Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Anne Rice

“The Dogcatcher” Unleashed:  The Story behind My Debut Novel

September 20, 2023 / / 57 Comments

My first novel, The Dogcatcher, is now available from DarkWinter Press.  It’s an occult horror/dark comedy about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a creature in the woods.  Here’s a (spoiler-free) behind-the-scenes account of the project’s creative inception and development; how it’s responsible for my being blackballed in Hollywood; how the coronavirus pandemic challenged and ultimately elevated the story’s thematic ambitions; and how these characters hounded my imagination—forgive the pun—for no fewer than fourteen years.

The Dogcatcher is on sale in paperback and Kindle formats via Amazon.

In the spring of 2007, I came home from L.A. for a week to attend my sister’s graduation at Cornell University.  My first occasion to sojourn in the Finger Lakes region, I took the opportunity to stay in Downtown Ithaca, tour the Cornell campus, visit Buttermilk Falls State Park.  I was completely taken with the area’s scenic beauty and thought it would make the perfect location for a screenplay.  Only trouble was, all I had was a setting in search of a story.

CUT TO:  TWO YEARS LATER

Binge-watching wasn’t yet an institutionalized practice, but DVD-by-mail was surging, and my wife and I were, as such, working our way through The X-Files (1993–2002) from the beginning.  Though I have ethical reservations about Chris Carter’s hugely popular sci-fi series, I admired the creative fecundity of its monster-of-the-week procedural format, which allowed for the protagonists, his-and-her FBI agents Mulder and Scully, to investigate purported attacks by mutants and shapeshifters in every corner of the United States, from bustling cities to backwater burgs:  the Jersey Devil in Atlantic City (“The Jersey Devil”); a wolf-creature in Browning, Montana (“Shapes”); a prehistoric plesiosaur in Millikan, Georgia (“Quagmire”); El Chupacabra in Fresno, California (“El Mundo Gira”); the Mothman in Leon County, Florida (“Detour”); a giant praying mantis in Oak Brook, Illinois (“Folie à Deux”); a human bat in Burley, Idaho (“Patience”).

Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in “The X-Files”

But the very premise of The X-Files stipulated that merely two underfunded federal agents, out of approximately 35,000 at the Bureau, were appropriated to investigate such anomalous urban legends.  I wondered:  If an average American town found itself bedeviled by a predatory cryptid—in real life, I mean—would the FBI really be the first responders?  Doubtful.  But who would?  The county police?  The National Guard?  If, say, a sasquatch went on a rampage, which regional public office would be the most well-equipped to deal with it…?

That’s when it occurred to me:  Animal Control.

And when I considered all the cultural associations we have with the word dogcatcher—“You couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this town”—I knew I had my hero:  a civil servant who is the butt of everyone’s easy jokes, but whose specialized skills and tools and, ultimately, compassion are what save the day.

But it was, to be sure, a hell of a long road from that moment of inspiration to this:

When the basic concept was first devised, I wrote a 20-page story treatment for an early iteration of The Dogcatcher, dated August 25, 2009.  That same summer, I signed with new literary managers, who immediately wanted a summary of all the projects I’d been working on.  Among other synopses and screenplays, I sent them the Dogcatcher treatment.

They hated it.  They argued against the viability of mixing horror and humor, this despite a long precedent for such an incongruous tonal marriage in commercially successful and culturally influential movies the likes of An American Werewolf in London (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Lost Boys (1987), Tremors (1990), Scream (1996), and Shaun of the Dead (2004), to say nothing of then–It Girl Megan Fox’s just-released succubus satire Jennifer’s Body (2009).  (I knew better than to cite seventy-year-old antecedents such as The Cat and the Canary and Hold That Ghost; Hollywood execs have little awareness of films that predate their own lifetimes.)  I was passionate about The Dogcatcher, but it was only one of several prospective projects I was ready to develop, so, on the advice of my new management, I put it in a drawer and moved on to other things.

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It’s Alive! Return of the Universal Classic Monsters

November 19, 2019 / / 30 Comments

Ah, the “shared cinematic universe”—the favored narrative model–cum–marketing campaign of the new millennium!  Pioneered by Marvel, it wasn’t long before every studio in town wanted a “mega-franchise” of its own, feverishly ransacking its IP archives for reliable brands to exploit anew.  By resurrecting the Universal Classic Monsters, Universal Studios saw an opportunity to create its own interconnected multimedia initiative… and the so-called “Dark Universe” was born.

