#Truth Seekers Takes Its Scares Seriously, Will Appeal to The X-Files Crowd

Following the release of the first The Truth Seekers trailer yesterday, fans cannot wait to join comedy duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost on their paranormal investigations. The cast and crew spoke recently about the upcoming sci-fi comedy series during [email protected], with co-creator Nat Saunders highlighting how the show was influenced by The X-Files and other beloved science fiction works.

“I think it was a mixture of wanting to get that X-Files kind of vibe but also looking back to old episodes of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Reading old books like the Usbourne Book Of Ghosts and the kind of paranormal stuff that obsessed us when we were growing up…We were kind of pulling up from different kinds of places. As Simon was saying, we wanted to take the horror really seriously and then make the comedy really funny. The horror stuff, it’s never spoofy, it’s homage if anything. There might be things that you recognize from other films and TV shows, but hopefully we’ve kind of put a spin on them and taken them seriously. We haven’t done a kind of goofy like ‘Let’s add some laughs to a classic horror tropes scene,’ kind of thing.”

The idea is to make you laugh, as evidenced in the Truth Seekers footage we’ve seen. But also to take frighten you when necessary, much like The X-Files often did. Saunders and co-creator James Serafinowicz looked to horror and sci-fi classics of the past in order to achieve the right balance, with the pair also looking to bring in some elements that horror fans may not have seen before.

“James bought this collection of paranormal leather-bound books from Andy Nyman, the guy who directed Ghost Stories. We spent hours pouring over these books and you’ve got spontaneous human combustion…we just wanted to bring a lot of that stuff to the show. Lots of kind of hauntography and psychogeography and number stations and weirdness you maybe haven’t seen before.”

Truth Seekers is an upcoming horror comedy series that follows a team of part-time paranormal investigators who team up to uncover and film ghost sightings across the UK, sharing their adventures on an online channel for all to see. However, as they stake out haunted churches, underground bunkers and abandoned hospitals with their array of homemade ghost-detecting gizmos, their supernatural experiences grow more frequent, more terrifying and even deadly, as they begin to uncover a conspiracy that could bring about Armageddon for the entire human race.

Set in a mysterious world filled with dread and just-out-of-sight monsters, Truth Seekers mixes the very funny with the very scary in an exciting take on genre storytelling, and stars Nick Frost as Gus, Simon Pegg as Dave, Samson Kayo as Elton, Malcolm McDowell as Richard, Emma D’Arcy as Astrid, and Susan Wokoma as Helen.

The series has been written by Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Nat Saunders and James Serafinowicz, and is being directed by Jim Field Smith (Episodes, Criminal: UK, The Wrong Mans). Truth Seekers is set to debut on Amazon Prime Video this fall. This comes to us from [email protected].

Topics: Amazon Prime, Streaming