December 5, 2016

Have you had a chance to catch up and watch SyFy’s excellent horror mini-series CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE? If not, you can now stream all 6 episodes via the SyFy website.

We were fortunate enough to have showrunner and show creator Nick Antosca as a special guest on this week’s episode of the Shock Waves podcast, along with series writer Harley Peyton. During the hour long discussion, we uncovered plenty of interesting tid-bits covering the origins of the series, how they expanded upon the original “creepypasta” for the show, and we even got some hints at what Season 2 of CHANNEL ZERO: NO END HOUSE will be like. But one of the most intriguing tidbits uncovered revolved around the origin of CANDLE COVE’s terrifying “tooth monster.”

“The technical name is ‘the tooth child,’” Antosca clarified. “I saw someone make a Pop doll, the funko doll, and on the package it said ‘tooth boy!’”

How the hell did he dream up such a visually daring monster? Well, it came from a nightmare actually. “It came about because when I was breaking out the concept for the first season, which I did way before the pitch, I was just thinking a lot about childhood and all the markers of childhood, and baby teeth kept coming up,” explains Antosca. “This was right when I was starting to write on HANNIBAL. So, all kinds of crazy shit was going through my head. I had a nightmare one night about a tooth child; a little person covered in teeth. And I thought that’d be great in CHANNEL ZERO.”

“This was 2014, I didn’t really think CHANNEL ZERO was going to happen,” he continued. “Most shows don’t get made. Most pitches don’t get sold. The chances of it getting on air were very low. So, I pitched it for HANNIBAL! I tried to get it in HANNIBAL.”

“It actually ended up in several drafts of HANNIBAL scripts, in visions. It was going to represent Hannibal’s dead sister Misha in visions. Because he ate her. It’s a vision of mastication, basically. Eventually that got cut out. And I’m so glad that it did, although at the time I was (bummed).”

Antosca revealed that the first design for “the tooth child” was actually done by THE WALKING DEAD’s Greg Nicotero as a favor. But Francois Dagenais, who did all the costumes for HANNIBAL created a maquette. “Jeff Vlaming, a writer on HANNIBAL, who also wrote on TEEN WOLF, is a really good artist and would always sketch stuff, and he would sketch the tooth boy on the board, so sometimes you’d come in and there’d be this thing that looked like it had popcorn kernels all over it, with little dialogue bubbles talking to Hannibal.”