The Big Picture

Fright Krewe is an animated series created by Eli Roth and James Frey, following a group of misfit teens in New Orleans as they battle an ancient demon. The series aims to capture the spooky and Halloween vibes, while also providing a safe and thrilling viewing experience for kids and families. Roth discusses the balance of scares and humor in his family-friendly projects like Fright Krewe and The House with a Clock in its Walls, and also hints at the level of gore in his upcoming R-rated slasher film Thanksgiving.

From co-creators Eli Roth and James Frey, the Hulu and Peacock series Fright Krewe follows a team of misfit teens – John “Pat” Patterson, Soleil Le Claire, Stanley Rodriguez-Jones, Will “Maybe” Satchel and Missy Dalisay – as they fight to save the city of New Orleans from an ancient demon who feeds on fear. While each high schooler gets a special gift from the Voodoo spirits to help them succeed, they must learn to overcome their own differences and work together, if they’re going to survive the secret supernatural world that’s been real, all along.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Roth talked about how this series he created with Frey came about, the vibe they were aiming for, why New Orleans is the perfect setting, building on what succeeded with the PG-rated The House with a Clock in its Walls, and the impression The Twilight Zone and Weird Science made on him. He also talked about the level of gore in his upcoming R-rated slasher film Thanksgiving and why it’s taken so long to bring it to the big screen, along with what happened to History of Horror.

Collider: New Orleans, spooky and Halloween are pretty much my three favorite things. If I had to pick a life vibe, it would definitely be that, so I was all over this show. I love everything about it because of that. How did this come about? Did you just want to capture something with that vibe?

ELI ROTH: Absolutely. Animation is obviously a long process, and this started back in 2015, when I sat down with James Frey, the writer, who is a dear friend of mine. We were talking about doing something horror and scary for our kids. There hadn’t been something that did what Scooby-Doo did for us, when we were kids, where you would watch the show and it was scary and it was safe, and the kids always figured it out on their own without the parents. We love that. It was an ambitious idea, but we said, “Let’s create something, whether it’s an animated series or books, that’s like Goosebumps, but that’s about a group of kids in New Orleans that are solving supernatural mysteries and that they accidentally unleashed this evil called The Fright.” And we put it together. We just started writing it. We thought of the characters – Patrick Patterson and Stanley Rodriguez and Missy and Soleil Le Claire. Some of them had different names, at the time, but we put together this series because we thought New Orleans is such a rich city, in terms of its history and in terms of horror. It’s the most haunted city in America, with the amount of ghost tours that they do in New Orleans.

In terms of animation, we thought about how voodoo was portrayed when we grew up and what we saw, whether it was a voodoo doll in Creepshow, or a mad scientist using voodoo to create slaves, it was always done in a very cartoony way and it was very one-dimensional. Looking into the religion, there are so many incredible, beautiful things. It’s such a rich religion. If you think about the crossover of religion and horror, look at how The Exorcist is still going, and you have Maman Brigitte, the Lwa, Papa Legba and Marie Laveau, and what she was to New Orleans. We thought, if you can do this and do it right, and bring in practitioners, and voodoo priests and priestesses, and people from New Orleans, that could really authenticate the groundwork for the story you’re telling, you could have something so cool and so special and unique, so that kids would think of it in a different way. We grew up with thinking voodoo is when someone is gonna put a spell on you and poke pins in a doll. But now, you can have a whole generation of kids that go, “Oh, this is a Lwa that helps you cross over, when you leave this world and go into the spirit world. This is the Lwa of bravery. This is the Lwa of strength.”

It’s so interesting how putting a visual representation to it can educate kids and make them reframe it in a completely different way. You want kids to watch the show and have fun, but then also go to New Orleans and see the places that are portrayed in the series. Kid scary, at its best, can give you that thrill and give you that laugh, but you can also Trojan horse all these ideas of bravery and friendship and finding your own voice and finding your own power. In Scooby-Doo, the kids were smart and they solved the mystery, but it was always a person in a mask. Here, the monsters are real, and when you’re dealing with real monsters, they always represent some side of ourselves. There’s always some side that we’re embarrassed by, that we’re ashamed of, and that we’re afraid of. Whether it’s Missy, who wants everything to be perfect, but she turns into a Rougarou, and the loss of control of your body is a real fear for kids. It’s giving kids something that they can chew on, that will be their mythology and their monsters that they can take ownership of, for the rest of their lives.

Image via DreamWorks Animation

I loved The House with a Clock in its Walls.

ROTH: Thank you.

That was the perfect spooky family film. This show is part spooky and part horror, but also for the whole family. Is there a key to hitting that right note for the whole family? Are you able to go further than one might think? How do you judge that? I was surprised at how much blood and gore is in this, but it still hits a really great family vibe.

ROTH: Thank you. The key, for me, is treating kids as intelligent young adults and not talking down to them and not saying, “I don’t think you can handle that.” It’s giving them enough where you’re giving them the scare, but you’re not traumatizing them. And giving a laugh after a scare is really important. Also, you have to really define what the playing field is, up front. With The House with a Clock in its Walls, I really wanted to do a straight PG movie. There are certain guidelines in a PG film, like Something Wicked This Way Comes or Gremlins, that’s not PG-13. PG-13 goes a little bit older and a little farther. It can get pretty close to an R. The Last Exorcism was PG-13. The House with a Clock in its Walls is straight PG. The kids are gonna get scared, but it’s that endurance test of, “Can I make it?” You always have Jack Black and Cate Blanchett there, so you’re like, “Don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay,” at the end of it. You don’t have that dark ending to it. It’s not about really scaring kids. It’s giving them the scare and giving them the thrill, but also teaching them something, at the end of it. You’re teaching them something about not judging a book by its cover, or maybe giving someone a second chance, or ways to repair an old friendship.

