When the man behind the Hostel franchise and a key member of the Splat Pack tells you he wants to take you into his “strange dreamworld”, reckoning your house is as good a place to jump in as any, you can’t be too far from a nightmare. But then, everyone likes a good, safe scare.
Stephen King perhaps put it best when he reckoned that horror “makes you, for a little while, a child again.” In that case, Eli Roth is the ultimate overgrown kid done good.

A 42-year-old kid from Newton, Massachusetts who takes glee in guts and the gore, he has been dismissed as a mere purveyor of torture porn in plenty of critical circles. In response to media derision and outrage, Roth has sniffed that studios and critics: “forget that that’s what people are paying for – to be terrified and disturbed.”
And they’re paying for it in their droves. Since his black comedy Cabin Fever announced him to cinema in 2002, he’s had monster hits with the likes of the two Hostel flicks and The Last Exorcism.
Roth has now turned his attention towards the small screen, intrigued by the possibilities and freedom (read: lack of censorship) granted by the arrival of Netflix. The result is Hemlock Grove, for which Roth is an executive producer and its de facto face. Developed by Brian McGreevy from his novel of the same name and Lee Shipman, the show is set in the titular Pennsylvanian town where dodgy biomedical testing and supernatural goings-on have made it even less appealing for an overnight stay than, say, Buffy’s Sunnydale. The first season introduced the Godfreys, the family at the helm of the biomedical estate, and chiefly focused on the investigations of their heir Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgård) and Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron), a teenager of gypsy stock prone to getting hairy under the collar around midnight. Factor in graphic werewolf transformations, the presence of upirs – a form of vampire that can go out during the day without the Twilight sparkles – and buckets of blood and you have a very Rothlike concoction indeed.
Rather than going for the gross-out, however, Roth argues that the team were more inspired by the mystery and aura of some TV classics.
“The television that I loved was The Twilight Zone and, really, Twin Peaks, which was the defining television event for my generation,” says Roth. “I love David Lynch, I worked very closely with David Lynch for a long time. I loved shows that are just slightly to the right of reality. When you watch Hemlock Grove, you’re not seeing into reality. It’s smalltown America, but I think anyone from a small town anywhere can relate to the show.”
Roth explains how the online platform allowed them to approach the supernatural in a “very realist” manner.
“What’s great with working with Netflix is that it allows us to have the language, to have the violence, to have people react the way they honestly would. We’re not making it for a particular teenage audience, we’re making it for a global audience.”
Although season one didn’t inspire the same fervour as other Netflix originals like House Of Cards and Orange Is The New Black, it clearly found its audience – season two has just arrived. Buoyed by Netflix’s faith and belief that there is a legion of loyal horror fans looking for this kind of TV programming, Roth hopes that Hemlock Grove will rub shoulders with the likes of The Walking Dead, Hannibal and American Horror Story for some time to come. He also doesn’t see a golden age for small screen horror on the horizon – he thinks we’re in it.
“We’re in what people will look back on years from now, I believe, [as] the golden age of horror television,” he affirms.
“I think part of the reason is that the networks have gotten a lot more lenient about the violence you can show, but also we’ve places like HBO and Netflix now. And what’s terrific is that, if the adults are gong to have sex, then they have sex, and if people are getting killed, then they get killed. That’s what people want. So much of the best storytelling that was in movies has moved over to television. In movies now, the big action event, comic book movies feel like the norm, and getting some incredible drama is a one-of-a-kind thing. Whereas it used to be the reverse. It used to be a lot of dramas – all dramas – and every now and then there was an event movie. Now it feels like every movie is an event movie and the best dramatic storytelling is on television.”
In terms of Hemlock Grove’s story, season two finds them in uncharted territory, having finished with the source material. To guide the show and perhaps steer it clear of the guilty pleasure tags picked up during its first 13 episodes, Charles ‘Chic’ Eglee (a former show runner for Dark Angel, Dexter, The Shield ) was brought onboard.
“The first thing that he told me was ‘character, character, character’,” says Roth. “When I met with him, we talked about certain things. I said I wanted to see Peter changing back [from werewolf form]. He’s been so careful about hiding his werewolf identity in the first season. In season two, I wanted the first episode to see him recklessly changing back, almost like a party trick, showing it off in front of some people. Just to fuck with them! And Chic said, ‘no, no, no, he should be doing it like it’s a grift. Like it’s a drug deal and he’s making them hallucinate’. Everything that Chic did comes from character. He doesn’t want anything to be ‘random’ or not motivated.”
Eglee aside, there are new additions to the cast in the form of Madeline Brewer (Orange Is The New Black) and Madeleine Martin (Californication).
“We really have two world class actors taking on this characters and bringing them to life and that’s what’s exciting: when you cast actors like Madeline and Madeleine, it just inspires us to write even greater characters.”
Brewer plays Miranda, a newcomer to Hemlock Grove and love interest for both Peter and Roman.
“It was definitely a huge change to come from [Orange Is The New Black] onto this show,” says Brewer. “She is the first person you see on Hemlock Grove that is really question what the hell is going on: ‘This is not normal’. Miranda takes you out of it for a second, and lets you think that ‘yes, what is happenings actually totally crazy’. I feel like we don’t get that. We get lost in a world where this is all very real. It’s not – it’s real nuts when there’s 75 pounds of blood being poured all over you!”

Season two of Hemlock Grove is now available on Netflix