, and great drama, and really cool characters that interact in a way that’s delicious. It’s like watching these two broken people who need each other. One’s a villain, one’s a hero, and you watch how they feed each other. How they bring each other back to life - they actually have the same goal. They both want rebirth.
It’s sick, and it’s demented, and it’s twisted and I think that in a weird way, we have this damaged hero that the more people that die, the more he comes back to life. The more he gets his goal in gear and the more he gets his mojo back. But at the same time he’s damaged because he takes on the death of every single person. It weighs on him. You know he carries those victims around on his shoulders like they’re all his fault. He takes responsibility for every single one of them. It’s really just tragic and sad when you realize that he’s just this sad lonely man who has had death follow him since he was born. He has this huge backstory, which, Kevin [Bacon] and I sort of created together. Death surrounds him, and everyone that he’s ever cared about has died. It’s just really a tragic hero. Which makes him fearless.
IGN: In a way, the fact that death surrounds him would make Carroll all the more interested in him. Because he's following the Poe model, who was also obsessed with death and dying. Carroll is just generally fascinated with death.
Williamson: Right, and Ryan Hardy also has a heart problem. I’m doing a bunch of winks here to Edgar Allan Poe, and the heart allegory. It’s meant to be fun. Pulpy fun. You know, a paperback novel on the beach, and you’re just flying through it. That was the goal.
IGN: There’s also this element of the cult in the show. In a practical sense, that gives this kind of a series a lot more room for an expanded world and story. There’s so many more places for you to go than if it were just the cat-and-mouse between one man and one killer, where the question would become, how far can that go?
Williamson: Well, I’ve always been fascinated by cults. I’ve always thought there was a show in it, and I developed things over the years. I felt like I wasn’t really interested in a typical cult. Most cults in America are selling jelly in a corner at the local store. They’re very harmless cults who are just selling their own ideology. And I wanted to do Charles Manson. I like the scary. I was also fascinated by Waco, Texas and Jim Jones. All of these cult leaders who are charismatic, who can sort of fill a void in peoples life, and lure them to follow them. But at the same time, he had the dumbest ideas. He was trying to preach, ‘Oh, there’s an impending race war coming and we have to be prepared for it.’
IGN: Yeah, Helter Skelter.
Williamson: Helter Skelter, yeah, and all that. But he secretly just wanted to be a rock star. He wanted to hang out with the Beach Boys. He had a very selfish, narcissistic motive. And it’s not unlike Joe Carroll. Just because Joe Carroll is a college professor, doesn’t mean he can’t be just as petty. At the end of the day, he’s a narcissist. You know there are religions out there that are rooted in science fiction novelists. You have this crazy stuff, so it’s not so far fetched to have this professor who is rooted in Gothic romanticism. At least it’s very much more passionate, it’s much more colorful and romantic and beautiful. I mean it’s meant as a joke and a wink and all that stuff. I just sort of poke fun, and turn it on its head using the idea of romanticism and this idea of “the death of a beautiful woman.”
IGN: Right, the Poe idea that, "there's nothing so fascinating in the world as a beautiful woman dying."
Williamson: Also it’s the Age Of Enlightenment. What created The Romantic Period?
IGN: Well it was kind of a response to the mechanism of The Enlightenment.
Williamson: Yeah, first came The Age Of Enlightenment, which was all about rationalism, and facts and science and structure. So Romanticism was the result of that.
IGN: Right, it was the push back.
Williamson: Right, so in my mind, The Age Of Enlightenment which inspires Romantacism, and if you just compare it to our society, this [story] is the result of the age of the Internet. We’ve got The Age Of The Internet, we’ve got how many people who spend how many hours a day on the Internet and not socializing?
IGN: You’re describing a lot of my days.
Williamson: Yeah, but you know some people go days and days without touching another person. And that creates certain psyches. That’s one element of what’s happening here [on The Following].
IGN: So are you proposing that it is that disconnect on the Internet that creates an open door for Carroll?
Williamson: That type of mentality would so easily accept a man who says, ‘Come, let me show you how to fill your life.’ There’s no human contact, and he comes along and says, ‘Take this knife and pierce this flesh and see if you can feel it.’ And that’s as sick as it gets and that’s not what people want to hear, but, that is the sickness of Joe Carroll, and that is how he reaches some people. But that’s just part of the sum. The other element is the bored housewife who is unfulfilled. The other element is the person who is off-kilter. His mother ate the wrong hormones, she didn’t eat enough organics. I don’t know. There are just so many ways to go. And we have these flashbacks where we show the origins [of the cult members]. I think it’s fun. I think it’s a thriller. I think people should chill out and just enjoy it. It’s just a creepy show.
IGN: There’s also the fun question with the cult members of which one is going to become a killer and which one is not. We have the possibility, with a couple of the members, that they may not be able to do it, to cross that line.
Williamson: Yeah, because they’re not all serial killers. Sometimes they’re a would-be killer, they’re groupies, they’re fans, they just want to be the "friends of". They want to be the Al-Anon version. They don’t want to be a full blown serial killer. And some of them are just sort of sociopaths. Have you read that new book “The Wisdom of Psychopaths”? It’s amazing. It just sort of talks about doctors and lawyers and asks, who's a psychopath and who’s not in our society? Who has the gene of a psychopath, and what do they need to have the push?
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