Q&A: Todd Casey and Zach Shields Discuss TRICK ’R TREAT: DAYS OF THE DEAD and KRAMPUS

Fans of the 2007 horror anthology Trick 'r Treat can now enjoy an early Halloween goodie in the form of Legendary Comics' Trick 'r Treat: Days of the Dead, a graphic novel containing four eclectic Halloween horror stories and featuring Sam, one of cinema's ultimate enforcers of All Hallow's Eve traditions. For our latest Q&A feature, Daily Dead caught up with two of the comic's co-writers, Todd Casey and Zach Shields, who discussed creating Days of the Dead, co-writing Michael Dougherty's upcoming Krampus film, and much more.

Where did the idea for Trick 'r Treat: Days of the Dead originate?

Todd Casey: I came late to the party, so I'll defer to the others on this.  But my assumption is that people have been waiting a long time for Trick 'r Treat 2 (Mike included) and a comic made sense as a way to begin welcoming people back into that world.

Zach Shields: Mike’s always thinking about the Trick ’r Treat world and ways to expand its mythology and keep the fans involved, so that is a big motivator. Also, we were working on the story for a Trick ’r Treat sequel, but Krampus had other plans. He’d been in the gym for a while by then—pumping up, putting on oils, practicing his flexes, and really just getting ready for those cameras. So when the call came to go shoot, he wasn’t taking "no" for an answer and at that point he had that real juiced-up temper, so we weren’t going to argue.  We just hit record, gave our lives to him, and made the Trick ’r Treat graphic novel while he wasn’t looking.

This graphic novel is an eclectic collection focusing on Colonial America, the Wild West, horror noir, and small-town USA. Did you intentionally set out to offer readers a diverse look at Halloween through drastically different settings and situations?

Todd Casey: Yes. We were excited by the limitless storytelling budget you get in comics and wanted to deepen the mythology by looking back through time. Thanks to our talented artists, the sky was the limit and we zeroed in on a few specific eras that interested us. The Celts celebrating Samhain were persecuted for their beliefs and that was a theme we carried throughout: Celts for their religion, Native peoples of North America for their race and culture, Socialists and Communists for their politics (although the story is specifically scapegoating Satanists, we were deliberate in our choice to use the Hollywood Red-Scare as a backdrop), and kids for their unwillingness to conform to whatever role society sees fit for them.

Kids, now more than ever, are finding themselves free to express themselves and be whoever they want to be, but there's an unfortunate cost that can come when less tolerant people ostracize them for their choices. And Halloween is about that choice to transform as much as it's about ghosts and goblins.

What were the challenges of exploring such a wide range of scenarios through time? Was there a lot of research involved or influences you drew from while writing the stories?

Todd Casey: The research we did came after we decided on what stories we wanted to tell. We knew what eras and people we wanted to focus on, so once we broke the stories, we did our research to make sure we weren't being embarrassingly anachronistic. Finding the connective tissue was challenging because we didn't want to bend these stories out of shape just to try and make a plot line work.  Ultimately, we focused on common themes and sprinkled a few hints throughout that the characters could be related in a Cloud Atlas kind of way.

Zach Shields: One challenge was finding the right balance of borrowing from the mythologies and history that inspired and turned the holiday into what it is today, while at the same time creating our own mythology from our own beliefs and love of the holiday. We wanted to honor what has come before us, but at the same time create something new. None of us have kids, but I imagine it’s as close as we’ve come to raising them—borrowing from your parents' wisdom and taking your own experiences to reinvent yourself in a smaller version of you. Except if we do a bad job, we just make a shitty comic instead of a shitty person.

What were your experiences collaborating with Michael Dougherty and Marc Andreyko to write this graphic novel? Did you all bring different ideas and styles to the table when it came time to conjure up these tales?

Todd Casey: This doesn't answer your question, but there was an afternoon where Mike, Zach and I were all in Zach's kitchen with laptops working on Seed and I was struck by how surreal it all was. I grew up reading comics and my first job was in a comic book store. And there I was, with two of my closest friends, writing a comic that was going to be illustrated and published and read. Writing them was much harder than I'd imagined, but it was a pleasure and a privilege to work on this with friends.  I've known Marc for years, but it was also surreal to work with him because I have a very specific memory of reading Torso in college and have forever associated him with that book (which is great).

How big of a part does the mischievous trick-or-treater Sam play in Days of the Dead? Can we expect to see him pop up in every story?

Todd Casey: He's definitely present in all the stories and has his hands in everything that's going on. He's steering the ship in an almost illuminati fashion from behind-the-scenes. He's not so much pulling people's strings, but showing them open doors. Does that make sense? Probably not. He's not beating anyone with a sack full of cats, but he is "interfering" in each story. Still obscure? Let's just say, he's around.

How is Days of the Dead connected to the in-the-works Trick 'r Treat 2 and the original film? Will the events in these stories affect what’s to come (or what did happen) onscreen?

Todd Casey: I can't really say for sure about future installments, but it doesn't directly connect to Trick 'r Treat in a plot sense. Maybe someone in the movie is a distant relative of someone in the comics. And I say that with a wink.

Next month, Legendary Comics will release a Krampus graphic novel. How involved were you creatively in that project and what types of stories can readers expect to see within its pages?

