October 24th, 2023 
Jackson Murphy 
New DreamWorks Animation family adventure series Curses! premieres this Friday October 27th on AppleTV+. Creators Jim Cooper & Jeff Dixon and director Leo Riley share visual and storytelling inspirations and insights on working with some classic and modern-day horror icons. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: This family is cursed. It must be reversed. This is a big adventure show. Tell me about the origins of “Curses!”
Jim Cooper: Jeff and I were not always a writing team. Our kids went to the same elementary school. We would drop the kids off and walk back home. Along the way we would talk about the writers’ life. Jeff has mostly worked in horror. I’ve mostly worked in family and animation. Over the years we’d be like, “We really should do something with horror and family”, like something we totally would have loved as kids and would’ve watched with our kids. My family has joked that we’ve always had a family curse. My dad’s generation — every male, whether they got married or into the family or were born into it — died before they were 50. And it’s always like, “It’s the curse!”
Jim Cooper: One day my cousin was sitting down with my grandpa’s photo album, and he found this photo. It is two children. One is three years old, who’s my grandfather, holding a human skill. My cousin was like, “Well, I think we found the origin of the family curse!” Jeff and I started talking about this idea of, “What if you were a cursed family because of something your ancestors did? Or maybe something that they took? Now what are you supposed to do?” It kind of sprang from there. And then we built this into what turned out to be “Curses!”
JM: That is quite a photo and origin story! So Jeff, you are a real horror guy. What do you love specifically about taking horror and making it work for families?
Jeff Dixon: I always say this, and everyone always laughs when I say it, but I have meaning behind it: I really want to scare children. The reason is personal to me. When I was a little kid, I would watch horror content as a challenge. “I can get through this!” The credits would come and I would have this feeling of empowerment. Over time it built this courage and it helped me kind of get through real life fears. Nowadays I think the tendency is to really protect kids and treat them with white cotton gloves. I actually think that adding some scares and some horror to kids’ lives is actually healthy and good. On a purely visceral level, horror is about as universal as you can get. Everybody gets scared, whether you’re little or old or everybody in between. So we tried to find a way everybody can get scared in “Curses!”
JM: One of the key words you said there Jeff was courage, and these two kids, Pandora and Russ, have such courage. Leo, you direct the first episode, which is a great introduction. What were your goals with wanting to establish the show? I really like the pacing of it.
Leo Riley: We spent a lot of time thinking about how the show would function as a gateway horror show, not only from the storytelling aspect but also from the visual side of it — really leaning into that sort of illustrated, EC Comics influence… “Tales From the Crypt” eerie comics, visual-style approach to the show.
JM: It’s a fantastic introduction. It sucked me in. There are some cool backstory elements. Jim, what do you love about our two main characters, Pandora and Russ? They’ve got their parents as well. They’re on a major quest.
JC: One of the things we really liked doing in the first couple episodes is this idea of: a lot of times in family stories and kids’ animation, they just put the kids in and, “Whiz! Bang! They know everything.” They’re built-in heroes. And we really liked the idea of them coming to rise to the occasion of the situation. They’re not just chock-full of, “I know how to do everything!” Pandora is a great skateboarder. Russ has his scientific knowledge. We liked the idea of them being somewhat normal kids coming into a tough situation and actually learning how to work with their mom in overcoming the family curse. We love that it’s a family problem and a family situation.
Creators Jim Cooper & Jeff Dixon (top row) and director Leo Riley (lower left) and Jackson.
JM: You also have Stanley and Larry, who are the caretakers of the restricted wing. They are so cool-looking with great personalities. Jeff, what were your goals with how we meet them and how they become part of this journey?
JD: We always knew we needed somebody to kind of be knowledgeable about the restricted wing. Who else would be better to do that than two actual artifacts that have woken up? Stanley and Larry, like all of our characters, have intense backstories. We know where they come from and their situation, and there’s a lot of connective tissue to the restricted wing. In a purely storytelling way, we really wanted to create that balance. All good horror needs those moments of rest. Stanley and Larry… I hate to use the term “comic relief”, but they’re a little bit of “comic relief”. But our whole concept of the show is family and slowly they become part of the family.
JM: It’s comic relief but with a lot of substance — a lot of important information to share. The dad is SOLID. He’s been cursed! It’s crazy what he goes through, and the kids and mom have to save the day with the help of Stanley and Larry. And Leo, as for watching this, it’s very cool-looking animation. I can tell there are a lot of intricacies to the detail work. How challenging was that, and what was the overall look you wanted to accomplish here?
LR: It was rooted in that EC Comics approach, adding the brushwork and the halftone. I think it also allowed us to, hopefully fairly seamlessly, blend 2D and CG elements into the show, which allowed us to take advantage of really interesting camerawork that harkens back to a lot of horror influences.
JM: There’s a skateboard sequence early on. You’ve got a lot of moments where they’re going into caves and tunnels and dark spaces, and you make it cool. Was it challenging, Leo, with the dark aspects, to make sure everybody could see everything?
LR: Yeah. Like everything else, you have to find that balance. With understanding how dark we could go with the show, not only visually but thematically too. When it’s daytime we’ve got the super punchy colors, and when it’s nighttime you lean into the darkness of everything.
JM: Jim, one of the other executive producers of the show is John Krasinski. What he did with “A Quiet Place: Parts I and II” was take horror and make it appealing to everybody, including my age and younger. He pulled it off with his lovely wife Emily Blunt. How was it having John be a part of this?
JC: Oh, it was fantastic! And you actually hit on a lot of it too. The main thing he expressed to us — What did he learn from the “Quiet Place” movies and how do we apply it to “Curses!”? The family concept. He was reiterating that “A Quiet Place” worked because it was a family that you cared about. These bad things that might happen to them… everything is heightened because you care about them as a family. That’s exactly what we were trying to do with “Curses!” It was really helpful trying to make that concept the north star of the show.
JM: Nice. That family was really in danger, and so is this family! And also part of this show is Robert Englund — Freddy Krueger in “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. He voices the key character of Cornelius. Jeff, it’s a horror icon on your show!
JD: You have no idea. (laughs) These guys mocked me consistently because I was giddy as a schoolgirl. They always say, “Never meet your heroes.” But if they’re Robert Englund, meet him. He was absolutely fantastic. An unbelievable professional. Cornelius comes from a different era, and he would say these different types of flourish in his words. And [Englund] would say, “By the way, in this time he wouldn’t say it this way he’d say it this way because this means this…” And we’re like, “Thank you, Robert Englund.” It was really incredible. He really took to the show. He’s a genre fan. After we’d record him, we would stand around and talk about horror movies. For me personally, it was a dream come true.
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