In ‘The Bondsman,' Kevin Bacon Goes to Hell and Back
The devil goes down to Georgia in the horror comedy series 'The Bondsman,' but he's not looking for a fiddle fight. This demon master is actually an old-school telemarketer, fax machine at the ready, overseeing a pyramid scheme of lost souls. And when he taps you on the shoulder, you'd best be ready to do his handiwork.
A gory, tongue-in-cheek slice of Southern Gothic, the new Amazon Prime Video series, premiering Thursday, presents a system of penance that borders on bureaucracy. A rural Georgia bondsman named Hub Halloran (Kevin Bacon) stumbles into the scheme in the first episode, when his throat gets slit in the line of duty. Coming to with a gaping wound in his neck, he soon realizes that he has been to hell and it has spit him back up. He's still a bondsman, but now his job is to track down demons that have escaped from hell. If he refuses, he gets sent back.
In a TV landscape offering no shortage of horror in recent years, 'The Bondsman' has a folksier flavor than most. The show's haunts are rural; the main characters are scared and surprised by the demons they encounter, but they also just seem inconvenienced and perturbed by the whole affair.
'The operational theory is like, 'Well, hell, I was going to go grocery shopping today, and instead, I've got to deal with a demon on the loose in my small town,'' said Erik Oleson, the showrunner. 'It's just one more of those things that the system keeps sticking on you.'
The system, in this case, is represented by Pot O' Gold, which presents itself as a tenacious series of pop-up ads and voice mail messages offering one of those opportunities that you just shouldn't pass up. The company logo is a jovial leprechaun. The boss is the devil himself, though he's too busy to make himself seen; instead he sends a very cheerful, un-devilish minion (Jolene Purdy) to give Hub his new assignment.
Hub is skeptical, though he notices that his slashed throat, which he initially covered up with duct tape, seems to have magically healed. Soon he's off to hunt down demons, armed with a variety of weapons (shotgun, chain saw), and Kitty, his spitfire mama (Beth Grant) by his side.
'The Bondsman' was created by Grainger David, a soft-spoken former journalist for Fortune who grew up in Atlanta and South Carolina. He studied literature at Princeton, where he immersed himself in Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O'Connor.
In an interview, David citied a line from O'Connor's short story 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find': 'She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.' Hub, David said, 'could have been a good man if there'd just been a demon around every minute of his life. He's someone who made so many mistakes and was just screwing up. And then finally here at the end, he sort of gets a second chance.'
In short, Hub had demons to wrestle with well before he died and came back. He was a lousy husband (though a pretty good country music collaborator) to his ex-wife, Maryanne (the singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles), and an inattentive father to his teenage son, Cade (Maxwell Jenkins). Both have now taken up with a carpetbagging Boston gangster (Damon Herriman) who is looking for his own redemption, though not very hard.
Hub isn't a terribly nice guy, but, as played by Bacon and written by David, he has the impish swagger of a man who doesn't realize he's in over his head — or, in this case, enslaved by the big boss down below. Plus, his mother is always there to knock him down a peg or two, or help him with his new gig.
'On the one hand Hub is kind of the quintessential ideal of American manhood,' Bacon said. 'He's kind of a loner and lives hard and all that stuff, but he's still very much of a mama's boy. I found that very funny.'
'The Bondsman' arrives under the production banner of Blumhouse, which has a prolific track record in horror for both big screen ('Get Out,' 'The Invisible Man') and small ('Into the Dark,' 'Sacred Lies'). Earlier Blumhouse productions have blended horror and comedy, but Jason Blum, the company's founder and an executive producer on 'The Bondsman,' said the results have been mixed.
'We've done some horror comedies; sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong,' Blum said. 'Usually when I read them, I don't like them because the comedy takes away from the horror and the horror takes away from the comedy. In this show I feel like they really complement each other, and that's very tricky to do.'
Macabre stories have always been part of TV, with creepy series like 'The Twilight Zone' and 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' being early hits and others, including 'The X-Files' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' becoming beloved shows. But this century the small screen has provided a more consistent home for capital-H horror, with showrunners using cinematic effects and gruesome gore to deliver jump scares to people's living rooms. This movement has yielded an impressive range of frights.
Some series, including 'The Walking Dead,' Ryan Murphy's 'American Horror Story' and the Duffer brothers' 'Stranger Things,' have become reliable franchises with fervent fan bases. Mike Flanagan has tapped a more literary, introspective vein with the likes of 'Midnight Mass' and 'The Haunting of Hill House.' TV horror has also made space for Afrofuturism and commentary on racism in American history, with 'Lovecraft Country.'
The creative team behind 'The Bondsman' agrees that television horror is more difficult to craft than the movie kind. 'With a movie you have more time to set up the jump scares that an audience wants,' Blum said.
Grainger added: 'Movie horror really wants to be meticulous and drawn out. It needs time in order for the audience to really get into that mind set of dread. This is a little bit different because of the more compressed time structure, and also because the comedy wants to resist that kind of elongated ramp.'
The 30-minute episodes of 'The Bondsman' amp up the mayhem quotient with concentrated doses of demonic frenzy. This somehow makes everything a little funnier, with outrageous setups and gory set pieces pushing at the edges of every episode.
Factor in the cross-genre pollinating and you get a relentless adrenaline blast, a work of sensation more concerned with providing quick jolts than winding back stories.
'We really just wanted to make a crazy mash-up of horror and action and family dramedy and music,' Oleson said. 'Just make it a fun ride, and hopefully at the end of the show, people have this stupid grin on their face and they're like, 'What the [expletive] was that?''
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