Mr. Price, had you read King’s novel before accepting this assignment?

I can’t remember.  I might have because Stephen King can be a guilty pleasure or an un-guilty pleasure, everybody has three or four Stephen King novels where they were like, “Oh,  I remember where I was when I read that”. And it’s different for everybody because he writes so much.  He always so much fun to read.

What about the supernatural aspect of The Outsider: isn’t it something new for you?

It is, but I always wanted to write about the supernatural since I was a kid, so it was a perfect combo for me.  And I liked the slow evolution of it.  What appealed to me was the notion of a detective who believes in tangible things, things that can be presented in court for a conviction.  What does it take for a person like that to accept to revert from reason to faith, like history in reverse?  I don’t like supernatural stories where 10 minutes into the show everybody has accepted that it’s all flesh-eating zombies out there like it’s normal and everybody goes oh shit, it’s zombies.

What kind of approach did you apply to the genre?

The thing about the horror genre is that unfortunately, most horror is not horrifying, it doesn’t really frighten you, it gets too pyrotechnic or you have to be an adolescent to really get scared.  And I think the way to turn horror into terror, meaning that horror is “Boo!”, while terror is more sublime, more subtle, is to keep it as human as possible,  even the ultimate creature. And that’s how I went about it.

A scene from The Outsider.

hbo

In some ways, the supernatural can sort of get around the normal rules of a crime procedural, escape the laws of gravity.  Was that something that you were trying to steer away from with this and to try to keep it grounded?

I was trying to keep everything as grounded as possible. I thought,  what would it take for me to believe in the boogeyman as being a sanctioned person of this century, not a French peasant farmer of the 15^th century?  I just wanted the events to be baffling but relatable, the problems that arose from the possibility of supernatural to be fought with reason that fails, I wanted it to be a real struggle to get there and once you get there, to keep that as human as possible, as I was saying.  But how do you convict a supernatural, how do you present forensic evidence in court about the boogeyman or Dracula or a ghost? This dilemma was very appealing to me.

The horror genre is changing. Stephen King himself said that his stories right now take a lot more from the world, which is becoming a scarier place than his own stories.

Yes, but the thing is that every generation has its own monsters, but it’s basically the same monsters. Now it’s Iran and the crisis this year.  Well, it could be medieval France and Henry whoever is coming over and there’s going to be war.  I mean everybody has Iran, everybody has the United States, every generation has its own horror. The most blatant example is the original Japanese 1954 movie of Godzilla.  It’s about post-World War II, where this giant sort of dinosaur creature is disrupted from the middle of the earth by nuclear explosions, I mean talk about metaphors!  But essentially you could say, what’s Dracula, Dracula is about Victorian sexual anxiety; Frankenstein is about don’t get too arrogant in the age of enlightenment, you can do godlike things, but don’t think you are God or all Hell is going to come down on you.

Who is this generation’s monster in your opinion?

I don’t know, just read a newspaper!  (laughter) Donald Trump, I mean he’s supposed to be on our side, right? Well, he’s not.  Just read a newspaper and it will answer your own question.

How much was Stephen King involved in the script?