October Faction showrunner Damian Kindler has teased what’s behind the trapped door at the end of season one.
October Faction follows Fred and Deloris Allen who, after the death of Fred’s father, return to their hometown in New York with their 17-year-old twins Geoff and Viv.
But the twins’ lives are quickly turned upside down when they find out that their seemingly normal and unremarkable parents aren’t who they seem: they’re not insurances sales representatives, they’re trained assassins who hunt monsters.
And he spoke to Her about how he got involved with the series, what he wishes they had been able to do in season one, and what may be lying behind that trapped door in the finale.
“I was sent the comics by IDW, the publisher, because they were interested in [adapting it for the screen. They’ve obviously adapted some of their titles before and so they wanted to know if I’d be interested in helping them come up with a version of October Faction, which I think Netflix was interested in, in general,” he told us, as he discussed how he got involved with the show.
“So they were looking for someone to come along and come up with a take, as they say. And I was really honoured because when I read the comic book, I was completely blown away, I was like, this is so special and so cool – and there’s fascinating characters, it’s not just a spooky supernatural thriller. It actually has a deep human story at its core. So, I was really excited when they sent it to me – I was really anxious to try and find a way to make it.”
He described October Faction, which debuted on Netflix back in January, as a family drama with a supernatural element.
“In a glib way, it’s almost like Men In Black meets Riverdale. It has a kind of fun and cheeky tone to it. But it’s also about the real and honest moments that happen when we’re coming of age, or in our teens or 20s, and we begin to earn this very raw, ugly truth about our parents which changes who we think we are and changes our relationship to our parents,” he continued. “So, it plays with a lot of big and small themes.”
He also weighed in on the differences between making a Netflix series – where fans can choose to bingewatch the entire thing, or little bits at a time – versus more traditional TV series’.
“It’s a very different way of making series television, or a series drama, which is you’re going to be delivering one story in ten chapters And you don’t put it out one at a time, you hand the whole thing over once it’s done,” he said.
“It’s like working in this underground lab for two years and you lose kind of all context for what it is and what it means, because you’re not rolling it out week to week and getting reactions, you’re actually just working on one whole thing. And after two years ago, you hand it over and you don’t even recognise what it is in context to reality or anything anymore. So, it’s nerve wracking because you kind of done it – you’re so close to it and so deeply inside it that you don’t know what it is.
“But I’m just overjoyed that when the came out people responded positively to it, understood it and got behind it.I was just like, I’ve been stuck in this kind of research facility making it for so long that I didn’t know whether people would like it.”
Discussing the plans for season two should the series get renewed, he admitted there was a “lot more” he wished they had been able to get into the first 10 episodes – and why he sees season one as a “prologue” to the October Faction story.
“I wish we could have gone deeper with Dante the character, which we will in season two if we get a pick up,” he said. “There’s more backstory of Alice and Fred as teenagers, there’s a lot more about Presidio – we’ve barely scratched the surface there. There’s a lot I would love to do.
“I’d love to have a crack at [a second season] because we feel season one was all just basically a prologue or a set up to what the actual October Faction is – and so, it’d be really cool to have a chance to kick it into high gear.”
As season one comes to an end, the viewers get a glimpse of a trapped door in the basement of the Allen family home, with something big and very angry sounding trying to break free.
And Kindler said that he “absolutely” knows what’s behind that door – and it sounds to us like it’s going to be just as big and bad as you would expect.
“When Deloris took Geoff into the underground lab where her father-in-law had been hiding, to sort of reconnect with him, they may or may not have accidentally awakened something by activating that lab,” he teased.
October Faction is produced by High Park Entertainment in association with IDW Entertainment. IDW Entertainment is the worldwide distributor for the series, except for in Canada. October Faction builds on the success of IDW Publishing’s comic book series written by Steve Niles.
