It’s clear that WGN’s “Salem” is quite horrific. What surprised me more than anything after speaking with creators Brannon Braga (“Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”) and Adam Simon (“The Haunting in Connecticut”) at the Salem Press Junket was just how embedded horror and especially horror history are in “Salem’s” DNA. There are a lot of phenomenal horror tropes that run through the show but occasionally we’ll see something that pulls from, spoofs, imitates, or pays tribute to classic horror from times past (most recently, in last week’s episode, we got a killer “Evil Dead” moment, which was both so awesome but self aware to the point where it was okay to snicker a bit). The horror references this season also pull from ancient fairytales including a haunted well.
The last episode of season one gave us a full on “Scanners” moment. When I asked Braga his influence in having Anne Hale telepathically explode her mother’s head, he confirmed my suspicions. “Well…the head exploding was ‘Scanners’. We were going to have the whole head explode but we felt it might be a little over the top, so we just had the top of her head explode. But it was inspired by ‘Scanners’.” And “Salem” goes balls to the wall with their special effects. “We built an amazing head and we blew it up!” said Braga.
“There are horror influences that Adam [Simon] and I—being lifelong horror fans—both bring. From “Scanners,” to Ramsey Campbell, who is one of my favorite authors…and this season will have a lot of H.P. Lovecraft references in there.” Said Braga. Note: I almost peed my pants when he told me this, being a lifelong Lovecraftian.
Without going into too much detail, Braga let me in on a little secret. There will be a rat in this season on “Salem”…and that rat may or may not be a prominent character in a wonderful little Lovecraft story. I’ll leave it at that.
Anne Hale might be one of the most classic horror-influenced characters yet. Not only did she get to reenact “Scanners” but also this season she goes full “Carrie.” Braga said, “She’s a cradle-witch. She’s incredibly powerful. But she has absolutely no control over herself and that makes her even more dangerous.”
Braga also cites David Lynch and Roman Polanski as big influences on the tone of the show (the atmosphere of dread and tension, in particular).
Both Simon and Braga grew up on horror so naturally “Salem” had no other path to go down. Simon said, “One of the first things we [he and Braga] said to each other is ‘We’re going to be the first real horror show.’ It really feels like what passes for horror on TV is not horror. In all kinds of ways…because of the limits of what you can show, but also because it tends to be done by people for whom that was not really their genre, their language. We really wanted it to feel physical and real and visceral.”
Simon, like Braga, assured me that the horror we see is totally old school. The only digital is for the realism of the set…set extensions, to make the ocean bigger, things like that. But the horror…as mentioned above with the gruesome head explosion, that’s as real as they can get without actually breaking laws.
Because of Simon and Braga’s lifelong obsession with horror, they had a fun time playing around with hidden references in things like titles and as I said earlier…the rat. “In the second season, and I would say probably only true fans of Bloody Disgusting will even get this reference, we’ve almost tapped into more of the classic foreign horror films. On the one hand there’s almost a kind of j-horror, k-horror thing happening here that you’re going to see, but also all the great Italian and French horror films. I would say this is our [Dario] Argento season!”
So if you doubted the horror elements of dear ol’ “Salem” take a deeper look. And bust out your H.P. Lovecraft. Find that rat.