‘I’ve written very cinematic stuff at the right time’: Joe Hill on producing a horror show in the social media age

It’s shaping up to be a very good year for Joe Hill. A TV show based on the American author’s novel NOS4A2 has just finished its first series in the US and hits UK screens next week. Another show based on the comic book series Locke and Key he creates with artist Gabriel Rodriguez is in production and will be shown on Netflix in 2020. Two short stories he co-wrote with his dad will be published in a collection this October, and one has been optioned as a Netflix movie. Another of his short stories from the same book is being made into an episode of the Creepshow anthology horror TV show.

Well, you get the idea. After two decades of published writing, Joe Hill is suddenly very hot property in studioland. “It’s crazy!” he declares. “A whole bunch of stuff that’s been developing for a few years is all kind of hatching at the same time.”

Something else you don’t know about Hill – partly because he took great pains to if not keep it an actual secret then at least not shout it from the rooftops at the start of his career – his dad happens to be the most famous living horror writer on the planet: Stephen King.

Hill’s full name is Joseph Hillstrom King, his middle name in honour of the Swedish-born American workers’ rights activist and songwriter, and when he started writing in 1997 with a clutch of short stories in fairly small-scale magazines, he took the pen name to distance himself from his father’s reputation and make it on his own.

His subterfuge managed to see him through the publication of his first short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, in 2005 and shortly after the release of his first novel, 2007’s Heart-Shaped Box, when word got out. But Hill had achieved what he set out to do: make it on his own terms. Warner Bros optioned the film rights and the deal was struck by the studio’s VP Kevin McCormick and producer Akiva Goldsman, with neither of them knowing of his famous dad.

Heart-Shaped Box, about a fading rockstar who collects occult memorabilia and buys himself an actual ghost, was never made into a movie, but Hill’s next novel, Horns, was. It arrived on screens in 2013, starring a fresh-from-Hogwarts Daniel Radcliffe as a young man who inexplicably begins to grow horns which force people to tell him their darkest secrets.

The forthcoming Hill short story collection Full Throttle, with its two collaborations with King, in some way closes the book on the period of his life during which he tried to keep a wide professional distance between him and his father. Joe Hill has made it on his own, and now he doesn’t need to keep secrets any more.

“The stories in Full Throttle are an interesting mix,” says Hill, “and two of them are collaborations with my dad. The story Throttle is a tribute to Richard Matheson, who wrote the movie Duel.”

Duel is a 1971 TV movie which just happened to be one of the early works of one Steven Spielberg. Based on a short story by Matheson, who also wrote the screenplay, it’s about a motorist menaced by a sinister truck, the driver of which we never see.

The second story father and son have co-written is called In The Tall Grass, which was originally published in Esquire magazine. It’s about a mysterious field into which wander siblings Cal and Becky, who not only cannot find their way out, but are confronted by horrors.

Hill has already seen the footage from Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation, and says, “It’s a real mindbender! Very, very scary. In a way it feels like early Cronenberg.”

I’m speaking to Hill at his home in New Hampshire, where he spends roughly two-thirds of the year. The rest of the time he lives just outside London. Last year, Hill was married to Gillian Redfearn, the deputy publisher of Orion’s science fiction and fantasy imprint Gollancz, which publishes Hill’s books in the UK.

“I love London,” says Hill. “I love being able to walk down the road to buy groceries, or go to the book store, or record store. My house in New Hampshire is in the rural suburbs, so that means you have to drive everywhere. I think people who live in cities are a lot more active because they walk to everything.”

He was born in 1972, and grew up with his father, mother Tabitha, sister Naomi and brother Owen in Bangor, Maine. It’s a very literary dynasty; Tabitha is also an author, as are Owen and Naomi (who is also a Unitarian Universalist Church minister). But what was it like being a kid in the home of Stephen King, creator of such blockbuster horror hits as Salem’s Lot, Carrie, The Stand, Cujo and dozens more?

“My parents loved books, and our table-time talks were always literary conversations,” says Hill. “We practically had a revolving door in our house where writers, publishers, booksellers would be coming in and out constantly.

“We read together as a family, after dinner we would pass books around to each other, and that’s how I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and discovered authors such as HP Lovecraft. For entertainment we’d roll a sheet of paper into dad’s typewriter and everyone would write two sentences each, in this long, ongoing game of exquisite corpse.” He pauses, and adds, “It was just my childhood, I certainly didn’t think there was anything unusual in that.”

The family lived at 47 West Broadway in Bangor, an almost foreboding-looking mansion that could be straight out of a horror novel by either father or son. It’s on the local tour bus route. The image of the King family playing literary parlour games of an evening is almost slightly disappointing; surely there were some more creepy moments?

Hill laughs, and recalls an anecdote about the 1982 movie Creepshow, a portmanteau horror directed by zombie-meister George A Romero and written by King in his screenwriting debut, adapting two of his own short stories. He also starred as a backwoods redneck who discovers a strange meteor in his yard, and while he was filming he took the young Joe along.

“They didn’t really have childcare arrangements on sets at that time, and while my dad was shooting his scenes he didn’t want me to be lonely, so they cast me as a kid who kills his father in one of the stories.” The rest of the time the nine-year-old was put in the care of Tom Savini, who was best known at the time for his gruesome horror make-up and special effects in movies such as Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. “Basically, Tom Savini was my babysitter,” laughs Hill.

And in a neat bit of symmetry, Savini is directing an episode of the new TV version of Creepshow, based on one of Hill’s stories which appears in Full Throttle, “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain”, in which a bunch of kids find the dead body of a Nessie-like lake monster.

