Screenwriter Nick Antosca on Finding Meaning in Terror
Nick Antosca is, for my money, one of the greatest purveyors of horror working today. His stories vibrate at a level so unsettling as to often defy description. They take root in your imagination, after you’ve experienced them, and fester there like tumors that periodically stab and scream. Simply put, they are the stuff of nightmares.
I’ve called Nick friend for, oh, about a decade now. When I first met him, he was the guy who’d written on the third and final season of my, by then, favorite TV series of all time - “Hannibal”. In fact, he co-wrote its finale. Afterward, he quickly went on to create the critically acclaimed horror anthology “Channel Zero”, then followed this by creating or co-creating numerous other horror/true crime series including “The Act”, “Brand New Cherry Flavor”, “Candy”, and “A Friend of the Family”. If this wasn’t impressive enough, he also co-wrote the films The Forest (2016) and Antlers (2021) - the latter of which was based on his short story The Quiet Boy. Did I say short story? Yes, yes I did. Because Nick is a published author, too, with several novels, novellas, and short story collections behind him.
I’m thrilled to be able to share with you my artist-on-artist conversation with my friend, in which we discuss everything from fear in his own life, to the psychologically autobiographical nature of his work, to the recent elevation of “true crime” to a genre. In particular, I want you to focus on Nick’s extraordinary relationship with his dreams and how he uses them to feed his art - but, likewise, how he uses his art to interrogate his own identity. He and I are going to speak at length about how he developed this approach and how his craft evolved, in part, to facilitate it. There are valuable insights here for artists at all stages of their creative journeys.
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COLE HADDON: Nick, I’ve missed you, man. I wish we could do this over drinks, but let’s do it this way instead. I tend to think of you as one of the writers I personally know most adept at scaring the fuck out of people. On so many occasions, I’ve read or watched you spin poetry out of the terrifying. So, to start, I want to ask you, what scares the fuck out of you?
NICK ANTOSCA: It depends – it changes. Before I worked in TV and film, I had a day job, and on the side, I got freelance jobs to interview filmmakers. I was interviewing Michael Haneke after The White Ribbon came out and I asked him if he was afraid to die. He said he wasn’t afraid of death, but he was afraid of indignity. I thought that was a good answer.
CH: I think it is, too.
NA: When I was a kid, I was afraid of someone coming into our house and doing something terrible to us. There were a couple experiences that influenced this. One of my earliest memories, from New Orleans, is picking dried mud off our family car after it was dragged out of the Bayou St. John by the police. It had been stolen and dumped there, apparently by some people who had been threatening my parents. I would’ve been like four years old – the backstory has been told to me secondhand. I just remember the car and the dried mud and feeling scared.
Then, when I was a little older and we had moved to Maryland, my parents bought a house that had a unit for a renter. Occasionally, there were weird people living there, behind our house, in the backyard – one in particular who I was afraid of.
CH: We’ll just skip the follow-up where I wonder if your parents were New Orleans drug lords or what they did to cross someone. I expect you’ve been asked this question about fear before because so much of your work obviously has a strong relationship to it, but what’s your own relationship like with it? What is it about the darkest aspects of humanity that appeal to you as a storyteller?
NA: I’ve been told that I’m not super in touch with my emotions - which I’m not sure I agree with. But when you ask that question and I try to think about my relationship with fear, maybe it makes sense that I picture an empty canvas. I can think of times I’ve been afraid. Mostly they were when I was really young, like I mentioned. Like younger than ten. I think I was very emotional then, very fearful, very attached to my parents. When I got older, I got more self-sufficient. Early adolescence is when I started writing, too. I was always writing horror stories, violent stories, even from a very young age. So, maybe I was expelling fear on the page. And when bad, upsetting things have happened to me as an adult, I wrote about versions of those things for the screen.
CH: Do you think you do that to exorcise these bad, upsetting things from your life?
NA: It’s more like picking at a scab or pressing curiously on a bruise. I don’t mean to make it sound all therapeutic. It’s also fun. I like horror. I like nightmares. I like to wake up from nightmares with my heart racing and think, wow, I got to experience that, and I’m okay. I sometimes hate waking up from good dreams. I’m like, “Wait – that wasn’t real?” I guess it depends on the dream. I have definitely had some bad dreams where the residue sticks with me all day. And good dreams that make me happy.
I’m surprised more writers don’t talk about getting material from their dreams. To me, it’s like free money. Images, sometimes whole storylines – this is available to us every night.
CH: This is fascinating because, most of the time, I have no idea that I’m dreaming at all. I remember discussing this with Wes Craven, whom you probably know regularly mined his dreams for his work – not just for Nightmare on Elm Street. So, I’m curious if this is a natural gift of yours, or if you’ve honed it with practice, as well as how you record them after the fact.
NA: I write down my dreams most mornings. Even if I weren’t using it for material, I think it helps me get to know myself better. I like to meditate, too. I went to the David Lynch Foundation and got instructed in transcendental meditation. That was very helpful. When I meditate, my dreams come back to me, especially if I’ve written them down earlier in the day. A lot of things from dreams end up in shows. Not in the shows based on true stories, obviously, like “A Friend of the Family” or “The Act”. But in “Channel Zero” and “Brand New Cherry Flavor”, there are tons of things that come from dreams.
CH: You’ve just referenced David Lynch, who has a deep relationship with his dreams, too. A mutual friend of ours, Harley Peyton, once described him as the most intuitive filmmaker he’s ever worked with. Now, it’s been a long time since Harley and I had this discussion, but what I took away from this advice was a greater willingness to unquestioningly trust my unconscious mind. It was really transformative for my work, too. I think the novel I had published a couple of years ago, Psalms for the End of the World, was directly a result of following this advice. How do you use your dreams in your work? Just helpful points of inspiration, like fun notes you might collect from a visit to the museum, or do you find them manifesting on the page in unexpected ways you then have to reckon with and maybe even just unquestioningly trust?
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