Interview With Sandy King, Producer Of ‘John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams’

Peacock’s new true crime show, John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, isn’t your usual run-of-the mill show. It seems like the world, the United States especially, is becoming more and more enthralled with serial killers and actual atrocities that there’s a new docuseries, documentary or mini-series popping up regularly. What sets Suburban Screams apart from the rest are a few things. One, it’s produced by John Carpenter and his wife, Sandy King. Two, it gives us the return of Carpenter to the director’s chair after 13 years. And three, it gives us premium cinematic scene work interspliced with archival footage, interviews, news clips, photos and more. These aren’t your everyday reenactments, folks.

To celebrate the release of the six-episode anthology on Peacock, I chatted with Sandy King about selecting the stories they wanted to tell, living next door to a serial killer, horror movies, and more!

PopHorror: Hi Sandy! I really enjoyed what I saw of Suburban Screams. I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

Sandy King: Good!

PopHorror: So first I want to know are you a true-crime fan?

Sandy King: Oh yeah, absolutely. I read everything I can of it. I went through a huge binge for a while of reading every serial killer book I could find, and I still do to an extent. I’m much more fascinated by reality than fiction a lot of the time.

PopHorror: It’s a lot scarier, isn’t it?

Sandy King: Well, yeah, the world’s pretty horrifying.

PopHorror: Yes.

Sandy King: People ask me what scares me, it’s what’s around me, it’s current events.

PopHorror: So how did you choose the crimes that were selected for the show?

Sandy King: We were presented with a slate that the network and the showrunner and the production company really liked, and we were presented with ones to choose from. A lot had been more supernatural and stuff, which we didn’t think was really up our alley.

PopHorror: I appreciate that.

Sandy King: Yeah, because we were thinking, well, Suburban Screams, we really wanted to get to the heart of what you would be freaked out if you found next door or in people you knew. So that was more the driving force of which ones appealed to us. And then there were a couple that when the network really wants one, you go, “Yeah, okay, it’s your dime. Fine.” But I think that when you see the truth of other people’s experiences and when that truth becomes their fact, you have to respect that and say, “Okay, what drives you and what is it that a survivor of an event lives with them for the rest of their lives?” That’s what gets more interesting rather than the event itself. What is it that they live with ongoing? And that became our motivation for each episode.

PopHorror: I appreciate you wanting to highlight the more… I don’t want to say real life ones, but versus the supernatural, because I don’t find that as scary as what humans can do to each other. And you’re right, with the name Suburban Screams, I’m thinking more of the serial killer living next door, or the one that… I got three episodes and I can’t remember the name of this one, but the young woman that was being stalked and I believe it said that her stalker is still out there. They never figured out who it was or caught them. That is terrifying. To the level of the stalking and what she was experiencing? That’s more terrifying to me than my neighbor having a ghost.

Sandy King: Yeah, me too, because those are the things that really happen and that you can put yourself in that position and no one to this day, no agency investigating, nobody’s able to find this guy. He is able to get so far into her life and so close to her that he was able to photograph her. So you know he’s nearby and still no one was able to catch him.

PopHorror: That’s scary.

Sandy King: It wasn’t for lack of trying. Every kind of agency looking still are, and she literally has that tremor. And I had the interviewer ask her before we wrapped up, when did her tremors start? For all I knew she had a palsy of some kind. No, that tremor started when he was stalking her.

PopHorror: Wowl, that poor woman, and now she’s going to continue to live looking over her shoulder. This type of story is what’s terrifying. So I appreciate that this is what you wanted to retell to us because that’s the scariest thing, I think.

Sandy King: Yeah, yeah. She’s trapped forever.

PopHorror: The reenactments are very well done. I appreciated that they were uncensored, which definitely separates Suburban Screams from other true crime shows that are out there. I watch a lot and I’m not a fan of reenactments, but I found that they were way different than what we normally see. How important was this to you to stand out from other shows?

Sandy King: Hugely important. Why do it if you’re going to be like everybody else? I felt like what we could bring to it was immersion in these people’s world, a visceral sense of what they went through, but stay true to the story. Not make up other stuff, not add monsters and things, events that didn’t happen. Everything in these stories happened. You may have 10 seconds of a hallucination in the phone stalker, but that was to try and show you how paranoid she’d gotten. But that’s out of 45 minutes. You’ve got a few seconds of a hallucination. The idea is that essentially what we brought to it was our ability to create a holistic, theatrical event that still kept the touchstones of the interviews and the reality to remind you, “Oh, by the way, this is true. By the way, this person experienced this.” And so you get reminders without pulling you totally out of living their event so that you walk away from it going, “Oh, shit.” As opposed to sitting back and cooking dinner watching somebody, how many days did it take to find the perpetrators of this crime and where you’re detached from it. Our idea was how immersed could you get and what happened to this person and what they lived with forever.

PopHorror: And was there a story that you wanted to cover but you weren’t able to for some reason?

Sandy King: There were a few, either for legal reasons because they were in litigation, or somebody bigger was making a theatrical movie out of it. There’s a few where you go, “Ah, that was so good.”

PopHorror: Next time!

Sandy King: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There’s a story that if we get another season I would love to do, that a sheriff told me when we were shooting Vampires of a man that the week before we were shooting out in the desert, he said, “Oh yeah, last week …” I had asked him something about crime out there in New Mexico and he said, “Oh, last week this guy came out here and shot his son because he thought he was a demon.” And that’s the kind of thing where you go, “God, the story behind that, what does he live with now? Has anybody, did he ever realize he wasn’t?” Stuff like that. And that’s the kind of thing where you wonder if your neighbor, do they think they have a demon in their house? Stuff is weird. And like you say, the serial killer next door, well, how many serial killers are there? You know they live next door to somebody.

PopHorror: I have a very questionable next-door neighbor, so it definitely goes through my mind sometimes.

Sandy King: Yeah! But I think most of the time nobody has a clue the guy’s a killer. That’s what fascinates me about them. The Ted Bundys of the world are in plain sight and they’re among us. They’re the fish in the sea eating the other fish. And that’s what I find so interesting about these human beings that are able to prey on others and then are behind you in the grocery line.

PopHorror:: Yep. Isn’t there a saying, you pass so many serial killers in your life without even – I don’t remember what it is off the top of my head – but without even realizing it, you’re passing them in your everyday life, and you’ll probably never know that someone that you pass or that you even encountered in your everyday life. That’s terrifying.

Sandy King: It is!  And it’s that dark side that draws me to writing horror. It’s that dark side that I find fascinating because I think that we’ve lifted the rock in this country and the hate is so overt that I tend to wonder about what’s quiet and worse.

PopHorror: Yeah, I definitely wonder about that too. And I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?

Sandy King: Oh, wow. Well, I’ve got the old ones because I’m a major Universal classic horror fan, and I’m a major Hammer fan. I love X the Unknown, and I love Frankenstein. I’m a giant Jordan Peele fan, so I’m all over the place. I love my husband’s movie, The Thing.

PopHorror: I actually hear that a lot when I ask that question, The Thing.

Sandy King: The Thing is, at the risk of sounding like I’m beating a drum, I think a perfect movie, whether it’s horror or not, it’s just really well constructed. I’m a fan of suspense, and that one just still makes me tear my hair out as the dog’s going down the hallway and that kind of thing. So for me, for horror to work, it has to be about something deeper and it has to have suspense and that kind of thing. So for me, that’s the template and old horror is why I go to the old horror because it’s great storytelling and again, it’s about something else.

Thank you so much to Sandy for taking the time to speak with us. Suburban Screams is now streaming on Peacock.