Repossessed

Demon-hunting drama Outcast turns even darker in its second season. Joseph McCabe gets the shivers

- Joseph McCabe

It’s hard to believe that just a short time ago, successful serialised hardcore horror was unheard of in American TV. Then came The Walking Dead. Robert Kirkman’s apocalyptic brainchild not only opened the floodgates for other macabre television dramas, it gave its creator the freedom to bring even more of his own dark imagination to the masses. The result was Outcast, which seeks to do for exorcisms what The Walking Dead did for zombies.

In its debut season, Outcast introduced audiences to Kyle Barnes (played by Patrick Fugit), a troubled young man with a gift for fighting demons. Partnered with Reverend John Anderson (Philip Glenister), a preacher who once believed he had Kyle’s power to cure the possessed, Kyle finds himself tasked with defending his town of Rome, West Virginia, against the evil that threatens it.

Though the show’s first year saw Kyle attempt to heal his own broken family along with the citizens of Rome, its second will, according to producer Chris Black, up the fright factor considerably.

“The cliché word would be ‘scarier’,” says Black, when SFX asks him how the show will differ in year two. “One of the challenges is it’s always been difficult to do real horror on television. There’s a hunger among horror fans to see in a television format stuff that they could only really see in movies before. One of the great opportunities we had in doing the show on Fox International throughout the world is they’ve given us the freedom to push boundaries and really tell stories that are truly terrifying. And we try to embrace that and ratchet up the stakes and raise that bar in the second season, beyond what we did in the first season.