By JENN ADAMS
Friday the 13th is widely considered a foreboding day, with a long history of tragedy and eerie coincidence culminating in a pseudo horror holiday often celebrated with spooky stories and franchise marathons. This year. Netflix marked the occasion with the release of a new limited series full of vengeful curses and lurking nightmares. From Channel Zero alums Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR roars onto the screen with the ferocious energy of a demonic acid trip.
Adapted from Todd Grimson’s 1996 novel, the eight-episode series follows aspiring filmmaker Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar) as she attempts to break into Hollywood by directing a feature version of her short film “Lucy’s Eye.” Betrayed by her producer mentor Lou Burke (Eric Lange), Lisa considers retribution through Boro (Catherine Keener), a mysterious woman promising to exact vengeance on Lisa’s enemies, but at a cost. Rue Morgue sat down with the creative duo to talk about demonic energy, “mother hunger,” and the project’s nightmare logic.
BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR (L to R) ROSA SALAZAR as LISA NOVA in episode 101 of BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR Cr. MERIE WEISMILLER WALLACE/NETFLIX © 2021
What drew you to Todd Grimson’s novel and how did you approach adapting it for TV?
NA: I read the novel ten or twelve years after it was published, probably 2007 or 2008. I had become email penpals with Todd beforehand because I had read some of his short stories. He sent me this book which I’d never heard of, it was out of print. I read it and I just didn’t know what to make of it. It really stuck with me. It has this really compelling yet sort of amoral and yet relatable main character, like a combination of Clive Barker, Brett Easton Ellis and David Lynch. I was working in finance at the time as an assistant, and I left that and came to LA and started the whole TV thing. And then Lenore and I became friends. We were working on Channel Zero. This was actually before…
LZ: Yeah it was before.
NA: And I sent Lenore the novel.
LZ: And I read it and you know kind of had a “holy crap” moment every time a new page got turned. It’s such a wild book and there’s so much material in there. I’ve never read anything else like it. It’s the most imaginative thing you know? You gotta respect it.
One of the things that’s fascinating about the story is the way it contrasts Lisa’s sense of morality with the morality of everyone around her, especially as she enters Hollywood. How did you approach exploring the emotional cost of cursing someone?
NA: Well, I mean the book has a sort of demonic energy that we wanted to capture. We changed a lot of things from the book in adapting it, but what we wanted to preserve was that quality of Lisa’s character. There is an amorality, and yet you identify with her, at least if you are somebody who’s trying to create things. At the same time, your vision can get so corrupted and hijacked and then you can get sidetracked and things like revenge or conflict can corrupt you. They can point you in the wrong direction, and that was part of what we wanted to explore with Lisa’s story.
LZ: An interesting thing that happens when something negative is dropped into the world is that it creates more negativity. There are infinite possibilities for how something can go wrong in Hollywood, so it’s a perfect environment to explore that kind of thing.
BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR is a story about trying to get a project made in Hollywood, and Lou Burke describes the process as the relationship between “predator and prey.” Is any part of the story autobiographical or representative of your own experiences?
LZ: Not for me luckily. [Laughs] I’ve had very good experiences and I hope I continue to.
NA: Yeah same. I’ve been very, very fortunate working with really good people. I have seen and heard stories and I’ve had near misses. One thing that I have seen that this story explores is manipulative mentorship. You know he [Lou] is a mentor to [Lisa] but he’s a parasite as well. And so is Boro actually. Lisa’s journey is the journey of a protege breaking free of her mentors and having to kill or escape her mentors.
I think you could read Lisa’s story as a #MeToo story. How do you feel it fits into the larger conversation?
NA: Well, ironically, we had started developing this project in 2016 so well before #MeToo. We had pitched and sold it in the fall of 2017, so it was never intended to be that way. It sort of coincided with something that was happening in the culture.
It’s a story that feels really relevant today despite the book’s 1996 publication and setting. Did you consider updating it for the present?
LZ: We liked keeping it in the ’90s mostly because it facilitated a more interesting story. One of the things we realized when we started to think about adapting it is that if you want to make a movie in the present day you just take your phone and make a movie. So the stakes were a little lower if we kept it in the present day.
NA: Short answer: too many screens!
The show has such a striking look. What did you turn to for visual inspiration?
LZ: We watched a lot of movies from the ’90s that took place in LA. Then, we initially were talking about it looking like True Romance during the day and Lost Highway at night, and a sort of interesting blend of all these beautiful pieces of film that we had watched. We got really, really lucky with our DP Celiana Cárdenas. She’s a genius. She had a thorough and incredible vision for the show that she brought to life. I don’t know what we would have done without her. It’s gorgeous because of her.
It really is gorgeous! And what inspired Lisa’s short film within the show, “Lucy’s Eye?”
NA: We were actually looking at early Lars von Trier. We talked with Rosa about it a lot because she’s playing the director of the film. We talked about what it would look and feel like, and Rosa was an influence on that. Matt Sobel shot it and we just kind of put our heads together and talked about what kind of film Lisa Nova would make.
Can you talk about the decision to gender-swap the role of Boro from the book and working with Catherine Keener to develop the character?
LZ: One of the reasons that we wanted to make Boro a woman was because we were really excited about this concept of exploring mother hunger and the sort of feminine nature of passion that is prevented from coming to life. There’s a lot that a woman experiences that men don’t. We already had Lou Burke. We needed somebody else for [Lisa] to play off of and we thought that was an interesting dynamic.
I also wanted to ask about the feline performers in the show and how you pulled off the birthing scenes.
NA: Well the feline performers are puppets. I’m glad you asked that question. They were extremely well behaved. They’re gross and cute.
They are gross and cute. Just the perfect line down the middle. How did you approach the other occult elements of the show?
LZ: I think we just kind of had fun inventing a lot of bizarre rules with Boro.
NA: Yeah, we drew some of the supernatural details from the novel directly, and then we invented some other stuff from various mythologies. But, more than any specific occult mythology, it’s nightmare logic. We would talk about what best represents what’s going on under the surface psychologically in the writer’s room, and we would come up with magic based on that.
Did you have any experiences with Channel Zero that came in handy on BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR?
NA: So Lenore and I worked on, was it Dream Door?
LZ: It was Dream Door, yeah.
NA: Yeah, so the idea of a main character who’s psychology is so deep and chaotic and turbulent that it manifests in the real world and starts damaging and influencing physical reality was obviously in both of those stories. Lenore and I talked a lot about those themes. Another thing we brought from Channel Zero is some of the people. Arkasha Stevenson did a season of Channel Zero. François Dagenais, who did the creature effects, also did the creature effects here.
Final question. Have you ever been tempted to put a curse on someone?
LZ: [Laughs] You know, I don’t personally believe in curses so the temptation is pretty far from my mind.
NA: Yeah I believe in moving on and moving forward. That’s part of the lesson of this story!
BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR is now streaming on Netflix.
