Little Demon is a new adult supernatural animated comedy series about Chrissy, the 13-year-old daughter of Satan. Dad enters her life at a critical time, and feisty mom Laura isn’t thrilled, but willing to fight for what’s best for her powerful child. Little Demon has its one-hour series premiere tonight at 10pm on FXX. I spoke with the show’s creators, EPs and writers, Darcy Fowler, Seth Kirschner and Kieran Valla, about their ambitious series that has bold comedic, horror and visual influences. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: There’s action. There’s comedy. There are visual gags. What I think is the strength of the show are the relationships. Tell me about the genesis of the show and how the relationships really came into play.

Darcy Fowler: That’s really awesome to hear that the relationships stuck out to you because that’s what we’re hoping. In terms of the origin of the show: the three of us are huge horror nerds. We wanted a story about a strong female character. We were looking at angles on Rosemary’s Baby. We started with this story about this mother with this cursed womb and it kind of evolved from there. Then the mother had a baby demon little girl child. Then we realized that making this demon — this antichrist girl — 13 [years old] was so much more ripe for themes, horror-wise. We found this core of this mother-daughter relationship, which as someone who was 13 once and a daughter… it can be pretty horrifying. That core unleashed everything else. Chrissy and puberty: the horrors of that. We rounded it out to tell this story about this broken family.

JM: And one of the other relationships I think really works is the one between Chrissy and Bennigan [her new friend at middle school]. It’s interesting that this is an animated series for adults, with adult language, comedy and violence… but it’s this really sweet, sincere friendship these two have. Seth, tell me about making this good, wholesome relationship with everything else going on.

Seth Kirschner: That’s awesome that you also find that to be sincere. That’s our goal with it. We do want to make sure it’s important for all of our characters to be three-dimensional — to be fully-formed characters. We do see Bennigan, in a way, as our moral compass for the show. He’s such an earnest person. He’s very genuine. He sees the good in everyone. Having someone that Chrissy can walk through this 13 year old life with, that’s by her side understanding and going through it, but even as equally awkward as her is very important. Everyone in our show is a version of an outsider in some way. He does become her best friend.

Having someone by her side with an earnest dynamic juxtaposed to the life Chrissy’s with her family — dealing with this broken home and this huge coming of age moment for her — was a very important factor for us to continue to ground her and the series. And it helps us find the humor in both of them. That bathroom scene [in the first episode] really sums up what their relationship is and what our show sort of comes down to. There are these horrors that keep happening, but at the core of it, it’s about this relationship and the genuine connection that the two of them are ideally building and pushing forward.

JM: And they have good dialogue timing. I had a chance to go to San Diego Comic-Con in 2019. You all just went to the 2022 edition. Kieran, how was it to go and talk about the show there?

Kieran Valla: When you’re working on something for years — to finally be able to screen it in front of a massive audience was an incredible experience. We showed the entire Pilot to an audience of nearly 3,000 people. It’s the center of the culture that you want to show it to with a show like Little Demon. We also had some veterans with us, like Danny [DeVito], Aubrey [Plaza] and [Dan] Harmon, who have been to so many of these things. To experience that and walk through it with all of them was incredible.

JM: Awesome. When I was there, there was this giant FX logo and huge display and this outdoor [gathering]. FX loves to make San Diego Comic-Con a destination.

SK: They did that this year too. There was a thing for What We Do in the Shadows and American Horror Story and an…

KV: Activation.

SK: Yeah, for Little Demon. It was incredible. Very mind-blowing.

KV: And they made Little Demon hot sauces, which was really cool.

JM: Very nice. Many of Aubrey Plaza’s career choices lately have been great. I saw her in Emily the Criminal. She is fantastic in that.

SK: She’s incredible in that.

JM: Yeah, and [Laura on Little Demon] is another cool role for her. Darcy, what impresses you about what she can bring to this voice performance?

DF: We’ve known Aubrey for so long. We’ve all worked with her a lot. We have this group the four of us call The Terror Team. When you first meet Aubrey she seems to play things close to the vest. But when she gets in a room to act, write and do voices, she just unleashes Hell, in the best way possible. She has so many colors. She immediately knows how to take a character and twist it, play it from a unique angle and play it to the top of her intelligence. She’s a very active performer. She never plays the victim. She always knows how to activate her roles in a way… we’re so excited to have her for Laura because she’s a great role model for 2022. (laughs)

JM: Yes: powerhouse, strong, female, mother, protector, taking risks. You’re totally right about that.

DF: Laura, in one of our episodes, infiltrates these PTA moms to bring them down. I could totally see Aubrey infiltrating a bunch of PTA moms and bringing them down. Can’t we all? It would be her dream. (laughs)

JM: Kieran, could you really have done this show without Lucy DeVito and Danny DeVito together and that dynamic?