What really propelled Hill to the big time was his 2013 novel NOS4A2 – or, as it’s published in the UK, NOS4R2. It’s one of those divided-by-a-common-language things, depending on how you pronounce the name of the vampire from the 1922 unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, Nosferatu. NOS4A2 is the punny number plate of a black 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith driven by the rather nasty Charlie Manx, who kidnaps children and takes them to a place called Christmasland.

The only person to escape Manx’s clutches is a tough kid called Vic McQueen, who has similar powers: as Manx can drive his Rolls-Royce to basically another dimension, so can McQueen ride her bike along the Shorter Way Bridge near her home and come out pretty much anywhere. She also has an uncanny knack for finding lost things.

The TV show based on the novel is about to finish up its first season in the US, and airs over here on AMC UK, which is available on Sky and BT, from 13 August. It stars Zachary Quinto, of American Horror Story and the Star Trek movies, as Manx, with Australian actor Ashleigh Cummings – familiar to UK audiences from her time on the Aussie soap Home and Away, as McQueen. YouTube sensation Jahkara Smith plays McQueen’s ally Maggie Leigh, a librarian with the ability to magically divine things using a bag full of Scrabble tiles.

The show has an aesthetic that Hill calls “Massachusetts Noir”, and as with many shows based on novels, it expands the universe from within the pages and gives more airtime to themes and characters which are only touched on in the source material.

Hill is credited as executive producer, but says his main role is “supporting the vision” of showrunner and writer Jami O’Brien. One interesting thing, he says, is how O’Brien has “dug themes out of the book which were subtext, and made them text”.

“When I wrote the novel I presented Charlie Manx and his assistant Bing Partridge as, in a way, representing the most toxic ideas of patriarchy,” he says. “Every woman Charlie Manx meets disappoints him, but when he comes into contact with Vic, she kind of fascinates him. Charlie’s views, at the time I wrote the book, were from a different time, they were from the 19th century, they were antique notions. But then, in the intervening time, all those attitudes have come roaring back. It’s like, when Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, it was science fiction. And now, some people seem to want to be using that as a guidebook.”

Hill says he’s delighted with the response to the TV show, but notes some critics – “mainly pretty white, and pretty male” – seem to take issue with a show essentially led by two female heroes which isn’t really sexy. “I guess the world of Vic is pretty grubby, it’s not glamorous,” shrugs Hill. “And the male characters… maybe the critics feel they don’t have anyone to relate to.”

Hill’s next novel after NOS4A2 was 2016’s The Fireman, a post-apocalyptic thriller following a pregnant nurse, Harper Grayson, in a world devastated by the Dragonscale virus, which causes people to spontaneously combust. It’s been optioned by Fox, and Hill has been writing the screenplay himself. But Fox’s recent acquisition by Disney has resulted in a lot of projects being scrapped. “The Fireman is still standing,” says Hill. “We’ll see what happens. It’s a fun script, so I hope we move on.”

After two big novels – both The Fireman and NOS4A2 weighed in above the 700-page mark – Hill what he called “downsized” with a book containing four novellas, Strange Weather, in 2017, and then concentrated on the short story collection, Full Throttle, out this October. He likens switching between shorter fiction and big tomes as akin to agriculture. “You don’t grow the same crop in the same land every year. If you grow corn one season, you’d better grow alfalfa the next.”

Hill has several crops in his silo, and aside from prose and screenwriting, he’s very big in the comic book world. His magnum opus so far has been Locke and Key, published by IDW and with Gabriel Rodriguez his artistic collaborator. It’s about a family who move into a huge, rambling house where locked doors lead to all kinds of worlds and situations, if you can find the keys. Which is not always, as the series shows, a good idea.

Locke and Key is finally coming to TV, but after a somewhat fraught journey. Back in 2011, Fox filmed a pilot for a TV series, but it didn’t get a series order. Then the channel Hulu took it on, but they backed out as well. Then, as Hill puts it, “Netflix sailed in and saved our ass”. The show is slated for a 2020 release on the streaming service.

So, it’s certainly a busy time for Hill. “I guess I’ve been very lucky,” he says. “I’m working at a time when there’s something of a content gold rush going on with the TV streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, alongside the legacy players like HBO. They’re all trying to build up media libraries, they’re just vacuuming up content, and I’ve been fortunate to be writing stuff that’s very cinematic at the right time.”

Added to that, it’s just been announced that Hill will head up his own pop-up imprint at DC Comics, called Hill House Comics. He will curate a line of five new horror series, writing two of them himself, and has gathered together some of the finest international comics talent in the business. The line launches in October with one of Hill’s titles, A Basket Full of Heads, illustrated by Italian artist Massimiliano Leonardo, who draws under the name Leomacs.

“It’s about an axe that can chop heads off but the heads can still talk afterwards,” he says, as though it’s the most ordinary thing in the world. He says he wants the line to have the tone of the Blumhouse production company, which has put out movies such as The Purge and Get Out – horror with social commentary and political bite.

Hill himself is forthright about his politics – earlier, when talking about how attitudes have changed between writing NOS4A2 and the TV adaptation airing, he muses, “The last two years have seen menacing thunderclouds gathering across the sun… or that would be better as pollution clouds, maybe. We’ve got social media which allows all these bad actors to find a way to say all these things.” He says he’s often asked how long he thinks the whole Netflix thing will last, what TV will look like in five years.

“Hey,” he says. “Who knows? In five years, we’ll probably be bashing cans open with rocks and hiding in the ruins of our cities from the dead-eyed ones, competing with the rats for food. We’re sitting in the pot as the water begins to boil but we’re too busy looking at our phones to notice.” Then he laughs and says, “That was cheerful, wasn’t it?”

Yes, life might be pretty good for Joe Hill, but once a horror writer, always a horror writer.

‘NOS4A2’ airs on AMC UK on selected satellite channels from 13 August. ‘Full Throttle’ is published by Gollancz on 10 October