Paul Simpson speaks to the creators of Fox’s short-lived but fun supernatural series Brimstone in this Dreamwatch interview from 1998. You can currently catch repeats on The Horror Channel…

What's the worst prison you can think of? If your mind turns to bricks and mortar, it might be Alcatraz, the Lubyanka or Colditz. If you're thinking in a more general way, it might be a loveless marriage or a boring job. Each in their own way is a private hell. But probably the worst prison to be in is Hell itself. Damned to torment for all eternity... But what if you could escape? In fact, what if 113 damned souls managed to escape? What would Satan do?

That's the intriguing premise behind the new Fox show, Brimstone. Created by Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff (Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight) and starring Peter Horton, (Children of the Corn, thirtysomething), Brimstone follows Detective Ezekiel Stone, whose wife was raped and murdered 15 years ago. Stone pursued the suspect and killed him in cold blood — thus condemning him to hell when he himself was killed shortly thereafter. The Devil, here incarnated in the slightly sleazy form of John Glover, offers Stone a bargain: he can be released from Hell if, and only if, he manages to capture the 113 escapees.

The genesis of Brimstone lies in a feature film script that Voris and Reiff had written a couple of years ago. "We thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool if somebody broke out of Hell?'" Voris explains. "Our first idea was that the people who break out will be an innocent pair of lovers, wrongly accused. Somehow the wheels of justice in the universe ground the wrong way and they were sent to Hell, for something really sympathetic. They break out and try to escape like fugitives from this kind of dark, martial law, heavy duty, draconian enforcer cop from hell who's the bad guy. Then we stopped and thought: if they were in hell, they belonged there, and the person who's dragging their guilty asses back to hell, that should be the hero."

113 is the Magic Number

The project languished for some time, until the writers decided to develop the idea for television. They changed the story from being about a pair of lovers to 113 souls who have escaped just before the series begins. "113 was just a really cool number," says Voris. "13 is a very scary horrific sort of number, but we wanted it to be a lot of damned souls, so 113 seemed cool."

Of course, it helped to sell the show that, for a network looking for a long running series, 113 souls, at a rate of one per week, equates to around five seasons worth of episodes.

With what they describe as the natural snobbiness of film people working in television, Reiff and Voris expected that the show would turn out looking "like Falcon Crest or Melrose Place, because television is television". However, Brimstone was to acquire a very distinctive look – imagine a combination of Se7en, Millennium and Graeme Harper's direction of Doctor Who's The Caves of Androzani – thanks to its pilot's director, who also acted as Director of Photography: Felix Enriquez Alcala. After working his way up through the ranks of the camera department at Warners, Alcala is now one of Warner's staff directors.

"He was like this revolutionary inside the palace," Reiff laughs. "He always wants to do things in a new and different way, and at the same time, he operates inside the system. We ended up getting on with him really well, professionally and personally, I think. We would argue about the material and settle it. He really liked the script, and didn't feel like he had to become the writing genius who was going to fix it. He was the director who was really going to make it come to life, and bring an extra element to it — which he definitely did."

Rolling Stone

The other major factor which both helped to sell Brimstone, and makes it work on screen, is the casting of Peter Horton as Ezekiel Stone. Although Reiff admits, "we would never have thought of casting Peter Horton when we wrote the part", both producers would find it difficult to imagine anyone else in the role now.

"I think he brought an amazing thing to it, which is, to what is a dark and morally ambiguous character, he brought a real likeability, and a real friendliness instantly, just because of who he is," Reiff says.

"The best thing that he brings is a lightness to the role," Voris adds. "His being Stone definitely helped us get on the air. Brimstone didn't bring to the table the type of things which usually get a show on television — really big names for the creators, really heavy duty track records, or big directors attached. All we had was the script, and that was it. Horton brings a little bit of a light, likeable touch to stuff which otherwise might be a little more difficult for us to get by the powers that be."

