Fright Krewe Showrunners on Bringing Horror to YA Audiences (Exclusive)

Fright Krewe's Joanna Lewis and Kristine Songco explain how they developed Hulu and Peacock's horror series for younger viewers.

By Charlie Ridgely

Fright Krewe, the new animated series created by Eli Roth, is bringing the spooks and scares to young audiences everywhere. The series, which follows a group of misfit teenagers in New Orleans as they try to save the city from a demonic threat, made its debut on both Hulu and Peacock earlier this week. Dealing directly with supernatural elements and some very creepy villains, Fright Krewe is the kind of gateway horror title that young viewers can really sink their teeth into.

Of course, balancing real horror with teenage and YA stories can sometimes be a challenge, but Fright Krewe's creative team was more than up to the task. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to speak with executive producers and showrunners Joanna Lewis and Kristine Songco about how they were able to strike the right balance and deliver a true YA horror experience.

"I think for us, the stakes always had to feel real," Songco explained. "The thing that, in the process, we kept saying a lot is 'not too cartoony,' which sounds weird when it's an animated show. But we wanted to make this feel like this could be a real story with real people. People's reactions are real, and the comedy comes from someone's very scared reaction to something. And the comedy will come in the moments before the scare kind of a thing. But yeah, I think we tried to make this a little more grounded in reality."

"And also, we wanted to make something that appealed to us," Lewis added. "So we wanted to be able to want to watch what we were working on."

Influences in Building Tension

In order to keep the story grounded, the writers of Fright Krewe had to be sure they were building enough tension to keep viewers on the edge of their seats, without always resorting to big scares. 

"The thing about this show is that because it is the gateway horror kind of thing, you think of different ways to do the scares because there are jump scares, but it can't just be blood and guts the way traditional horror is," said Songco. "So there are a lot of zombie things, like All of Us Are Dead or Train to Busan that I watched for tension building reasons."

"And before we did this show, the Fear Street trilogy had come out, and I was like a herd studying with my notebook," Lewis said with a laugh. "Like, 'how many minutes between each scare? How are they treating the different things? Okay so there's that kind of thing but then there's the thing were people are just walking down a dark alley.' And that's terrifying. So we had to study. Kristine and I are both horror wimps, wo we spent a lot of sleepless nights watching these horror movies."

Setting Fright Krewe in New Orleans

Not only does Fright Krewe deal with all sorts of different supernatural and voodoo elements, but the entire story is deeply rooted in the history and culture of New Orleans. Getting the magic of New Orleans right was one of the biggest keys for the creative team in putting the series together.

"Right before we got asked to work on the show, I had come back from a trip to New Orleans, and I had done the graveyard tour, the voodoo tour, the vampire tours," Lewis told us. "And I came home so excited and so shocked because I realized that everything I understood about voodoo was completely wrong. And it was really important to us to get voodoo right."

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"It's really a vibrant faith tradition that's got so many beautiful aspects to it," she continued. "it's really hard to go learn about it and not fall in love with its beauty as a faith-based tradition. And that was really important to us, to be able to bring that to screen as best we could. That being said, voodoo is an oral tradition, so it wasn't just doing a tour. We did a bunch of research, and we had consultants who were extremely instrumental in making sure we were doing a faithful representation of the faith."

All 10 episodes of Fright Krewe are now streaming on Hulu and Peacock.

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