Tomorrow’s FEARnet exclusive web premiere of the horror anthology series Fear Itself – and to help you get ready for it, we spoke with cast and crew of the episode “Eater”.  Check out our interviews with director Stuart Gordon (of Re-Animator fame), actress Elisabeth Moss (of Mad Men fame), and actor Stephen R. Hart – as they discuss the plot of the episode, working in horror, and the mystical powers of the universe!

Stuart Gordon:

My wife is always kidding me.  Because when one of the kids cuts their finger I’m ready to pass out, and she says, “In your movies you’re using tons of blood and so forth, [but] you’re really the biggest baby in the world!"

“Eater” is a story about a little police station.  It’s set in upstate New York, and they have a serial killer that has been captured, brought there, to be put in a holding cell until morning.  And of course all hell breaks loose and it’s the worst night in the world for all the people involved...except the eater.

I think it’s a very different thing to be on network television because there are certain standards-and-practices issues that you’ve got to deal with.  But what I kept thinking about was some of those great old shows like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and how they were able to really scare the hell out of you and still manage to be broadcast-able on network TV.  So that’s kind of the challenge here: we can’t do buckets of blood or all sorts of interesting maimings and tortures, but we can suggest things.  And I think sometimes it’s the suggestion that is far scarier than the actual event itself.

Elisabeth Moss:

The story is about a serial killer named Mellor, who’s being transported.  He’s been caught, and he’s being transported to a bigger prison, and the feds are going to pick him up in the morning, but he has to stay the night in our little police station in Chesterton, and in our little cell.  And chaos ensues.

I play Bannerman, who’s the new recruit, who they call the boot.  She’s had three months on the force, so she’s brand new, totally green, very excited about her job – and also happens to be a very big horror freak, and used to be sort of a goth girl, has the tattoos and the piercing.  She’s very into this kind of thing, reads the horror magazines and that kind of stuff.  And sort of gets thrown into her own little horror film.

It’s definitely a simple story.  It’s very basic.  You have sort of your standard horror ideas but the way that it’s done and the way that Stuart Gordon is directing and the set design and the costumes and the make up and the special effects has just been so good.  The actors are great, it’s just been really scary.  There are times when I’m doing things and I don’t have to act that much because what I see is scary.

I enjoy doing the genre, not as much watching it.  Doing the genre’s fun because it’s not technical, [and] it’s fun and it’s like Halloween every day and it’s like playing.  Watching it, I’m a bit of a scaredy cat.  I don’t like a lot of gore, but I don’t like watching it so much I get really scared.

Stephen R. Hart:

My character is the type of character that could very well exist, you know?  There’s a lot of powers that people possess that can’t be measured by scientific means and can’t really be determined, but there’s people with power.  We know that.  There’s healers, there’s all kinds of things, and this story is very terrifying, because it takes place in a police station, which most people would feel that the police would kind of be in control of.  We can only hope that they’d be in control of their own station, but it’s one of those situations where maybe they lose a little bit of control.