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TBS Superstation’s EVIL NEVER DIES
Breaks with Horror Movie Traditions
TBS Superstation’s newest original movie, EVIL NEVER DIES, mixes traditional horror elements with the world of high-tech, cutting-edge moviemaking.

EVIL NEVER DIES, starring Thomas Gibson (Dharma & Greg) and Katherine Heigl (Roswell), tells the story of a police officer who loses his wife at the hands of a brutal murderer. After being transferred to patrol duty at a prestigious college, he discovers that the now-executed murderer is part of a professor’s strange experiment that results in his being brought back to life, his murderous drive still intact.

EVIL NEVER DIES’ visual approach is different than many horror movies. “We didn’t want this movie to be an over-the-top horror film,” says executive producer Mark Wolper. “We wanted it to be edgy, dark and realistic.

To get that “edgy, dark and realistic” look to the movie, the production team met several times with the movie’s cinematographer, Mark Wareham. “One of the templates we used in discussing how we wanted to approach the cinematography on this film was the movie Se7en,” executive producer Jeffrey Hayes explains. “What that means is not being afraid to let things go black in the corner. Things that you don’t see are often much more frightening than things you partially see.”

Wareham adds, “In pre-production director Uli Edel and I discussed using a lot of hand-held camera sequences and making the frames very dark, adding tension by using things that you don’t see, not by using things you do. We also wanted to create a lot of ambiguity, because the story has a lot of unique twists, so we didn’t want to give too much away.”

When it came to set design, the filmmakers opted to combine traditional and modern elements. The laboratory in which the serial killer is revived is actually a hybrid. “The lab is a mix of gothic, because the building was built in the late 1800s, and high-tech,” says Hayes. “What we’ve tried to do is juxtapose those two worlds.”

To make the laboratory more realistic, the team “went as high-tech as we possibly could,” Hayes continues. “We used medical advisors to give us that reality feel to the set. It contributes to the whole thing being a very realistic situation.”

Contributing even more to the realism is the fact that science played an important role in designing the movie’s sets. “In keeping with the premise of this movie,” Wolper says, “it’s important that we make the audience believe that you can really bring someone back from the dead. And to do that, you’ve got to have some pretty cool equipment. We’ve gone to a lot of expense and a lot of time preparing the set using the latest information from scientists we’ve contacted. We’ve put together what we think is a pretty feasible way to bring someone back to life.”