REPOSSESSED
Demon-hunting drama Outcast turns even darker in its second season. Joseph McCabe gets the shivers
It’s hard to believe that just a short time ago, successful serialised hardcore horror was unheard of in American TV. Then came The
Walking Dead. Robert Kirkman’s apocalyptic brainchild not only opened the floodgates for other macabre television dramas, it gave its creator the freedom to bring even more of his own dark imagination to the masses. The result was Outcast, which seeks to do for exorcisms what
The Walking Dead did for zombies. In its debut season, Outcast introduced audiences to Kyle Barnes (played by Patrick Fugit), a troubled young man with a gift for fighting demons. Partnered with Reverend John Anderson (Philip Glenister), a preacher who once believed he had Kyle’s power to cure the possessed, Kyle finds himself tasked with defending his town of Rome, West Virginia, against the evil that threatens it.
Though the show’s first year saw Kyle attempt to heal his own broken family along with the citizens of Rome, its second will, according to producer Chris Black, up the fright factor considerably.
“The cliché word would be ‘scarier’,” says Black, when SFX asks him how the show will differ in year two. “One of the challenges is it’s always been difficult to do real horror on television. There’s a hunger among horror fans to see in a television format stuff that they could only really see in movies before. One of the great opportunities we had in doing the show on Fox International throughout the world is they’ve given us the freedom to push boundaries and really tell stories that are truly terrifying. And we try to embrace that and ratchet up the stakes and raise that bar in the second season, beyond what we did in the first season.
“In the first season,” Black explains, “we had episodes that didn’t even focus very strongly on a supernatural component. That showed that horror can come from a very human place, that the demons that confront us are often of our own making, and don’t need a supernatural place to come from. That said, we’re not shying away from the supernatural component. The big reveal of the second season is the true scale of the threat that these people are facing. That it’s much bigger, it’s much scarier, it’s much more pervasive and widespread and much more challenging for Kyle to face than he
"WHAT YOU SAW IN THE FIRST SEASON WAS THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG"
ever envisioned. In terms of the stakes for the characters, it is a much greater threat to the people he knows, to the people he loves and cares about than he ever imagined it could be.”
Chief among those people is Kyle’s daughter Amber, who recently – unbeknownst to Kyle – was revealed to have inherited her father’s ability.
“Hopefully that is going to be one more layer of the onion that we will peel back as we begin to dig deeper into what the supernatural mythology of this show actually is,” Black tells us. “And Kyle discovers that he is not entirely unique. That this is an ability – be it a blessing or a curse – that he has passed on seemingly to his daughter is going to be a big revelation to him on a couple of different fronts. One, on a very personal level, he is going to be horrified that he has burdened his child with what he sees as a terrible curse that he carries himself; and his primary goal is going to be to protect and shield Amber from all the horror and responsibilities that he faces. But it’s also going to open up another line of investigation for Kyle. In the realisation that is this is something he can pass on to his daughter, he asks, ‘Is this something that was passed on to me?’
“We do have the issue of his missing father, and that’s going to provide another line of investigation for Kyle to dig deeper into his own personal history and how it’s linked to the history of Rome itself. We are going to get very deeply in the second season into Kyle’s backstory.”
Meanwhile, Reverend Anderson will struggle with his crisis of faith.
“We left him at the end of the second season as essentially rejected by his flock,” says Black. “So part of Anderson’s arc for the second season is going to be his own struggle to find family. To find his place where he belongs and his role in this larger fight, now that he’s come to understand it’s really Kyle who’s the instrument and not him. Anderson’s struggle is to find a new family, which ultimately may bring him back around after his crisis of faith to rediscovering his own religious faith in an entirely different way.”
FRESH FACES
As for the new characters joining the show this year, Black breaks them down for us… “We have a big new character who’s coming in, this character named Dakota, who’s this sort of mysterious young woman who is the leader of this cult-like sect who lives in the woods outside of Rome. Who clearly has some insight into what is going on in this world, but whether she is fighting with our heroes or against them remains to be seen. “We also have a new character named Dr Park, played by this wonderful actor Hoon Lee (who plays Joe on Banshee), who’s an enormously talented guy who is going to come in as a compatriot of [Brent Spiner’s] Sidney. But again, we’re going to wonder if this guy has an agenda that falls in line with Sidney, or whether he’s pursuing an agenda on his own.
“We’re also going to dig deeper into some of the characters we’ve already established. Chief Giles’ wife Rose is going to become a much more pivotal character and be drawn into the struggle in Rome. And we’re going to dig much more deeply into her relationship with Chief Giles and bringing the two of them together as a team to fight the threat that’s facing Rome.
“There’s also Junkyard Bob, who’s played by a wonderful actor named MC Gainey (who a lot of people may remember as one of the Others on Lost). He comes in as this hermitlike recluse who lives out at the local salvage yard, whom Kyle discovers. He knows a lot more about what’s going on in this town, and a lot more about Kyle’s own personal backstory than he’s been letting on. So he becomes a big player in the second season.
“Without getting into spoilers,” says Black of the danger facing Rome, “what you saw in the first season was the tip of the iceberg. These demons that Kyle has seen are the first wave of a much larger battle he’s going to have to wage. He is going to be confronted with new enemies, but he’s also going to have to find new allies in order to wage that fight, and he’s going to discover that although his ability is singular it is not unique. That he’s going to need to find people who can fight these entities the same way that he can, and bring the big guns to bear so to speak, if he’s ever going to defeat them and ever going to get what he wants.
“Which really is his life back,” adds Black. “His wife and his daughter.”
Outcast season two starts on 3 April on Fox.