Writer: Steve Newton

Magazine: Fangoria Issue #151

Publish Date: April 1996

Pages: 46-49, 80

Copyright: © 1996 Starlog Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Ordering Info: 475 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016

Thanks to Showtime, ghosts and ghouls will be coming out of the TV set on a regular basis. Vancouver's massive Dominion Bridge Studios has been the site of some serious TV horror-making in the last few years, playing host to the miniseries of Stephen King's It and, in 1994, Showtime's CableACE Award-winning revival of The Outer Limits. Now the company behind that show, Trilogy Entertainment Group, is tackling another genre cable project with Poltergeist: The Legacy, a series about a wealthy and influential secret society devoted to the understanding of — and battle against — supernatural phenomena around the globe.

Dutch actor Derek de Lint toplines as charismatic university professor Derek Rayne, who leads the Legacy, humanity's unknown — and final — line of defense against a growing evil presence in the world. The cast also includes Broadway actor Patrick Fitzgerald as the group's spiritual guide, priest Philip Callaghan; Robbi Chong (Tommy's daughter and Rae Dawn's sister) as brilliant researcher Alex Moreau; Martin (Friday the 13th Part VIII) Cummins as adventurous risk-taker Nick Boyle; and newcomer Jordan Bayne as the beautiful and inventive Julia Walker.

When Fango visits the set on a soaking wet November morning, the filmmakers are in the midst of shooting the series' two-hour pilot, which is scheduled to air on Showtime in mid-April. Under production designer Ian Thomas, the crew has constructed the interior of a turn-of-the-century Gothic mansion; expensive-looking antiques and a rich wood tone lend the set a rustic, old-world feel. There's a cozy-looking fireplace in the main foyer, and a piano in the living room which the sophisticated Dr. Rayne plays at his leisure. At the rearof the set stands a nighttime rendering of the San Francisco skyline (the mansion is set on Angel Island).

In the Poltergeist pilot. Shaver's character, Rachel Corrigan, is attending the gravesite of her husband and son in the small town of Connemere, Ireland, when she unwittingly stumbles upon a supernatural object of unimaginable power in a dusty antiques shop. It is one of five ancient sepulchers containing a demonic soul trapped centuries ago by Druid priests, and when the members of The Legacy are alerted to this paranormal disturbance through Rayne's unsettling psychic visions, they dispatch to Ireland to recover the sepulcher before its devastating energies can be unlocked. But by the time they get there, Rachel has been seduced and impregnated by the power of the sepulcher, and the fetus is developing at an astonishingly fast rate. Before you can say spawn-o'-hell, the aforementioned birth takes place, which isn't good news for The Legacy, although Rachel's traumatic encounter reveals a remarkable psychic gift and ultimately leads to her initiation as a permanent member of the group.

From the title of this series, you might expect that it's somehow derived from the Steven Spielberg/Tobe Hooper blockbuster ghost epic of 1982. But according to Lewis, whose company is producing the series for MGM Worldwide Television, there's little connection. "The only relationship to the Poltergeist film is that MGM had the underlying rights to it," Lewis relates, "so they owned the property. When it came time, with the success of Outer Limits, to see what else they could mine, they came to me and said, 'Do you want to do Poltergeist as a series?' and I said, 'Well, I don't really get it. What, is the family moving to another [haunted] house? What a horrible life these people have" I said that I wouldn't do that story because there's a real limitation to it, and they said, 'Well, if you could do it, what would you do?' "And where I started from was to create a franchise based around a secret society that has been around for 2, 3,000 years, like Freemasons have, with their special handshakes and all that fun stuff that I grew up loving," Lewis continues. "There's much more of the wonder of what Spielberg did with Raiders, and you'll even see in our two-hour pilot a little bit of a homage to that. Our opening sequence takes place in a mine in Peru, where Winston Rayne, one of the members of The Legacy, has taken his son Derek on what's supposed to have been a vacation. But basically, the father's completely obsessed with finding this box, a sepulcher which contains all these evil spirits, and that obsession results in Derek witnessing his father being killed right in front of him. "Then we cut to 25 years later and Derek is now the leader of The Legacy, and he's sort of tortured by the way his father died. And what happens in the pilot is that they find another box, and Derek knows more than anyone how dangerous it is."

Lewis admits that the success of The Outer Limits had a lot to do with spurring MGM to seek out another dark fantasy-minded series, but there's also the question of competition — and comparison — with that biggest of all paranormal investigation shows, The X Files. "I've never watched a complete episode of X Files." Lewis says, "but I believe they're pretty different. Obviously it's a huge hit, and I wish them well, but... Someone asked me if we feel that Outer Limits was created by the success of X Files, and I remind people that Outer Limits was created in 1963, when [X Files creator] Chris Carter was just a kid. So it's the other way around. Outer Limits was a success, Poltergeist existed before Chris Carter probably wrote his first TV show, and I think you do borrow from successful material.

"The premise of The X Files, as I understand it, is that the government's hiding everything. In Poltergeist. these people believe exactly what they're seeing, and they're trying to protect society. It's almost that H.P. Lovecraft thing where, in between what we see normally, you catch glimpses of incredibly disturbing images. Highlander tapped into that a little bit, where there's this sort of mythic battle that's been going on since the beginning of time, good vs. evil."

It is this historical context that Lewis believes will ultimately allow Poltergeist: The Legacy to stand apart in the increasingly crowded field of spooky TV. "What I'm positing is that this secret society of people was created to help understand the world," he says. "And what's fun about this is, Edgar Allan Poe was a member of the Legacy, as was Robert Louis Stevenson. They were writing their stories while they were part of this secret society, which really gives it a solid grounding and makes for great fun."