BONES: Silas Weir Mitchell (left) stars in NBC’s dark supernatural drama “Grimm,” a show that comes off as Halloween every week. (Scott Green/NBC)
Ok, so your show is due for its “Halloween episode,” which is now an expected part of every fall TV season.
But if you’re a series with macabre overtones like “Grimm” or “666 Park Avenue” — and you’re treading on ghoulish ground every week — how do you make your Halloween episode stand out from the rest of the pack?
“Every week is sort of Halloween for us in some sense, so we absolutely did want to ramp it up [for Halloween],” says “Grimm” executive producer David Greenwalt of tomorrow’s episode, “La Llorona” — which will also be simulcast, in Spanish, Monday night on NBC-owned Telemundo.
“This is a South American tale of a weeping woman seeking her drowned kids from hundreds of years ago,” he says. “So it’s more of a ghost story than a ‘Grimm’ story.”
Tomorrow’s episode of “Grimm” — a supernatural cop drama with characters based on Grimm’s Fairy Tales — takes place on Halloween, with Portland homicide detectives Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) and Hank Griffin (Russell Hornsby) investigating a series of child abductions, with assistance from a mysterious detective (guest star Kate del Castillo).
“The story of ‘La Llorona’ is such a big mythology in the Spanish market, and there’s a lot of Spanish on the show,” Greenwalt says. “And [guest star] Kate del Castillo is doing her own dubbing in Spanish.”
There’s also some haunting going on over at The Drake, the gothic, foreboding, “Rosemary’s Baby”-ish Manhattan apartment building that’s home to ABC’s “666 Park Avenue” — and, this Sunday night, to its annual Halloween shindig.
“We knew from the beginning that Episode 5 was going to air right before Halloween, so we saw the episode as being the big turning point for our main character,” says “666 Park Avenue” creator/executive producer David Wilcox.
“Things are going to change for Jane after this episode.”
Jane (Rachael Taylor) is The Drake’s young, naive manager who’s fascinated — and repelled — by the building’s eerie, violent phenomena and its Mephistophelean owner, Gavin Doran (Terry O’Quinn).
“In Sunday’s episode, Jane is chased through the [Halloween] party by a guy wielding a hatchet,” Wilcox says.
“We wanted to nod to the sort of homicidal maniac chasing the heroine through the building . . . We took that basic idea as a Halloween trope and kind of folded that into our show.”