DC: I love that earlier you brought up this concept of universal fears. What kinds of tales can we expect to see, what fears will we experience, with the rest of “Two Sentence Horror Stories”?
VM: So for me, I love that you said that because in the Two Sentence Horror Stories, the universal fears are the universal way we experience fear, the dark mirrors, the unknown, and then I think that’s a reflection of the stories in the series that are also dealing with universal fears but I would say they are universal primal fears. Death, but for me not just death but loss, grief, abandonment, loneliness and, a really big one for me, being helpless. So I feel like if I was to just do the kinds of things that scare me the most I would do those.
If I’m being completely personal and honest, being alone is one of my biggest fears and what I love about horror is that really, that is one of the central themes of almost every single horror tale ever told. You’re alone, you’re alone in the dark, you’re alone facing the beast, you are alone in the sense that you are trapped in some way, incapacitated in such a way that you are bearing witness to all of these things that are about to happen but you can’t do anything about it.
Others are about coveting what someone else has and the length to which a person might go to in order to get that. Other episodes deal with, being so excited with something that you’re doing that you go far beyond the boundaries of what you should do and what are the consequences of that, and all of it is animated by this feeling of helplessness, of being alone but also that each episode deals with, I hope that when folks watch it they see them also as meditations on issues that we’re dealing with and confronting now. Racism, the focus on beauty and beauty standards, how far technology goes and is that too far, the world of internet trolling, law is obviously dealing with a host of issues, particularly what it feels like to be an outsider, particularly when you’re a child or immigrant, living in other cultures, dealing with internalized homophobia, and fear, about who you truly are and living life in the light and then of course, very much being abandoned, so each episode is trying to grapple with all of those things at the same time and the thing about horror is that you can, it has the ability to shift through all of those levels at the same time.
