A new anthology series arrives this Halloween season with “Tales From the Void,” SCREAMBOX’s Original Series that delivers six chilling tales adapted from the extremely popular r/No Sleep (18M subs) stories and assembles talented filmmakers to bring them to life.
Two episodes will premiere exclusively on SCREAMBOX every Sunday between October 13 and October 27. The episodes will also be available to buy or rent via electronic sell-through platforms the following Tuesday.
Up first? “Into The Unknown“ by director Joe Lynch (Suitable Flesh, Mayhem).
It turns out that the director was already familiar with the story. He tell us, “Well, what’s interesting is that I knew about this story because a lot of the stories that came for the show were derived from the NoSleep podcast. I actually started the NoSleep podcast before I even knew about the Reddit site, r/No Sleep, and Creepypasta. There was this whole new fountain of amazing creepy stories that were out there, that whether they were a derivative of other things that we’ve seen before and kind of added a new spin, or just certain things that you go, ‘God, how is it that no one has ever thought of that before?‘ When the showrunners and the executive producers came to me with it and told me about this one script, I was like, ‘I know that story.‘”
“The script is based on a story called ‘The Black Square‘ by Matt Dymerski,“ Lynch continues. “It’s one that I had always heard about, but it’s funny because I heard about it through other people telling me. It’s one of the beautiful things about these stories; you either read it on the site or you hear it from other people and go, ‘God, that’s creepy.‘ Then you realize where it came from. The story itself, without giving too much away, is about this mysterious black square that pops up unprompted in this tenement complex, and essentially, it elicits different reactions from different people who live in this apartment complex. That’s the main story.
“I don’t want to give too much away there, but it reminded me immediately of Stephen King’s The Mist. Easily my favorite, I guess, short story/novella from King. Out of all of them, that’s the one that hit me the hardest. The reason why is that something that I think Darabont really tapped into in the movie as well is that the scariest monsters aren’t the ones that we conjure up or that appear in the middle of a complex or loom out of a mist. It’s us.”
It’s those moral conundrums and the chance to explore the sci-fi realm that excited Lynch the most about joining the series. He tells us, “That’s the thing that really got me about both the story and the script that our showrunner Francesco [Loschiavo] wrote, was that it’s interesting to take a totem, so to speak, something that, whether it’s real or not real or perceived to be real, and then just to see how different people react to it. That’s the thing that really got me going, like, ‘Ooh, there’s something there.‘ I’ve never done anything like that before. I’ve never done anything that teeters more into the sci-fi realm. Any of the TV or the anthologies that I’ve done before, like Creepshow, for example; even though ‘The Right Snuff‘ was set in space, it’s a horror story. But this was where I could really enjoy digging my claws into something that’s a little bit more sci-fi, a little bit more Channel Zero, Black Mirror, or Twilight Zone.”
“What’s funny is that of all the contemporary stories that the crew, the cast, and I have all talked about, we always come back to Twilight Zone, which is so amazing to think that a show that’s practically 70 years old can still be so relevant today,” Lynch continues. “The thing that Serling really brought to the table was, in all the best episodes, that it is about the human factor. It’s not about the fantastical. It is about the factual, and then that meaning, like the people that are involved or the people that are infected or affected, if you will.“
That sense of humanity and moral ambiguity isn’t exclusive to Lynch’s episode, either.
“Every episode of Tales from the Void is directly aimed at making you feel, ‘Well, what would I do in that situation?‘” the filmmaker explains. “That’s the best horror. Again, to go back to The Mist, there’s something about the way that King and then Darabont wove those characters so that there’s going to be moments that you might go, ‘Well, Mrs. Carmody does have a point.‘ Even when she’s screaming, ‘Expiation,‘ and you’re like, ‘Oh God, but what about the kid? But what if that is the right thing to do?‘
“It’s something that I’ve been saying to a lot of the cast in my episodes. There are no bad people; there are bad situations. You can’t even say bad decisions because if they justify themselves for the reason why they’re doing what they’re doing, and in my episode, this is one of the best parts about this process, it’s happened so fast that you have to really be as instinctual as possible. Because what was on the page was a really great script, but then you bring the actors in, and they’re bringing their points of view, and then you’re bringing the DP in, and he’s got his point of view, and you have to take all of these ingredients and kind of put it together. But the thing that was really exciting about this was what was written on the page.“
Lynch adds, “It’s so powerful to express the moral ambiguity of the situation that we’re setting up. That is really the key of this show, is if we all do our jobs right, and so far so good, knock on wood, it feels like each episode has that question that poses to the audience, ‘Well, who’s right here? Who’s wrong here?‘ It’s really your perspective. It’s really your subjective viewpoint that allows you to go, ‘Huh, what would I do in that situation?’ That’s what makes it so fascinating.”
Watch Joe Lynch’s “Into the Unknown” this Sunday on SCREAMBOX.
