Entertainment

Haunted house

Rachael Taylor uncovers more than she bargained for in her new job. (ABC)

The real-life Ansonia on Broadway stands in for 666 Park. (Photo: Eilon Paz)

Horror has found a new audience, with shows about zombies (AMC’s “Walking Dead”), ghosts (FX’s “American Horror Story”) and vampires, werewolves, shifters, witches and renegade gods (HBO’s “True Blood”). But those shows are all on cable. This season, ABC didn’t want to be left out of the fun and came up with spooky series of its own, “666 Park Avenue.” It stars network favorities Terry O’Quinn (“Lost”) and Vanessa Williams (“Ugly Betty” and “Desperate Housewives”), and premieres tonight at 10.

“I’ve wanted to do a horror television show for a long time and sort of figured it wasn’t ever going to happen,” says David Wilcox, the shows’s creator and executive producer. “But with the success of shows like ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘American Horror Story,’ I think networks are getting more open to the possibility of dipping their toes into this genre. When I had an opportunity to pitch a take on this project, I jumped on it.”

“666 Park Avenue” is loosely based on a series of books by Gabriella Pierce. It co-stars Dave Annable (“Brothers & Sisters”) and Australian actress Rachael Taylor (“Charlie’s Angels”) as Henry and Jane, a young couple who have just been offered the chance to live in The Drake, a beautiful and historic building — for free — as long as they manage the property. The offer comes with all sorts of strings, but Henry and Jane don’t know that. Yet.

“One of the things I liked so much about this show is that everyone has their own points of seduction,” says Taylor. “In the pilot, Jane and Henry in the pilot are broke. I just looked for an apartment in New York City myself and it was really distressing. I think if you’re offered to live in a very, very seductive and elegant building with these amazing, glamorous people, then I certainly see that as a realistic pressure point.”

While Jane and Henry are seduced by the glamour, the location and the rapt attention of their new landlords — married couple Gavin (O’Quinn) and Olivia Doran (Williams) — it doesn’t take long before Jane starts to suspect that all is not right at The Drake. Gavin is working hard to befriend Henry, by taking him golfing and helping him make high-level connections, while Olivia is giving Jane expensive designer dresses and tickets to the symphony. What Gavin and Olivia are up to isn’t quite clear in the pilot, but it certainly raises questions. A lot of them.

“My theory, and it’s just a theory, is that Gavin’s kind of a sharecropper on the plantation of evil,” says O’Quinn. “He plants the seeds, but he only gets half the harvest. He has to feed some back to the building, but he gets his share and he uses people to his own ends.”

In some ways, Gavin seems to be in partnership with The Drake, or with whatever dark presence has taken up residence there.

“The [Drake] is in many ways like the Overlook Hotel from ‘The Shining,’” says Wilcox. “It has a presence. It has a spirit . . . that seems to be working hand in hand with Gavin Doran. But it’s also more powerful than anybody knows.”

Playing the part of The Drake is The Ansonia, a famous Manhattan building that’s actually located on the Upper West Side, at 2109 Broadway. The show itself is shot in Brooklyn.

“If you haven’t shot on a street in New York, that’s an experience that every actor should have, I think, because it certainly is an exercise in focus and concentration,” says O’Quinn. “Because there are those people who don’t want to stop their day and will cross the street and don’t care what you’re doing or if you’re making a movie or who you think you are.”

While Henry is working hard at the New York City Mayor’s office trying to get ahead, Jane is prowling around The Drake, initially because her love of both architecture and history makes The Drake especially intriguing to her.

“I think Dave’s character, Henry, is more likely to be led toward temptation than Jane,” says Taylor. “I think that one of the core aspects of the character of Jane is that she really does have a strong moral center.”

Still, Henry and Jane, who are very much in love but not yet married, will find their relationship sorely tested before they leave the Drake — that is, if they get to leave.

“This is an opportunity to tell morality tales — what is the one thing you are willing to sell your soul for?” says Wilcox. “people in this show never learn. To me, that’s really the fun of it.”

666 PARK AVENUE

Today, 10 p.m., ABC