Fear Itself is an unusual offering from a major American TV network: a one-hour horror anthology series, produced by Keith Addis and Andrew Deane, part of the team behind Showtime’s more graphic Masters of Horror. Fear Itself has episodes directed by horror veterans including John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) and Mary Harron (American Psycho). However, some segments are directed by newcomers to the horror genre. One of these is Breck Eisner, perhaps best known for directing the action adventure Sahara. He also helmed instalments of the science fiction miniseries Taken and directed The Invisible Man pilot for NBC. His Fear Itself episode, ‘Sacrifice’, has been chosen as the series premiere, airing on NBC on 5 June. Words: Abbie Bernstein

Had you wanted to do horror or episodic television before being approached to do Fear Itself?

Episodic was definitely not of interest to me. As a director, I feel that casting, tone and style are your strongest tools, and when you come on to episodic they take those tools away from you. So I didn’t really have a strong interest to get into that world, although I do like the pilot world, because you have those tools available to you. I’ve enjoyed doing that. What I liked about this is, it felt like a pilot. I was able to set the tone, shoot it the way I wanted to, cast it. And I want to do horror. As soon as they sent me the script, within five minutes of reading it, I said, “Absolutely, I’ll do it!”

Your episode ‘Sacrifice’ is based on Del Howison’s short story ‘The Lost Herd’ from the Hot Blood XII: Strange Bedfellows anthology …

Correct. I love the title of the short story. The title didn’t work for this, but I love it. ‘Sacrifice’ is definitely different. There is a twist at the end – it’s not the same twist, but there is a twist.

Mick Garris had written a script based on the short story and the script was significantly different than the story from its inception. But the concept of it is true to the story. It’s a little more ‘inspired by’ than literally a remake. It takes place today in Edmonton, Canada but has a period location - it’s an old fort from the late 1800s. So it has that quality, but it’s no longer a Western. [Writer] Grant Rosenberg and I developed the script, keeping true to Mick’s script, but there was a lot of work to do on it because there was overt sex and a lot of language – I suspect it was originally written for cable. [Laughs] We kept the basic concept and the tone and a lot of Mick’s dialogue – his dialogue was great. Keeping as much of that as I could, there was definitely some key plot stuff that I developed.

The episode was originally titled ‘Red Snow’…

Well, we got snow. That was the funny thing. We got enough snow to make it look like a snowy area, but not enough snow to motivate it being called ‘Red Snow’. I wanted that Fargo shot! So we were able to get a little bit of snow and get the look, and then in Edmonton, the lake was pretty great. I wanted one of two looks. What I was hoping for was snow and an overcast, bleak feeling. We didn’t get that, but what we got was clear sunny days, which gave great backlight and really long shadows, and the sun never goes high at that time of year. And we had a good crew.

As far as graphic horror, is the approach ‘less is more’ or as much as you can get away with on network TV?

Well, it clearly depends on the director! For Stuart Gordon, it’s absolutely as much as he can get away with at NBC; that’s who he is. I don’t know if I’m not a big gore fan or if it’s that my wife and I have just had a baby and I was responding to not wanting to have too much gore.

But isn’t childbirth really gory?

Surprisingly not! I was so scared about being there in the delivery room, but in the end, the emotion of the moment blocks out the gore of it.

Did the network censors have any problems with the horror elements?

They had two tiny notes about the length of a spike protruding that kills a woman and one other tiny note about the amount of time we stay on a spike killing this guy. It did not impact the show at all. I’m not a big gore fan – the kind of horror I like is from the 70s, like The Shining, The Omen, The Exorcist. Although I appreciate things like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes and I like going to see them, those aren’t the kinds of things I think I’m best at making. I like to use a tone of foreboding rather than gore, to create fear.

You have more horror projects coming up...

A Creature From the Black Lagoon remake and The Crazies, which is a George Romero remake. People out in the tall grass terrorising each other. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a great script – a guy named Ray Wright wrote it. It’s got a good core to it, good story, good characters.

How was the overall experience of making Fear Itself?

They just let me go. Obviously, they had to approve the script, but whatever I wanted to do, as long as it fit within the budget and the time frame...The concept of the show is to give each episode to a director and let him or her do as they see fit and they were true to that, and that’s what made the experience for me so great.

Fear Itself begins on NBC on 5 June 2008.