Agent Stoker Begins

9.12.24

AGENT STOKER really begins with Edgar Allan Poe.

What are the odds that you were like us, reading "The Black Cat" and "The Telltale Heart" in middle school and realizing there were dark possibilities in the world that you had never before considered?

In ninth grade, I had an English teacher named Ron Smith, and he had us reading "The Cask of Amontillado" out loud in class.  When the climax comes, when the narrator is shackled against the wall of the wine cellar and then entombed behind a fresh wall of bricks.  Mr. Smith took one of the students by the hand, walked him over to a corner of the room, and started "walling him up" behind an improvised wall of school textbooks.  It was the greatest, simultaneously funny and eerie.  When I wrote an episode of the Hulu miniseries 11.22.63 where Stephen King’s hero Jake has to work as an English teacher, I wrote a scene recreating this moment to establish Jake was a TERRIFIC English teacher.

In college I was lucky to take American Literature from the esteemed professor Richard Brodhead, who spoke marvelously about the role of architecture in creating the paranoid Poe universe.  As a podcast, AGENT STOKER by definition has no architecture, but thanks to our amazing sound designer Patrick Hogan, we do think a lot about the physical settings in which scary things take place.

Also in college, I was a programmer and projectionist for the Yale Film Society and we hosted a series of late-night horror films for which I was always present.  The film I remember most was Poe’s THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, but not for its titular torture trope.  The final scene involves a character who’s been locked in a coffin, hearing that the authorities are shutting up this place forever.  No rescue will ever arrive.  The bulging eyes of someone realizing there’s no hope – that was horror.

Fast-forward many years, when I’m in Mexico City for a live stage adaptation of my screenplay HARD CANDY.  There’s a part of the city where the streets are named for cultural figures.  Goethe, Descartes, Euclid.  My wife and I are walking around and we find ourselves at the intersection of Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe.  Given that I’ve directed KING LEAR and acted in TWELFTH NIGHT and so on, I make a joke that I’ve spent my life at the intersection of Shakespeare and Poe.  But is it a joke?  (BTW, this intersection is mentioned in AGENT STOKER Episode 301, release date 10/17/24!)

Now we move ahead just a couple more years and I’m in the writing room for ALTERED CARBON, the Netflix science fiction series.  Set hundreds of years in the future, the show is adapted from a classic cyberpunk novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan. In the book, our hero Takeshi Kovacs stays at a hotel called The Hendrix, run by an AI who believes he’s Jimi Hendrix.  But when we reach out optimistically to the Hendrix estate, we find we can’t afford to license his image or music. We discuss other alternatives ranging from Johnny Cash to Snoop Dogg. Finally we have to start thinking about what famous character we could get for free.  And in my recollection, it was our Executive Story Editor, Nevin Densham, who suggested: Edgar Allan Poe.

The hotel was thus named the Raven, and we started shaping Poe as a character.  Show creator Laeta Kalogridis knew that I was the English major with a gothic background, so she asked me to take a pass through all of Poe’s dialogue in the series. (To be clear, this happens all the time in television – the episodes of ALTERED CARBON that bear my writing credit similarly have lines and ideas suggested by everyone in the writing room.) And then we had to cast Poe.

And there was really only one choice.  I remember when all the writers crowded around to watch the self-tape made by actor Chris Conner, who nailed it from the first take.  Between the haunted qualities, the eyes that had seen too much, the voice that was a bit too gin-soaked and that understood romance but also death – it was obvious that Chris was our Poe.  He became the breakout character of the show, that supporting character you long to see more, the one character to get more screen time in Season Two than in Season One.

Then came the pandemic.  Nobody was working.  We all stayed home and wiped down all our produce.  What would happen to the industry amidst this quarantine?  There were no clear answers.

And that’s when Chris, who knew me as the guy who had run point on Poe, reached out to me to ask if I’d want to create a podcast with him.  We talked about a lot of reference points for what we might want to make together: BLACK MIRROR.  The old radio dramas of THE SHADOW.  The science fiction of Philip K. Dick.  The noir detective fiction of Raymond Chandler.  The monster-of-the-week thrills of both KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and THE X-FILES. 

But at the heart of it, AGENT STOKER owes its legacy to Poe.  More about that next week.

Eerily yours

Brian