We had the chance to chat with popular horror writer Joe Hill about his body of work, his thoughts on women in horror and the television treatment of NOS4A2.
Author Joe Hill is known for his novels (Heart-Shaped Box,The Fireman) and for the movies and series based on his work (Horns, NOS4A2, Locke & Key). He is also known for being the son of Stephen King; but, Hill is extraordinarily talented in his own right.
When this writer first read his debut novel Heart-Shaped Box, I did not even know to whom he was related. I only knew that this was the best horror novel I had read in years.
With AMC series NOS4A2 ending its second season, it was great timing for Joe Hill to chat with 1428 Elm about his body of work, and how he feels about the television treatment of NOS4A2.
1428 Elm: Hi, Joe, it’s a pleasure to “virtually” meet you! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I’m a big fan of your work, and I am loving the NOS4A2 series on AMC, particularly in this second season.
Joe Hill : Oh, I’m so glad to hear it. I hope you love the final chapter.
1428 Elm: The first of your novels that I read was Heart-Shaped Box, probably in ’07 or ’08, and there is so much bad horror out there that I was thrilled with your book. There were passages I could literally see, and I always thought it would make a great movie. What are the odds that we are ever going to get a chance to see that great movie?
Joe Hill : You know, I think about that now and then. Because Heart-Shaped Box was one of those books that got lucky, and had a big picture sale before it ever came out. It was bought by Warner Brothers with quite a bit of fanfare, and they had Neil Jordan, who had done The Crying Game and a lot of great Irish films.
He was set to write and direct, and there was a writer’s strike, I believe in 2008, and Neil Jordan went back to Ireland to do a little indie picture, which…let’s face it, isn’t that the kind of movie we actually wanted him to make anyway?
You know, a nice personal film about the world he knows best? So, with that, Heart-Shaped Box kind of slipped away into this Hollywood netherworld where different screenwriters have worked on it, different folks have been attached to it. Every once in a while, like every 18 months, there will be a little flurry of excitement, and it seems like something’s gonna happen with it, and then everything goes silent again.
1428 Elm: Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed, for sure.
Joe Hill : When I wrote it, the idea of a perfect movie, the perfect movie version of it would have been filmed about 1986, and it would have been directed by John Carpenter, starring Kurt Russell.
And we could have got…who would’ve done the soundtrack? Who would have written the music? Get Danzig to write the music! That would have been perfect!
Tawny Kitaen could play Georgia, she would’ve been awesome. That would have been great, I want to watch that film, man, that would have been so great.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a time machine, so I don’t think John Carpenter is available to go back in time and make that movie. And Kurt Russell…you know, Jude’s a little bit of an older guy, but I think Kurt Russell has somewhat aged out of the part.
1428 Elm: I don’t know, Kurt Russell could do almost anything.
Joe Hill : Well, when you think about it, as a young guy, he played Elvis, and Judas Coyne is kind of a heavy metal Elvis, so to me, it always made perfect sense in terms of the casting.
1428 Elm: We recently talked to Jami O’Brien, and we discussed how nuanced your characters are. They’re not perfect, sometimes they’re infuriating, but you always root for them, you always want them to come through. When you write, do you base your characters on people you know? If not, how do you go about creating these complicated characters?
Joe Hill : I know that there are writers who write from an autobiographical standpoint, I try to avoid that. For me, the thrill of fiction is projecting myself into lives that are different from my own.
And just to go back to Heart-Shaped Box for a second, I mean Judas Coyne is the perfect example of that. I don’t really have anything…I mean, ultimately, I’m not a 60-something heavy metal musician who’s played arenas and recorded videos.
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All I know about that life is what I read about in Rolling Stone when I was a teenager. But it was exciting, you know, the thrill of fiction is finding your way into a life and a set of experiences very different from your own, and finding out what that’s all about.
Of course, you do have to do the homework; you have to get it right. People feel betrayed if you tackle something that’s close to their own experience and get it wildly wrong.
But, if you can pull the trick off, if you do the homework, if you can stick the landing, people feel seen, and they feel like, “Oh, that’s how it is, you know, I love that this person knew that that’s how it is.” And so, that’s kind of what you’re always going for. I will say one thing, Jami’s a wonderful writer.
She deepened the emotional lives of all these characters, and really explored them, and explored the darker corners of their psyches in a way that I wasn’t able to always touch on in the book. She did wonderful work with the characters. I do think it’s kind of interesting…
I follow along on Twitter every time a new episode comes out. And, if you took someone with Vic’s characteristics, and she was male and played by Bruce Willis, you know, a wise-cracking drunk, really tough, really emotionally shielded, relentless in her pursuit of the wicked, but not really connected to her family, sort of missing out on that emotional connection with her family, and fumbling to try and make it work…that’s a hero everybody loves. As soon as that character’s female, people become very critical, and I find that tremendously interesting.
So, maybe the sins we would accept in a male hero if they’re fighting the terrorists in Nakatomi Plaza, we are no longer as a culture as happy with, we are much more judgmental as soon as that character is female.
1428 Elm: Yes, and it’s a shame this late into our existence as human beings that it’s still that way.
Joe Hill : Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s a tough one, and as a creator, I’m always wrestling with it. Because, I think especially in the horror genre, there’s a long, long tradition of centering female characters as the protagonists. Look at any of the slasher films, ultimately the hero is always, you know, Jamie Lee Curtis.