That way, when they get into a scary situation, or they’re afraid of a monster under their bed or in the closet, they can think of their Patrick Patterson or Stanley or Missy or Soleil, and they can find that bravery and go, “Wait a minute, I know how to beat this monster. You just have to decode it with this, or beat them by playing that note or that song.” This is my version of figuring that out. Even without the help of the parents, the kids can overcome great danger and monsters, and for little kids, that’s important. For parents, you want something that’s visual and spectacular. We were very lucky that we had DreamWorks Animation to support us because we could really render this stuff at such a high cinematic level, with a director like Shane Acker. Our showrunners, Kristine Songco and Joanna Lewis, are so fantastic and they care so much. Once my name is on it, everybody wants to push the gore, and we go, “Yeah, kids can handle it. Let’s push it as far as we can.” But when you have the humor and the message underneath it, it all makes it okay.

I’ve seen a lot of your horror projects over the years and you really have a sense of what works, in that regard. But The House with a Clock in its Walls and Fright Krewe both just really spoke to me because they have a perfect balance of that scary family vibe.

ROTH: Thank you. I would say Fright Krewe is for the kids, and then when the parents want date night, they go to Thanksgiving. That’s one for the adults. But also, when you’re a parent and your kids want to watch something scary, you’ve gotta watch it with them. They want to know that it’s okay and that it’s safe. They want you there in the room. It’s like when The Simpsons first came out, people were like, “Oh, this is for adults and kids. Everybody can watch the show together.” That’s what I like. If you’re a fan of scary, you’re a big kid, yourself, and I love the challenge of it. It’s easy for me. Well, it’s never easy. When I’m doing Thanksgiving, I wanna come up with a great crazy tale and push the gore as far as I can. It’s a really great challenge when you’re in the box of, “This is for kids. We can only do this. I have to be clever in other ways. We have to have smarter writing. I have to have better dialogue. I have to have funnier visuals and more inventive monsters. How are we gonna do that?” The House with a Clock in its Walls was actually so freeing. I was like, “I can’t be gory. I don’t have the usual tricks. How can we make Isaac Izard come out of the grave with worms in his eyes? What can I do to Isaac’s voice to make it terrifying? How can I transfer Mrs. Hanchett? What are the different tricks I can use to make them transfer?”

When I saw The Twilight Zone, the movie, as a kid, that Joe Dante episode with the girl who could create anything, the sister is watching TV and she had no mouth. Are you kidding me? I lost my mind when I saw that. That stayed with me, my whole life. Or Weird Science with the creature they turned Chet into. There was such weird, fun stuff that was in the PG kid realm. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had Amblin and DreamWorks Animation to help me render that, and they really supported it. I look at what Robert Rodriguez did, when he was doing Desperado and Spy Kids, or Peter Jackson, when he did that stuff and then The Lord of the Rings. That’s definitely my sensibility. I’ve always wanted to make stuff for different audiences. It’s just having kids and wanting to give them something that they can call their own and that they can enjoy too. You can’t go from zero to Hostel. There’s gotta be a few steps in between.

Image via DreamWorks Animation

How would you compare Thanksgiving to your previous films? How would you describe the level of gore? Are you talking gory, or crazy gory? What can we expect?

ROTH: I wouldn’t say it’s as far as Terrifier 2. It’s much more in the Cabin Fever and Hostel vein, where it’s an R-rated movie that’s being released in movie theaters by a mainstream studio, but it’s still totally bonkers. I want everyone screaming and going, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe they did that.” It’s that kind of movie, but it’s also not gonna be in the way you’d expect. You want to outdo what you did in the fake trailer, but hit people in ways that they don’t see coming. That’s the trick. Because it’s based on a fake trailer, I have to live up to the expectations, but I can’t just recreate what I did before because then, weirdly, it becomes boring. So, you have to surprise people in ways that they don’t see coming.

It’s been 15 years since the trailer in Grindhouse. Why now, versus even five years ago?

ROTH: We tried to do it. There were rights issues, and then the pandemic hit. We thought we had. Also, we were trying to get the script right. For years, I was just connecting the dots between the trailer, and then I was like, “Am I just filming the scenes in between what I already did before it?” (Co-writer) Jeff Rendell and I just went through every iteration. I’ll tell you, the big revelation was, he said, “I have to just pretend that Thanksgiving 1980 exists, and that it was so offensive that every print was destroyed, and the only thing that survived was the trailer. This is the reboot of what that movie was. Every copy of the script was burned. Every print was burned. The only thing that survived was that one trailer, on the darkest corners of the internet. So, we have to make a movie based on that. This is the reboot of what that was.” That freed me up creatively to go, “I can use a couple of my favorite things in the trailer, but I don’t have to worry about recreating the trailer.” That trailer was for a movie where every print was destroyed. Now, this is gonna be its own thing.

Image via DreamWorks Animation

One of my co-workers, who was a fan of your History of Horror TV show and podcast, wanted me to ask if you felt like you were able to say everything you wanted about the history of the genre with that, or if there’s any chance it could return, in some form and at some point?

ROTH: We had a fourth season that we pitched to AMC, but they decided not to do it. I would continue that show forever. I would never stop doing History of Horror, if it was up to me, but AMC did not want to continue it. Unfortunately, a new regime came in. You’d have to write to AMC and demand it come back because it was literally AMC that said, “No, we’re not gonna do fourth season.” I had great guests lined up, but they didn’t want to do it. I’m very lucky that we got to do three seasons and a podcast, but I would continue that series the rest of my life. Maybe I’ll do it in another form.

Fright Krewe is available to stream at Hulu and Peacock.