Creators Jim Cooper and Jeff Dixon never set out to make an animated horror show for kids. “Curses! sort of happened because we’re both dads and our local kids went to elementary school together. We met dropping the kids off at school and found out we were both writers,” says Jim Cooper known for his work on Dragons: Riders of Berk and Vinyl. Jeff Dixon is known for his work on action film The Hurricane Heist, so their meeting was fortuitous.
The dads discussed the idea for Curses! over many years. Originally, it was conceived as a live-action idea, which would have been even more expensive to produce than animation. Coupled with the difficulty in setting up original material at a studio, the pair ruminated on the idea until the timing was right.
Gateway Horror
“We always liked the idea of gateway horror that had this entry level stuff, whether it was live action in something like Poltergeist, The Goonies or Gremlins,” continues Cooper. The writers didn’t feel that the traditional PG-rated material pushed the right buttons with them and felt that horror for kids and their families was an underserved market.
Director Leo Riley read all the initial material for Curses! ranging from the scripts, show bible and additional notes before deciding his take on the material. “My approach was talking to Jeff and Jim, figuring out where their heads were at, the space that it needed to occupy, and then coming up with a visual approach that felt appropriate to the content,” says Riley. Then he spent some time considering the show’s audience – kids and their parents. The director describes the look of Curses! as being “a bit more illustrated than traditional animation.
Cooper and Dixon pitched Curses! as a kind of Scooby-Doo to Dreamworks and Apple TV+ executives as the closest comparable, despite the aesthetic being totally different. Jeff Dixon also mentioned animated films like ParaNorman, Monster House, Coraline and Goosebumps which have a “spookier” edge to them during their meeting.
Gateway horror has guardrails so the horror elements are suitable for kids. Adds Dixon, “I tend to lean more horror. Jim tends to lean a little more comedy. And anytime something got too scary, he’d pull me back. When thing got a little too zany, I’d pull him back. Leo also is a horror guy, but he also is probably the most stable head of us all to realize that absolute sweet spot balance in the middle of we can’t traumatize kids.”
Although horror and comedy are the prevailing genres of Curses! with some family drama, fantasy, and Indiana Jones high adventure folded in. Riley allowed himself to experiment with different horror genre permutations depending on each episode.
Curses! has a clear mandate that it’s a show for kids from the start, but that their parents can also enjoy. “Ironically, we would always say in the writers’ room that we weren’t writing a show for kids. We were writing a show for everyone that was accessible to kids,” clarifies Dixon.
Meet The Vanderhouvens
The Vanderhouvens are loosely based on the Cooper and Dixon families and their relationships.
Curses! centers on the exploits of father Alex (Reid Scott) who’s turned to stone from a family curses following the theft of ancient artefacts, his wife Sky (Lyric Lewis), and daughter Pandora (Gabrielle Nevaeh) and son Russ (Andre Robinson) who decide to return them in oder to reverse the curse.
Sky (Lyric Lewis) and Alex Vanderhouven (Reid Scott) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+.
The first episode involves Alex hiding the family curse and setting up a mystery for the family by telling him he was eventually going to turn to stone. But the family is always at the center of the show. Says Jeff, “Jim and I are just dads at heart. We tried to be the Clark Griswolds. We always try to keep the family doing this tradition or that tradition.” Many family shows focus on the kids ditching their parents, going on an adventure, and coming home in time for dinner. The Vanderhouvens are always together in Curses!. “So when the dad is turned to stone, it’s not just the kids who lost their dad. Sky lost her husband.”
“It’s really based out of our relationships with our siblings, and then also our kids’ relationships with each other at the same time. It’s interesting because my dad died when I was the ages of Russ and Pandora,” says Jim. Pandora and Russ make fun of one another following the loss of their father because humor is a way to cope with such a loss.
The Pilot Episode
Arguably one of the most important episodes of any series, the pilot episode involves a lot of heavy lifting to introduce the characters, the world, and the story to the audience.
“The funny thing about the pilot is, we bounced many times about how far to break it up,” recalls Dixon. “You are introducing the characters and the story, but you also need a contained entertaining story within it. You can’t just be an exposition dump.”
Interestingly, Curses! uses the first three episodes to launch their story and the background behind the curse which is normally reserved for the pilot episode. “We always have that mentality of spreading out some of the information in episode two and three and not trying to jam it all into the pilot. We don’t introduce the hourglass until episode two, we don’t introduce what you have to do with the artefact until episode three,” continues Dixon. This gave the writers some breathing room to allow them to focus on the family. Previous drafts compressed the setup into the pilot episode.
“That was our real core. Let’s focus on the family because if you don’t care about the family, then you don’t care about the stakes. Then you don’t care about the series,” adds Jeff.
“The pilot is about the situation. You’re cursed. This is more a cliffhanger into the next episode, where you could build more information,” continues Jim. “And then, in episode three, allowing them go on the adventure to return the thing. You can get it all in one episode, but you’re not getting very deep on anything.”
Russ (Andre Robinson) and Pandora (Gabrielle Nevaeh) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
Recalls Leo, “I really remember about that process of kicking off into the pilot episode was how initially there was a different opening for the pilot. And what happened was there was a concern that you must find a balance of trying to give enough information, but not too much information. My thought was, ‘Let’s give them the information that you could probably harken back to as you get deeper into the episodes.’ You’re dropping kernels while moving forward and hook the viewer without a massive information dump where people just turn it off. It was a matter of visually being able to give you everything right at the beginning and follow up with an explanation.”
The potential for a massive backstory information dump occurs when describing how their great, great, great grandfather Cornelius went to these places and took the artefacts. And now theye’re all paying the price.
Creating The Series
Jim Cooper and Jeff Dixon broke the entire first season before the main writers’ room opened. “We had an idea of what the artefacts were, the idea of each episode, and the locations and cultures of every episode. Once our writers came in, it was more about fleshing those out and taking a lot of their personal experiences and putting them in. Use stuff from your own life,” mentions Dixon.
They referenced two staff writers Ami Boghani and Dimitry Pompée. “They’re two very different human beings, but in actuality they have such a Pandora and Russ relationship. We listened to them talk and used their dialogue,” continues Jeff.
Ami discussed the pressures of being a mom in the writers’ room, balancing work and life, and having so little time to herself. All this ended up in Sky’s character. Cooper also highlighted Dimitry’s love of history to infuse into the storylines.
For Leo Riley, “It had to do with taking these scripts that were quite complex and finding a balance of where we could go dark, where we would add a little levity to the storytelling. You have ways to offset things that might feel a little harsh with something that’s a little light.”
Advice To Writers
Jeff Dixon recalls a very early draft a writer wrote which played “very young, like it was written for something else.” The writer claimed that they wrote for “kids.” Dixon and Cooper responded, “Write what you would want to read, write what you would want to see, write the show that would interest you. And then, if there’s anything that you need to tailor down, you can go back in the rewrite process. Because if you’re trying to write for someone that is not you, you have a tendency to over exaggerate certain certain aspects of the story.“