1428 Elm: Yeah, the Final Girl.
Joe Hill : Yeah, the Final Girl, you know, Ripley in Alien is a Final Girl. But, there’s so much pressure for that character to not really have any flaws, except maybe some sense of fright, which she has to overcome. But, people should be allowed to be more complicated, you shouldn’t have to be a brilliant, perfect looking virgin to be a hero.
1428 Elm: Yes, that is true. And, that’s Vic in a nutshell, really. Now, Horns has been made into a movie, NOS4A2 and Locke & Key became series, and you were able to be involved in all three of these projects, correct?
Joe Hill : Yeah, somewhat. I didn’t have too much to do with Horns. I would say on a scale of one to ten, with ten being really maximum involvement, I would say I was probably a one on Horns, a four on NOS4A2, and about a six on Locke & Key.
1428 Elm: It’s enough for you to keep an eye on your babies, though.
Joe Hill : Enough, enough. With Horns, I felt like, you know…my Dad had had a lot of stories turned into films, and I’ve seen that happen. But it’s different when it’s your own piece of work, it’s an experience you’ve never had before, someone takes a story you wrote and makes a show out of it.
And with Horns, I felt like my job here is to shut up and learn, not to try to control the process, just to see how does this work? How do people handle themselves? I made suggestions, I read scripts. I thought Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple and Max were brilliant, Alexandre Aja who directed it, they put together a beautiful film.
The first third is so funny, it’s a black comedy, the second third is really tragic and really frightening, the final third is very surreal, it doesn’t quite work for me. And I did have a pitch about two scenes that we could film that I thought would make the ending work a little better, and Alexandre Aja loved it, but there was no financial way to shoot another five days. That’s show biz, babe!
1428 Elm: And I know that your father was probably disappointed in a lot of the adaptations of his books. I’ve read about that, I’m a big fan of his as well, so I imagine you learned a little bit from his experiences also.
Joe Hill : Yeah, somewhat. I think the main thing I learned from my Dad, is…you know my Dad always said people will see a movie that wasn’t very good, and they’ll say, “Oh, man, they ruined your book!” And my Dad’s answer is, “No they didn’t, it’s still right there.”
1428 Elm: Exactly!
Joe Hill : Not one single word in that book is changed. And that’s kind of my view about all this stuff. With NOS4A2, I told a version of the story that made me happy. I took my best swing at it, and worked on it for about three years, and that’s the version at book stores.
And Jami loved the book, and saw things in it that brought her back to her own childhood in Massachusetts. And she wanted to do her spin on the story, and from the moment I read her first script, I thought, “I wanna see this show, this is great, this is really fun and really heartfelt, and nuanced, and thoughtful, and exciting and scary.” And I largely viewed my role throughout season one and season two as supporting her.
1428 Elm: I really liked, in the last episode particularly, that we really got to see a different side of Bing and of Millie that we hadn’t seen before. For the first time, I actually felt a bit of sympathy for them.
Joe Hill : Don’t feel sympathy for Bing, I mean, Bing might have been saved, but…
1428 Elm: He tried to do the right thing for the first time, though.
Joe Hill: Yeah, but it was a little bit late for that.
1428 Elm: He’s a little bit off the rails, so...
Joe Hill : In some ways, Bing is Charlie’s most tragic victim, because he is himself a kind of child. That said, he was turned on by the power that he got from his association with Charlie Manx. And he willingly went with him to an amoral, terrifying place. So, he’s a tragic figure in the same way that Renfield in Dracula is a tragic figure. That said, you wouldn’t want to give Renfield a comforting hug in a dark alley.
1428: Tell me what we have to look forward to from you in the near future, what have you been working on in quarantine?
Joe Hill : Well, I spent a lot of the last year and a half working on a set of comic books under the Hill House imprint for DC. I wrote a couple of them, there’s one called Basketful of Heads and another called Plunge, I worked with some great writers and artists to do some other stories, Daphne Byrne, The Low, Low Woods , and The Dollhouse Family, and those are all coming out in some really beautiful hard covers over the course of this fall.
1428 Elm: Right, I was looking at the website, that looks really interesting.
Joe Hill : Yeah, I’m definitely excited, they come out as individual issues, so comic book fans know about them, which is a whole different readership in book stores. I’m excited for the collection of hard covers to get to book stores. I’m working on a new novel, which is going really good. It’s another beast, I can tell it’s gonna be another of these Fireman size books. Sooner or later I’ll learn how to write a short novel.
1428 Elm: No, I love a big book! I’m a very fast reader, so I like something to keep me entertained for a long time.
Joe Hill : This one is definitely going to be a doorstop, like NOS4A2. That’s going really well, and then my soul brother Gabriel Rodriguez and I have returned to the world of Locke & Key, and we’re doing more Locke & Key comics, and the storyline we’re working on now leads into a Locke & Key and Sandman universe crossover, and that’ll be coming out over the next year.
1428 Elm: That all sounds great. Thank you so much for your time, now I can check one item off my bucket list.
Joe Hill: Thanks for talking with me, this was fun.
Have you read the books and stories of Joe Hill? Tell us which are your favorites in the comments section.