Rob: Well, it was a cool movie. No worries about that.
Adam: Thanks, man.
Rob: It was really cool. And before we get into "Salem", which I am so excited to talk about, you did one of the best horror documentaries, of course, "The Great American Nightmare". What triggered you to do a horror documentary, and how difficult was it to acquire the incredible roster you had for that?
Adam: Yeah! I would have to say, it is one of my most favorite projects I ever did. Certainly one of the pieces I am most proud of, and I have a lot of love for that film. I love that people still find and use it as a guide, and it was made in 1999-2000. I won't say those movies were forgotten at the time, but nobody was really looking into that particular group of horror films from '68 to '78. I am not saying we're responsible for it, but it was interesting to me that a decade after that, all of the films mentioned were remade. And the whole motif that the movie was about, certain what we came to call "torture porn", which was never thought in that way before, not to mention the figure of the zombie, not to mention the motif of Cronenberg films, these movies involving a somewhat "sexual contagion", all of these had kind of been forgotten. I was approached by IFC, you know, Independent Film Channel, and the guy who runs that, Jonathan Searing, was also himself a great horror fan. He knew me because I had done another documentary that I had on Sam Fuller, and they had acquired that and knew that I was also a fan of horror. It was during that time that we talked about the history, I said, "Give me an hour or an hour and a half, I still can't tell you the entire history." And we played on that idea, and I wish we had done that, it would have been a longer, more involved history on the series. But '68 to '78 was definitely part of my formative years, six to sixteen, and that age group kind of forms your mind. And, I was particularly fascinated by these films, and may of them I didn't see as a kid. Most of them were the "out there", "dangerous" ones, and I started with more innocent seeming horror. And then I got the chance to really talk to the guys who made this darker type of stuff, talking to them as one professional to another, not to do the typical "How did you make that guy's head explode?", I didn't take it from the typical fanboy approach. It was about connecting with all of these filmmakers as human beings, which made films that were really in a tumultuous period in our country's history; the Vietnam movement, Civil Rights, and all of the explosive stuff was happening. So, it was really kind of a one-to-one thing. Some of the guys felt skeptical, and they didn't want to talk about things they talked about a zillion times. And with first couple of interviews with George Romero and Tom Savini, who laid the foundation, and then interviewing Jon Landis, these guys really went to their friends and said, "You should really talk to this guy, this is something different." I had interviewed all of these guys who really had a chance to talk about their films in a different approach and really talk about what was happening in the world when their movie was being made. So, to me, also hearing about the crazy nightmares that were happening in the street, it was both inspired and really echoed these collective nightmares that were put on the screen.
Rob: And there were a lot of imitators, documentaries like "Nightmares In Red, White, and Blue" and all of these documentaries that spawned the historian style of talking about horror, and of course what was happening at the time.
Adam: Yeah. It really hadn't been done, I don't think, and it also awakened a number of filmmakers like Eli Roth, and films like "Wolf Creek" and Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" to go, "What if we look at our times this way?" The group of guys that I know all saw the movie and said, "Well, what if we applied that today?" I do think it inspired a rebirth of that kind of horror, right out of the nightmares on the streets.
Rob: Now, we are going to get into "Salem", which is exciting. What prompted you and your partner to take the series to WGN America?
Adam: Well, a guy who is an Executive Producer on it now, Josh Barry, who had been an Executive of ABC, who is part of a company that actually runs a company, and this will be interesting to your readers, "Prospect Park" which actually manages a lot of metal and death metal bands. He had seen a pilot that I had written for NBC, and he out of the blue on Halloween in 2012 contacted me and said, "Are you interested at all in Salem? The idea of what happened there?" I said, "Of course! I have always been fascinated", and he said, "Do you think there is a tv series in that?". I said, "I am sure there is, let me go off and think about it." And that was the kind of stuff I was obsessed with as a kid, particularly HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a truly American horror. Plus, I started reading nonfiction stuff about witchcraft and events that happened in Europe in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and my wanting to do something with that. And for the first time I thought about it, and said, "Wait a minute. We always look at the events in Salem in the Arthur Miller, "The Crucible" kind of perspective, and we kind of block out the accusations that happened there. And the world of witchcraft they were talking about was really part of a last gasp of a two to three hundred year European tradition. I did some research and was really blown away by at what I found. The first thing that really leapt out that was so fascinating was in the center of all of these English witch trials, which you see in "Witchfinder General" and all of these books all happened in the county of Essex, something like eighty percent of these pieces were in Essex, which just happened to be where the majority of these Puritans that came to the United States are from. This is why the county of Salem was called Essex, which really blew my mind! So I said, "What if this wasn't an American phenomenon, what if the old witches had come to and they were on the same boats?" At any rate, I came up with a really different approach that came down to the witches were real, but what if they were running the trial. That came from reading the transcripts of the trials, reading stuff from the period that just seemed weird, unanswered questions why certain Puritans that were involved in the same practices were never prosecuted, things like that. So, it was originally pitched to "Fox 21", who was the more cutting edge of the tv family, as it was doing shows like "Homeland", and "Sons Of Anarchy", of course. And they immediately got excited about it. But I also had zero experience in tv other than writing a pilot that people really liked but never got made, and they said, "We want to pair you with an experienced showrunner, but everybody wants him,he probably won't do it, but let us take a shot at it.and see if you get along." That was Brannon Braga, and they sent him a twelve to thirteen page thing I had written just about the world it would take place in. I had known Brannon's work already doing a couple of seasons of "24" and he had done episodes of what I thought were the only good, more contemporary science fiction I had seen like "Threshold" and "Flash Forward". He really fell in love with it and we met, what I didn't realize was that Brannon was a life-long horror guy, and he never got to do a horror movie. We discussed the idea and got along instantly, so we worked on writing a pilot for Fox which then was sold to FX. We were going to be on FX, when out of the blue we were not the only horror show (Deep sigh). The network was really excited, and then the runner of "American Horror Story" decided to do one of theor next seasons about witches, and he had mentioned he was going to do it in Salem, but they never did it. We had already written the pilot, and it was up in the air for a moment what would happen to the show, when all of a sudden WGN, which was actually run by the same people who ran FX had slipped the script to them. They were excited because they were looking for a way to launch a whole new network to define who they were with an new show. It worked well for us because they didn't just give us a chance for a pilot, they came to us and said, "We don't want to just shoot your pilot, we want thirteen episodes." And we were off to the races. So, on the other hand, were going to be seen on a network that only hit sixty percent of American homes, and people had never heard of it. But the upside was, we were going to get to tell the whole thirteen hour story and see if it worked, instead of getting a pilot that may or may not have been picked up. So it also explains the first Season which had choppy points because I had to write all thirteen hours in considerably less time than we could spend writing the pilot, which with the second Season we had more time to plan and pay it out to be more cohesive in thirteen chapters.