In the pilot, Stone chases after a 19th century priest, played by Crusade's Peter Woodward, who is capturing children, and is preparing to sacrifice them because he believes it is God's work. To outsiders – and to the audience for much of the early half of the show – it appears that he is simply a paedophile, with a rather less complex agenda than actually transpires to be the case. It's not standard fare for a television show, far less one which is now airing in America at 8pm.

One way in which the horror is lessened, or at least ameliorated, is by the use of black humour. In one scene, a friendly female librarian is attracted to Stone's rugged good looks, and makes a very obvious pass at him. Stone carefully rebuffs it, giving good reasons why he can't date the woman, muttering to himself, and the audience, as he walks away, 'Not to mention — I'm dead!'

"In a way, Horton was a dream come true for me and Cy," Ethan Reiff explains. "We had written a character with a very similar voice, a kind of dry humour voice, a number of times earlier. It had always been screwed up: it had either been rewritten by somebody who wanted to make it more cartoony and goofy, which happened to us on Demon Knight, or it had been rewritten by the director or the actor, and the lines weren't as good. That was the first time we had seen that character and that voice come to life exactly as we had sort of envisioned them. Horton nailed them. All those bits of dry humour and black humour, he really sort of got.

"If there was one thing that we weren't a thousand per cent happy about with the pilot, there were a couple of spots where we could have squeezed just a little more out of the black humour moments. In the series, we're trying to go to that well just a little bit more, to get just a little bit of the black humour."

Family Values and the Millennium Albatross

Although they received little or no problems from Fox during the shooting of the pilot – Reiff describes the whole experience as "probably the most pure joy of our careers. It was just awesome" – once the show got the green light to go to series, the fan started getting pelted.

Voris and Reiff continue to deal with this in a simple manner: "Just stop for one moment and think about the universe of the show. No matter how dark any of the specific details of an episode of our show might be, the world of Brimstone is so family values friendly, so traditionally moral values. Basically, the world of Brimstone is: if you live a good life, you go to heaven, a bad life you go to hell. Our story is this one anomaly: some of the bad guys broke out of hell, so somebody has to do something about it." Ruefully, Voris has to admit, "Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't."

Another problem that the creators are trying to overcome is comparisons with Fox's other dark series, Chris Carter's Millennium, which airs immediately after Brimstone. Although Reiff hastens to explain that Brimstone's problems are not the 1013 show's fault, "Millennium became a 10,000 lb albatross around our neck."

"The problem is that the very top brass at Fox saw our show, and said, 'It's dark, it's creepy, it's Millennium! We don't want this again!'" Voris adds. "Millennium is the dysfunctional universe. It's an unfair rap on our show. The biggest challenge is going to be constantly showing people that we're not Millennium. You watch five minutes of the pilot, and if you watch the wrong five minutes, here's this dark, creepy, spooky show, yes, it's just like Millennium.

"Again, Peter Horton helps a lot. He's a very romantic figure: a lot of women really like him. I think it helps get people into the show, and they realise there is the humour, and there is the more optimistic moral view of the universe.

"We made a key conceptual difference in the show which has paid off: these are not demons from hell, they are human beings who did horrible things, who went to hell, and have come back and they now have extra powers and abilities because they've been in hell — but they are human beings. We are examining in all the episodes what their take on it is. Even the priest in the pilot felt he was doing God's work, and he was fighting against the Devil. The irony in that final battle between him and Stone is he's saying, 'I know who you are, you've been sent to cast me back into the Pit, but I'm a Soldier of God'. The attempt is, if they're really scary and horrifying, you're going to get a tinge of their humanity every time."

With the action moving from New York to Los Angeles, and everything from Tang Dynasty poets to Carthaginian warriors being amongst the escapees, Detective Ezekiel Stone has a major task on his hands before he can gain redemption...

This article originally appeared in Dreamwatch Issue 52 (Autumn 1998).