Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have a new show on the way, and like their past collaborations, it dabbles in the genres of horror and the paranormal. Amazon's Truth Seekers follows a conspiracy YouTube team as they look to uncover a strange paranormal event. The cast and crew recently spoke about the series during Comic-Con@Home, as well as how the show was influenced by The X-Files and other works.
Most of that talk came from co-creator Nat Saunders, who spoke a bit about the direction for Truth Seekers and what he, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and James Serafinowicz looked to when coming up with the ideas for this paranormal horror-comedy.
I think it was a mixture of wanting to get that X-Files kind of vibe but also looking back to old episodes of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Reading old books like the Usbourne Book Of Ghosts and the kind of paranormal stuff that obsessed us when we were growing up...We were kind of pulling up from different kinds of places. As Simon was saying, we wanted to take the horror really seriously and then make the comedy really funny. The horror stuff, it’s never spoofy, it’s homage if anything. There might be things that you recognize from other films and TV shows, but hopefully we’ve kind of put a spin on them and taken them seriously. We haven’t done a kind of goofy like ‘Let’s add some laughs to a classic horror tropes scene,’ kind of thing.
As Saunders said, Truth Seekers is looking to makes audiences laugh when it's time to laugh, and freak out when it gets scary. That is to say, the horror stuff was taken seriously, which is why the show looked to The X-Files and miscellaneous old ghost stories to draw from the things that frightened them in the past.
It's a good tell of how Truth Seekers will operate, but what content can viewers expect specifically? Nat Saunders continued talking about some of the things they wanted to incorporate in the series, some of which may be familiar as fodder for episodes of The X-Files.
James bought this collection of paranormal leather-bound books from Andy Nyman, the guy who directed Ghost Stories. We spent hours pouring over these books and you’ve got spontaneous human combustion...we just wanted to bring a lot of that stuff to the show. Lots of kind of hauntography and psychogeography and number stations and weirdness you maybe haven’t seen before.
Truth Seekers certainly sounds like a show for horror enthusiasts, a good number of whom are likely already familiar with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg due to Shaun of the Dead. It seems like there's also stuff for The X-Files fan who still hasn't moved on from the series ending, and is eager to dive back into a paranormal world once more.
Truth Seekers is said to be coming soon to Prime Video. Continue to stick with CinemaBlend for more on what's coming to streaming, and more on television and movies.
