Willow Creator Jon Kasdan Reveals Some Unlikely Horror Influences On The Series
Have you caught the new "Willow" series yet? It's a whole lot of fun. The Disney+ sequel to the 1988 movie feels like a throwback, not just to the fantasy-comedy that inspired it, but also to the great, dynamic young adult "chosen one" stories of decades past, like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "The Princess Bride." On the short list of possible influences for the series, one name I would never expect to see is H.P. Lovecraft, but according to series creator Jon Kasdan, the cosmic horror author's sensibilities are woven into the new story.
Kasdan first mentioned Lovecraft on Twitter, citing the author of works like "The Call of Cthulu" and "At the Mountains of Madness" after the show's first two episodes dropped. "Series is packed with cthulhu mythos easter eggs," he tweeted, adding a cheeky warning that mirrors the sort one might hear about in a Lovecraft tale: "But a warning: investigate further at peril to your own sanity. These are doorways and passages that lead to ... ancient places."
Kasdan continues the Lovecraftian tradition
As intriguing as that is, the specific references Kasdan says are in the first episodes are even more interesting. In the same tweet, he mentions three specific Lovecraft-related references that pop up in just the first episode. The first, Hastur the Unspeakable, is a powerful being who shows up in Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos, but Hastur appeared even earlier in a work by Ambrose Pierce. The being also appears in Robert W. Chambers' "The King in Yellow," the 1895 short story collection that fans of "True Detective" might remember was essential to that show's first season.
Kasdan also name-drops the "Pnakotic Manuscripts" and the "De Vermis Mysteriis," two fictional grimoires (the latter first created by Robert Bloch) that are featured heavily in Lovecraft's sprawling literary arcana. Both have since been built upon by other authors as well. Basically, it's all a big, magical, centuries-old brew made up of several authors' spooky contributions, and with "Willow," Kasdan is throwing some new ingredients into the cauldron.
In an interview with Collider, Kasdan was asked about the Lovecraft references, which he says are deeply woven into the series. In response, he paints a picture of literary intertexuality: big, mythic stories that comment on big, mythic stories that came before them. "I grew up falling in love with those stories, and particularly hugely influential on this story was the novel 'It,'" which I read when I was ... twelve or thirteen," Kasdan said.
'Almost like an original D&D game'
Kasdan said that after getting really into "It," he wanted to know where the Stephen King classic's own mythology came from, "which leads all teenagers to love Lovecraft inevitably, and this incredible world he created," he said. It's true that King's novel, which on the surface is about a killer clown and the group of kids it taunts across several decades, also has its own incredibly deep lore, which is cosmic and mysterious like Lovecraft's reality-bending horror.
Kasdan says he appreciates the way multiple contemporaries of Lovecraft have commented on his work with their own, explaining, "One of the things that drew me to it was that with Lovecraft, you've got this thing where all these writers of the period, some really talented and some lesser, all developed this connection to what he was doing." The "Willow" creator says that the collaborative creation among these authors "was almost like an original D&D game they were all playing together." He mentions both Bloch, who famously wrote the novel "Psycho," and "Conan the Cimmerian" writer Robert E. Howard as two members of the Lovecraft Circle.
Kasdan says he thought the Lovecraftian method of collaborative storytelling was "such a cool device," adding, "it's such a thing that I admire in storytelling where people are bouncing concepts and mythological ideas off each other's work in an effort to create a more expansive and complete universe." As for Kasdan's own references to Lovecraft, you'll have to keep a close eye on the series to catch all of them, but one is immediately obvious in episode one: Tony Revolori's character, Graydon Hastur, shares a last name with one of Lovecraft's terrifying gods. Curious!
New episodes of "Willow" stream on Wednesdays on Disney+.