Chuck Hogan on ‘The Strain’ and Mirroring the Books

Chuck Hogan The Strain Interview
Poster for ‘The Strain’ (Copyright 2014, FX Networks)

Writer/executive producer Chuck Hogan admitted that he was so used to the way the worms looked in The Strain that he wasn’t actually prepared for the reaction they got from viewers. At the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, Hogan said, “I got so used to the prosthetic and how scary the creatures look as we go along, I’d forgotten about the worms, which are largely VFX stuff. But what we’re hearing is the pilot and the first episode people are really freaked out by those worms. It came out so great, so it’s fun. The reaction stuff is great.”

The Strain airs on FX on Sunday nights at 10pm ET/PT and as season one continues, Hogan talked about what viewers can expect.

Chuck Hogan The Strain Interview

How close does this season follow the book?

Chuck Hogan: “Actually, the pilot I feel takes up almost half of the book, really. Not everything. We go back into some things but we really chewed up a lot of book in the pilot. That was good too because it really challenged us to come up with some different things and to create some things going ahead. But essentially, the first season is the first book in the sense that it starts and ends in a very similar fashion, but in the middle, especially towards the end of the season, we were able to do a lot of new stuff that was really fun.

I think we got a few episodes in and the actors and the locations were really informing us. We were sort of writing to that and it changed in a really fun way. It became something, I don’t know, it just felt bigger and better, frankly, the more that we went with it. That was exciting.”

Is there anything you had to tone down for FX?

Chuck Hogan: “No. No, that’s why, in many ways, they’re great partners with us but their whole thing is make it weirder, bigger, scarier which is no problem at all. So no, really other than just very sensible things that we wouldn’t really consider doing, in fact we have just sort of toned stuff down ourselves. It had nothing to do with the network, just maybe that’s a little too much. We would pull back a little bit. We don’t want people to really be grossed out, so it’s fun. It’s fun trying to gauge people’s responses.”

Was it planned as a TV series and it fell through, so you made the books and comic books?

Chuck Hogan: “My understanding is that Guillermo has always seen this as a longform narrative and his thinking was television. He went in…this was before we’d ever met, and people weren’t really getting it…and I think he had the idea to do it his own way and to have something that he could then show to people and say, ‘This is what I’m talking about.’

So when we met, we just talked about the books and we wrote the three novels and that was it. He and I both wanted to make sure that we wrote the books and they were finished, and then tried to do something else with it. That’s why we didn’t go to the networks until we were done writing it and stuff.

He definitely had this idea. He always thought of it as an eventual TV show way before TV was cool. We started in 2006 and I was kind of hoping for a movie. This would make a great movie, but he’s absolutely right. It’s so much more fun to be able to take characters in and out, have them in jeopardy, lose some, gain some. This is a much better way to tell the story.”

Who was hardest to cast?

Chuck Hogan: “Hardest to cast? It’s hard to say. We had a lot of good choices. It was hard in a good way which is we can’t go wrong, which actor or actress will be better. But the chemistry’s been fantastic. You notice, we have almost everybody here, we were able to get together and hang out last night. It’s just a really, really good group. Everyone is phenomenal. I honestly can’t think of many bumps in the road. We’ve been really lucky, really lucky.”

How do you balance the tone between humor and horror?

Chuck Hogan: “I love it. I think that’s fun. It’s fun that our show isn’t just one thing. It’s sort of an easy pitch. It’s a vampire show, great. But we go to some really weird places. We do some really crazy stuff. There’s some funny stuff, but not as much. There may be more coming but yeah, it’s really an entertaining show in every aspect. It’s entertaining scary, it’s entertaining weird, it’s entertaining fun.

It was the same thing writing the books. It was so great to be able to go to different places and to play something really gory and play something really mythical. The variety is really what excites me and hopefully the viewer too. There’s a lot of different looks.”