With its second season, titled "No-End House," Syfy’s Channel Zero has become one of the best horror shows on TV. There’s a lot to thank for that: a really solid cast, an intriguing story that goes beyond the creepypasta on which it’s based, really smart music and set design, and more. But Channel Zero took its creepy horror to another level at the end of its second episode, "Nice Neighborhood."
In Episode 1, as Margot and her friends entered the No-End House, they witnessed a warning scrawled across the first door: "Beware the cannibals." It seemed like standard haunted house set dressing, but in Episode 2 we found out what it was about, as Margot’s dad, John, tore apart some uncanny simulacrum of his wife and slurped bloody boba balls from inside her flesh.
There are plenty of clues to what was really going on there. We’ve met some residents of the No-End House, including JD 2’s girlfriend and Lacey (the woman from the first episode’s opening scene), who appear to have lost all their real memories. If you watched closely while John was rubbing Margot’s head as she slept, it appeared her mother’s face was becoming increasingly fuzzy and obscured. Then her mother appeared down in the garage, and John ate her. It seems the No-End House creates entities like Margot’s dad, then uses them to feed off living people’s memories.
When we spoke with the show’s creator, horror writer Nick Antosca, about the scene, we had some specific questions: Where did that imagery come from, and what was actor John Carroll Lynch really eating while filming the scene?
"There’s a very specific answer to that," he said. "It comes from conversations between me and [Director] Steven Piet and Sarah Sitkin, who’s a horror sculptor who we brought onto the show principally to create the sculptures inside the No-End House, like the busts and stuff. But we also had her create the ‘flesh memories,’ these kind of hard shell memories that you crack open and eat the goop inside."
The thing that really makes your skin crawl in that scene is the way that "goop" oozes slowly out of her arm, and how Lynch greedily scoops it up and lets it smear down his chin as he consumes it. The "memory filling" went through many different iterations, from "this kind of runny, gluey white paste thing" to "all different kinds of gross tapioca slimy things," Antosca said.
"We tested a bunch of digusting stuff for the memory filling, and we settled on something that kind of explicitly looks like fish roe," he explained. "It’s actually tapioca with some chocolatey pudding and dye in it, and John said that it tasted very bad. At the end of that take, he would just stand up, like, smeared with that stuff, and go, ‘You’re welcome,’ and then walk off."
"And John is great, by the way," he added, chuckling. "He’s a dream to work with."
In the original creepypasta story on which this season is based–Brian Russell’s "The NoEnd House"–a man named David enters the house in the hopes of winning $500 for making it all the way through. By the end, it’s implied that he’ll be trapped inside it forever, but the story didn’t explore how, why, or what happens next. That’s where Channel Zero: No-End House gets to have some fun.
"I don’t purport to say these are canonical versions of the Creepypastas," Antosca said. "Obviously we take the original, we adapt elements of it, we use the original premise, and then we invent and put our own stamp on it. The way I look at it is each season of Channel Zero is like a nightmare that you have after reading the story it’s based on. It’s our fan fiction of the original creepypasta."
"I read a bunch of creepypasta, I zero in on one that particularly speaks to me or has a lot of possibility, and then I just think about it for a while," he continued. "I think about what it means, what it suggests, what kind of larger possibilities there are in the world and the mythology."
Channel Zero Season 2: No-End House airs Wednesdays on SyFy. You can also watch the first episode on YouTube for free.
Source: GameSpot
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