KV: They’re a dream team. Heck no we couldn’t have done the show without them. Lucy is an incredibly talented performer who inhabited this character so fully. And it feels like she brings so much of herself to it and her experiences growing up. Danny is obviously a comedic genius. That dynamic together and the reality they bring to that dynamic, being a father and daughter, is unlike anyone’s gonna see on TV. We are so grateful to have their voices and their minds, because they’re executive producers as well. They bring these characters to life and give us great feedback and insight on the show with their vast experience working in the arts. It’s unbelievable.

JM: And Danny is the king of FX with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Seth, how did you get ARNOLD [Schwarzenegger] to come-in for the third episode?

SK: That comes back also to Danny. People love Danny. Everyone wants to be involved with something with Danny again. Luckily, we’re fortunate for him to have those connections. And not only that… it’s not like Arnold just did it blindly. He did read it and really enjoyed it. And we were getting messages about how he was preparing the night before, which was really fun to hear he was preparing for the announcer. People seem to dig the scripts they’re being sent. It taps into some weird, different area in people’s brains of, “This is a very strange show. And it’s gonna be balls to the wall chaotic.” The gods… the devils… the demons… everything’s on our side to get Arnold in this. (laughs)

JM: And I think so many people love the horror genre. One of the cool sequences in the second episode is the soul-switching sequence. Darcy, I’m sure putting a sequence like that together is fun and you have to calculate everything.

DF: Yeah! We actually at one point had this really ridiculous diagram constructed to show how the souls are knocked out of bodies. The exact motions of how each soul goes out and into each body, since it’s such a crazy swap. That type of thing — in working with Dan Harmon: he really encouraged us to delve into the nitty gritty specifics of the rules of our show — of horror and of Laura’s magic. That was really really fun for the whole possession obsession.

JM: And Kieran, how immersive did the detail work of the creatures and the wacky monsters get?

KV: That process was really fun. We have a lot of incredibly talented artists that would put together these creature designs. We would use mythological references and things from our favorite graphic novels and movies, and we would throw all those references at our artists. Sometimes you would have three or four different artists taking a shot at a certain creature character design. And then you can take elements from each of those artists and incorporate them in and even combine a couple of the artists’ ideas. That was always a really exciting process to see this vast amount of work that they would put together. To be able to work with them and refine those things — and finding that balance between horror and comedy. We sometimes wanted the designs to be truly grotesque and scary but also have a comedic element to them and have them be accessible.

JM: Now Seth, there seems to be a horror movie that comes out in theaters or on a streaming service every single week. What have you discovered in working on this show that you can do in animation that these live-action horror films and supernatural films just cannot do?

SK: That’s a great question. We worked in live-action before we went into animation. Sometimes we would come-up to certain things. For instance, if we wanted a decapitated head to fly into a basketball hoop from mid-court, which is something we had at one point in one of our live-action ideas, that would take roughly a full day of shooting. Fortunately for us, we have so many artists that are able to construct this thing. That’s just one element that can happen within this same day, with so many other elements that are being constructed at the same time. Timing-wise, we’re able to get things done in a very, very different way.

And again, I keep pointing to that bathroom scene in the Pilot, but the fact that we’re able to do something like that… It did take a very long time to construct and get that scene the way we finally wanted it to, but to have that amount of gore and placed in the places we wanted it to — gives us much more precision and we’re able to go harder in certain areas. People have a different type of suspension of disbelief when they’re watching animation, so from an audience point of view we’re able to push other certain limits that you wouldn’t expect in animation — that haven’t entirely been done before.

DF: And by the way, our animation team is insanely amazing. The things that they do: it’s very humbling.

SK: We know it doesn’t happen just like that. There’s so much work that goes into it. There’s so many different people that can all work at the same time.

DF: Working right now on Post [Production]! We’re getting there!

JM: You can tell the work that’s put into these episodes. I have one final question for each of you: What is your favorite animated horror / supernatural movie or series of all-time, and did it influence something in the show?

DF: The first one that comes to mind is Spirited Away, which I feel has a horror element.

SK: Growing up watching so much animation, not specifically animated horror, but all I did was watch Nick Jr. Animation is one of the reasons I got into entertainment in general because it felt like it was so expansive. But for horror, Castlevania is incredible. The other animated movies that are the most inspiring for the show are the other [Hayao] Miyazaki movies, like absolutely Howl’s Moving Castle. The details and all that goes into Miyazaki films: everything has a purpose and the artists put so much into everything. Also, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a good one.

KV: The animated horror stuff that inspires me the most is… more graphic novel form, but Junji Ito “Uzumaki” stuff. That showed me the level of depravity where horror and animation could go. Seoul Station was cool — pretty hardcore zombie animation. And I really like ParaNorman. I love, story-wise, where that goes. Thematically the depths that it goes to and how dark the ending is.

JM: Yes! And both ParaNorman and Little Demon are about young people building their confidence.

KV: Absolutely!