A short drive to a residential road northwest of downtown is all it takes to realize you’re not in Duncan anymore.
Ghosts, witches and extraterrestrials, oh my!
Welcome to Spooksville, a frightfully family-friendly wonderland of weirdness being brought to life by Vancouver’s Front Street Pictures and Jane Startz Productions in a new live-action comedy adventure series premièring on U.S. youth network The Hub this fall.
Spooksville, inspired by Christopher Pike’s acclaimed books for young readers, stars Keean Johnson (Broadway’s Billy Elliot) as new kid in town Adam Freeman, Katie Douglas as his feisty pal Sally Wilcox and Nick Purcha as pre-teen friend Watch Waverly, a bespectacled brainiac.
The town of Springville earned its spooky nickname because of the battle between good and evil waged there for centuries, evidenced by ghosts, extraterrestrials and other supernatural occurrences.
Inside the Duncan Curling Club on Sherman Road, a 10,000-square-foot soundstage houses three standing sets.
The Gothic highlight is the Curiosities Room, a gloomy, cluttered refuge for a young witch who uses it as a cover to concoct spells and potions. You enter through paisley-patterned drapes from an oak-panelled hall matching interiors at Craigdarroch Castle.
The façade of the Victoria landmark stands in for Shadowmire, Spooksville’s haunted mountaintop mansion.
It’s one of several exteriors — including Fisgard Lighthouse and Duncan city hall, doubling as a library — being featured as the cameras roll on 22 episodes — 88 shooting days in all — from Victoria to the Cowichan Valley through August.
“This is our jewel,” says Allen Lewis, Metchosin-based vice-president of production for Front Street Pictures, during a Curiosities Room walkabout.
“It’s very Harry Potter-esque. A lot of spooky stuff happens here.”
The dark, eye-catching room is a place where Edgar Allen Poe would feel at home, strewn as it is with dusty, corked potion bottles, petrified bats, a stone vulture that peers ominously at visitors, glass-encased skeletons, an antiquated organ, freaky vintage dolls, a The Magician painting featuring a three-headed peacock-like creature, and a massive coal-black fireplace.
The Duncan studio also contains a set depicting Adam’s bedroom, a “swing set” area where filming recently took place in a Fisgard Lighthouse replica, and Watch’s lab, a maze of beakers, test tubes, cables and electronic gizmos.
“The debt must be paid!” deep-voiced actor Mark Gibbon, playing the towering, bronze-coloured Debt Collector, menacingly bellows before smashing through a door made of balsa and fake insulation as director Neill Fearnley looks on.
“Freeze, you interdimensional rockpile!” Adam warns, before threatening to vapourize the goggled creature with a ray-gun.
“We made this robot from another dimension angry and he has to try and get us to pay by being slaves on the planet he lives on,” explains Johnson. “We’re trying to figure out how to get rid of him.”
While Spooksville is visually striking — with 3-D mapping, Iron Man-style graphics, effects that create illusions like an electrical orb, characters beaming out of sight and hands shooting sparks — storytelling is paramount.
So says Jane Startz, the children’s programming veteran (The Magic School Bus, Ella Enchanted) executive producing with Front Street’s Harvey Kahn.
“This is not Nightmare on Elm Street,” laughs the hands-on showrunner.
“Nobody dies, nobody disappears forever. Goonies is our movie model. It’s fun, physical and it shows girls as well as boys being active. Each of the stories has a lot of heart, humour and laughs, but also some scary moments.”
It’s different from shows like Goosebumps and The Haunting Hour by R.L. Stine, who Startz worked with after co-founding Scholastic Productions. “They’re in the horror genre and this is the comedy-adventure genre. It’s a big distinction.”
With two directors working at all times — a shooting director and a “prepping” director — on episodes shot two at a time in 10-hour days in an eight-day block, the modestly budgeted series is keeping crews on their toes.
“You need to prepare in advance as much as you can for battle, and throw out the plan when it starts,” says Fearnley, whose credits range from 21 Jump Street to Front Street’s The Haunting Hour. “The enemy is now involved. The enemy is time.”
Lewis said he’s elated southern Vancouver Island could host the kind of television series locals have long hoped for.
“It’s a case of ‘If you build it, they will come,’ ” he said. “There are so many people working in Vancouver who are from the Island, so we’re trying to bring a lot of those folks back. It’s 90 per cent local. And we’re trying to build the infrastructure to encourage others.”
A key component was getting into the curling rink off-season after the show’s original production manager, the late Ken Lawson, stumbled upon it last year. Crews have since installed a permanent overhead grid to hang lights and equipment.
“We’re saddened, but this is a great legacy Ken has left,” said Lewis.
“That’s what nailed it for us. We wanted to find a beautiful seaside community with a small town where you can also get that [six per cent distant location] tax credit.”
Spooksville is also shooting library and Lizzie Borden School interiors at the original Stanley Gordon School in Lake Cowichan, where a makeshift studio also houses production designer Tink’s pièce de résistance — a haunted cave.
“The thing I’m adamant about is authenticity,” says Tink, who goes by only one name, and whose credits include Victoria-shot features Freshman Father and Murder on Spec.
The elaborate cave set, which can also double for dungeons, is constructed from 14 movable walls carved in Vancouver that “allow for infinite configurations.”