Well, not born, exactly—more like announced.  When the first offering, Dracula Untold, took a critical beating and underperformed domestically, Universal promptly issued a retraction:  “Just kidding!  That wasn’t really the first Dark Universe movie!”  An all-star cast was hastily assembled:  Russell Crowe as Jekyll and Hyde!  Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s monster!  Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man!  Angelina Jolie as the Bride of Frankenstein!  And first up would be Tom Cruise in The Mummy…

Um… isn’t this precisely the kind of arrogant presumption most of the Universal Classic Monsters came to regret?

Except—whoops!—The Mummy bombed, too… at which point the sun rather quietly went down on the Dark Universe project altogether.  Seems launching a shared fictional universe is considerably harder than Marvel made it look.  Imagine that.

The thing is, we already had a revival—arguably a cinematic renaissance—of the Universal Classic Monsters in the 1990s.  Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were given gloriously Gothic reprisals in an (unrelated) series of studio features that starred some of the biggest names in Hollywood.  None of those projects were cooked up in a corporate think tank, but were instead the idiosyncratic visions of a diverse group of directors—the artists behind no less than The Godfather, The Graduate, The Crying Game, Dangerous Liaisons, and Basic Instinct, to name a few—employing horror’s most recognizable freaks to (for the most part) explore the anxiety of confronting the end of not merely a century, but a millennium.

If the respective creative efforts of these filmmakers were uncoordinated, their common agenda was entirely logical.  Many of their fiendish subjects, after all, first arrived on the cultural scene at the end of the previous century:  Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886; both Dracula and The Invisible Man in 1897.  Furthermore, their stories tended to speak to either the hazards of zealous scientific ambition (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), or, in the case of Dracula and The Mummy, the limitations of it—of humankind’s attempts to tame the natural world through technology:  “And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (from Jonathan Harker’s journal, dated 15 May).

Even the Wolf Man serves as a metaphor for the primal instincts we’ve suppressed under our civilized veneer; far from having learned to let our two halves coexist in harmony, they are instead at war within the modern man and woman.  These are existential issues that seem to weigh more heavily on us at the eve of a new epoch, which is arguably why the monstrous creations we use to examine them flourished in the literature of the 1890s and then again, a century later, through the cinema of the 1990s.  It goes to illustrate that sometimes fictional characters simply speak to their times in a very profound way that can’t be engineered or anticipated.  It’s just alchemical, much as Hollywood would prefer it to be mathematical.

With that in mind, let’s have a look at the unofficial “Universal Classic Monsters reprisal” of the nineties (and I’ve included a few other likeminded films from the movement) to better appreciate what worked and what sometimes didn’t.

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Mirror/Mirror: On Seeing Ourselves in Fictional Characters

August 26, 2019 / / 16 Comments

Over the past few months, I’ve been helping plan an old friend’s bachelor party, the experience of which has made me starkly aware of just how conservative I’ve become in middle age.  Not politically, you understand—personally.  When I was a kid, I was like Leo Getz in Lethal Weapon (I was seriously that annoying) who nonetheless fancied himself Martin Riggs; somewhere along the way, though, I grew up to be Roger Murtaugh.

Riggs (Mel Gibson), Leo (Joe Pesci), and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in “Lethal Weapon 2” from 1989 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

And that got me thinking about how, at different stages of life, we’re sometimes lucky enough to closely identify with a particular fictional character in an exceptional way; I would say the experience is even as random and as rarified as true friendship:  How many times, really, have we “met” a character who speaks so directly to us, whose emotional circumstances so closely reflect our own, that through them we vicariously attain some measure of insight… and maybe even catharsis?

We’re not necessarily talking favorite characters here; those come in spades.  God knows, I love Indiana Jones and Jean-Luc Picard and Philip Marlowe and Chili Palmer, but I don’t necessarily—much as I want to—relate to those characters so much as admire their characteristics.  In that way, they’re more aspirational than they are analogous.

I’d like to know which characters from fiction speak to you—and for you.  I’ll get us started, selecting examples from three distinct phases of my life:  childhood, adolescence, and midlife.  (For those interested, I’ve included each narrative’s Save the Cat! genre.)

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