Todd Casey: Zach and I wrote it along with his sister-in-law, Laura. Zach was in New Zealand for the film shoot and I could only get down there for a week, so we wrote them all on set and in our hotel with some outside help from Laura back in L.A.  The stories are set in the world of the movie, but they're less grounded than the film.  Everything is a little more heightened and exaggerated and hallucinatory.  In terms of the characters featured, we wanted to give some contrast to who we saw in the film. The family in Krampus is paean to the American Dream. The characters in the comics didn't have it so good. It's kind of the sadder side of Christmas.

You both also co-wrote and co-produce the anticipated Krampus film coming out this winter. What was the most fun part of diving into that deep well of holiday lore, and what can you tease to our readers about the film (following its awesome trailer reveal last month)?

Todd Casey: Doing the research was fun for me because I majored in history and that suddenly felt useful. In the course of that research, we found Krampus was decidedly less devil-like before Christianity spread across Europe. He used to have more horns—which was a symbol of fertility—and a soft horse-hair whip, which is also related to fertility in ways I dare not describe. And now, some centuries later, he has a jack-in-the-box that eats people.

Our Krampus' methods evolved because people evolved.  In a time of quaint European villages, it made sense to grab a stick and round up kids in a wicker backpack, but when you're swooping down on the armed-citizenry of 21st Century America, you need ground support. It was nice to see that there are so many variations of the legend because it gave us a creative license. Myths can and should be ever-evolving.

Halloween’s right around the corner. Do you have a favorite All Hallow’s Eve memory that you can share?

Todd Casey: It's non-specific, but I have a nauseating amount of nostalgia for East Coast fall. More than candy, costumes, or parties, I just loved the atmosphere.  After a decade plus in L.A., I've found new things about the holiday to love. Like Mike's Halloween parties. Mike and I both live in parts of L.A. that get an obscene amount of trick 'r treaters, which I missed during my apartment-dwelling years and now enjoy.

Zach Shields: When I was twelve I went as a delinquent disguised as Skeletor, but that didn’t fool old Barb Shields, who had the foresight to check my trick ’r treating bag as I walked out of the house. In it she found some rotten eggs, a BB gun, a few Roman candles, toilet paper, and at least seven glow sticks. I didn’t really have a concrete plan—especially for the glow sticks—but that didn’t matter to Barb, cause she had a new plan for me: to stay home and not get free candy and expensive fun with my friends.

But I love Halloween, so I made lemonade and three decoy scarecrows out of my dad’s clothes and a lot of newspapers. I set them up on the porch, dressed myself in amongst them, and waited for trick’r treaters to come by. When they did, I would jump up and chase them away, trying to keep as much of our household candy supply for myself as I could.

It ended up being my favorite Halloween—I got to scream, laugh, and scare people (including my four friends I was supposed to go be an asshole with). And in the end, no one got hurt, no property was destroyed, and I had a half-full bowl of un-passed-out candy that I felt I had earned.

Since then I’ve tried to use my twelve-year-old imagination to make people scream instead of my twelve-year-old misguided frustration with not understanding how the world works or why my bones hurt and my armpits all of a sudden smelled like old McDonalds in a hot car. In the end, it’s for the best cause now there’s this graphic novel and Krampus. And while they might make you jump out of your seat and scream, I can guarantee neither of them will take a shit on your lawn for no good reason.

With Trick 'r Treat: Days of the Dead now available from Legendary Comics, what other projects do you have on deck that you can tease for our readers, and where can they find you on social media?

Todd Casey: In comics, I'm co-writing a long-form graphic novel with Noelle Stevenson called 4 Wizards that's coming from HarperCollins in 2017.  I'm also the head writer on a Disney show called Future-Worm, which is about as weird as it sounds, and new episodes of my previous show, Wander Over Yonder, are airing this fall. My use of social media is pretty limited, but if you like listening to people who never talk, I'm @wordwarthree on Twitter.

Zach Shields: I have a spooky record I did years ago called Dead Man’s Bones which is good for Halloween-time and I’m working on a new project called Night Things, which is about dreams instead of death. It’ll come out soon.

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"About Trick 'r Treat: Days of the Dead

From the twisted imagination of Trick ’r Treat creator Michael Dougherty (director of the upcoming Krampus and Trick ’r Treat 2 and screenwriter of X-Men 2 and Superman Returns) alongside a top-notch team of creators including writers Todd Casey and Zach Shields (Krampus), Marc Andreyko (Batwoman) and artists Fiona Staples (Saga), Stephen Byrne (Buffy/Angel), Stuart Sayger (Bram Stoker’s Death Ship) and Zid (Son of Merlin) comes this 4-part collection that paves the way for the Trick ’r Treat film sequel.

Days of the Dead takes readers on a journey through Halloween history with 4 chilling new Trick ’r Treat tales. Discover old-world lovers whose romance takes a chilling turn and Western pioneers who discover the dark side of the frontier. Travel to 1950s Los Angeles for a tale of pure horror noir and into the heart of small-town America to see some pranksters taught a lesson they'll never forget.

Across centuries of Halloween horror, wherever fear lies, Sam will be waiting…​"