Sean Crouch got his start in television with shows like Veronica Mars and Numb3rs, but ever since he saw Aliens when it opened in 1986, the new showrunner for Lore season 2 of has always wanted to do horror.
“When I was 13, my favorite movie was Aliens,” he says. “That was the movie that sort of changed my life. That’s when I realized you could make these great action movies, with great female action stars, but still be scared by what’s happening on screen. From that moment on, I’ve always wanted to do science fiction or horror, so I tried moving my career that way as best as I could. I took jobs on other shows at first, but I kept telling my agents what I really wanted to do.”
“Once I got that Exorcist gig,” he adds, “I was really happy.”
Following Syfy’s Dominion, which ran from 2014 to 2015, Crouch scored a producing and writing gig on the second season of FOX’s acclaimed The Exorcist adaptation, which operated as a horror mythology series. The approach to distinctive and self-contained stories there is one that Crouch took to Lore season 2, where he took over as showrunner back in February.
Showrunner Sean Crouch talks new approach for Lore season 2
Based on the hugely popular podcast created by Aaron Mahnke, the first season of Lore premiered Friday, Oct. 13, 2017 on Amazon Prime. Roughly a year later, a new batch of six episodes for Lore season 2 will stream this Friday.
Much like the previous six episodes, the latest entries will delve into new horrifying tales of murder and the supernatural, like “Hinterkaifeck” and “Prague Clock,” that are based on actual accounts. Unlike season one, however, Lore season 2 focuses more on narrative and character than combining the show’s cinematic dramatizations with documentary footage.
“That was actually pretty much how I got the job,” Crouch says of his pitch to emphasize story and character over the previous season’s documentary-like approach. “When I went to Amazon, I said, ‘I would love to turn this into a show that I can’t watch with my kids.’ I want them to have that experience when they’re 13, not when they’re seven. It’s still set in the unscripted world, but it’s all a narrative now. We’re trying to make it scarier. Sure, we have more money and the production value is great, but it’s all a smaller, simpler story.”
Throughout the conversation, Crouch repeatedly returns to the movies and television shows that frightened – and engaged – him when he was younger. The Twilight Zone is a big part of his personal mythos, but so too is – yes, you guessed it – Aliens. And even though Ridley Scott’s first film, Alien, has more in common with the horror genre than James Cameron’s action-heavy sequel, he’s right on the money.
“I think Alien is more of the traditional haunted house film,” he explains. “There’s a monster on the loose. Whereas Aliens is that and everything else. That’s why, to me, Aliens is one of my favorite movies of all time, because it takes me through all the different emotions that are possible. That’s what I want to try to do with horror.”
Crouch continues, noting that “horror, at its very center, has to have heart” in order for it to work.
“It has to have something relatable, something that you love, so that you can be worried about losing it. In horror, it’s most likely the case that you’re going to lose whatever that thing is. In Aliens, they lost everything, except for the few people who survived. They lost the entire planet! Or, consider The Exorcist. It’s about a father and his kids, really, but then we went in and dropped a demon into the mix. It’s always about the family and the kids first. If you just have someone walking around and killing people, then you don’t care about what’s happening. That’s not scary.”
Lore season 2 premieres Friday, Oct. 19, on Amazon Prime.
