V
ampires, zombies, witches, shape-shifters, angels, demons, aliens, monsters, serial killers and small towns with supernatural secrets are just a few of the entities currently haunting your cable box. Indeed, prime-time television is in the throes of a genre revival with seemingly every network launching its own macabre series in the hope of cornering a share of what’s proved to be a very lucrative market.
This latest wave of mostly supernatural programming (see p.28 for a round-up
of terror on TV this fall) began percolating in the 1990s with hit shows such as The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which helped set the stylistic template for what would follow. But the genre TV renaissance truly came to a head during the last five years with the ongoing success of Supernatural and breakout premium cable series Dexter, True Blood and The Walking Dead ultimately paving the way for even more new genre fare, including Haven. The series –which is loosely based on Stephen King’s 2005 mystery novel The
Colorado Kid, about the haunting effects of an unsolved murder – debuted last summer and is currently in the midst of its second season. (It airs on Syfy in the US and Showcase in Canada.) The decades-old crime at the centre of King’s story forms the show’s overarching mystery, which is made even more mysterious due to the fact that no one can remember what actually happened that day. But that’s far from the only weird thing going on in the picturesque Maine town. “Like any small town it looks all pretty, everything looks
fine, and then you hang out there for a while and you get to know some of the weirdos that inhabit that town and you learn about the dark underbelly of this otherwise perfect little joint,” says Lucas Bryant, who stars as police officer Nathan Wuornos, a lifetime resident of Haven. “If you hang out even longer, you learn the reasons for those age-old feuds and all the darkness that goes on in town. And that’s what’s happening in Haven.”
The community is being plagued by something the locals refer to as “The Trou-
bles” – special, chaos-causing abilities exhibited by some of the residents when they’re exposed to extreme stress or trauma. For example, after the death of his wife, a man’s shadow detaches itself and goes on a vengeful killing spree. Then there’s the boy whose nightmares are causing people to die in inventively grisly ways, a woman whose stormy moods result in equally stormy weather, and another woman who hooks up with a man on a Friday, only to give birth to his offspring on Sunday, draining him of all life in the process. “The Troubles are unidentified periods in time which causes residents of Haven to go cuckoo,” jokes Bryant. But to his co-star Emily Rose (Jericho), who plays Audrey Parker, the former FBI agent who assists him in his inves- tigations, things are a little less cut and dry. “People say [the Troubles are] superpowers, but it’s not like that at all,” she explains. “Superpowers are things that people discover and can control about themselves, and the
Troubles are things that people don’t want to admit are there, are trying to cover up or don’t know how to control.” As a result, Haven is the sort of place where huge gaping
cracks suddenly appear in the landscape, drawings become the artistic equivalent of voodoo dolls, dead things come back to life and food rots right before the eyes. And as with the best King adaptations, character development never plays second
fiddle to the freaky weekly set pieces. Audrey, for example, is driven by an overwhelming desire, as an orphan, to find her roots. So when the Bureau sends her to Haven to track a
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