GHOST WORLD
JOE CORNISH’S TV THRILLER
TAKES GHOST-HUNTING TO THE NEXT LEVEL. THE DIRECTOR AND HIS TEAM TELL US HOW THEY BUILT A SPOOKY SHOW DRENCHED IN DETAIL
WORDS DAN JOLIN
LOCKWOOD & CO.
JOE CORNISH IS “A SIMPLE-MINDED MAN”.
HIS WORDS, NOT ours. “I get very confused and overwhelmed with complicated world-building,” the writer-director confesses to Empire. “Sit me down in front of The Rings Of Power and I feel like I’m sitting a geography exam. Or House Of The Dragon, I feel like I’m sitting a history exam. I like really simple, easy-to-grasp concepts. Like the notion of a plague of ghosts infesting the country, and psychic teenagers being employed to combat them…”
Following 2011’s Attack The Block and 2019’s The Kid Who Would Be King, Cornish is back with another tale of capable youngsters taking on supernatural threats. Except this time, he’s running an eight-episode show for Netflix and adapting someone else’s work, namely the Lockwood & Co. young-adult series by British writer Jonathan Stroud. Set in a parallel-world London and revolving around the city’s only ghost-hunting agency not run by adults, it was originally brought to Cornish by his producing partner, Rachael Prior.
“She read it and went, ‘Okay. Kids fighting supernatural things with swords. Joe Cornish,’” he laughs. “I suppose I just really loved that kind of film as a kid. There’s nothing better than a narrative that empowers you when you’re young. I think it’s really thrilling. Although, of course, there is a lot more to Lockwood & Co.”
Much more. Which is why we’ve asked Cornish, his two lead actors and some of his core crew to talk us through this distinctive, inventive story. Sure, it involves busting ghosts. But as Cameron Chapman — aka the Lockwood of the title — puts it: “It’s definitely not Ghostbusters.”
Here: Concept art of Type 2 ghost Annabel Ward attacking, by Romek Delimata. Note the use of rapiers to disperse rather than stab the ghoul.
THE WORLD
Lockwood & Co. is set in the modern day, but it’s not quite our modern day. Its reality diverged from this one back in 1968, when ‘The Problem’ began: a “ghost epidemic”, as Cornish puts it, where spectres of the troubled dead mysteriously began pouring into the living world. “It’s been going on for about 55 years, which is really cool, because it’s an ingrained situation and you’re talking about a society that’s had to develop to deal with it.”