The Unbinding Creators Talks Their Chilling New Investigative Documentary

In two seasons of the TV series Hellier, occult researchers Greg and Dana Newkirk followed a lead that started with a call for help against a group of “goblins” that were showing up in a family’s Kentucky backyard, which led the couple on a complex, frightening, and enlightening journey that concluded with them performing an ancient ritual in an underground cave. Unlike other mainstream paranormal TV shows, who all utilize similar tools and are quick to call almost anything haunted, fans appreciate the more grounded and ambitious attempts to uncover the truth of these events of “high strangeness” in Hellier as opposed to delivering yet another program featuring researchers running around and screaming about the supernatural. The Newkirks’ latest project, The Unbinding, takes a similar cinematic approach as Hellier (courtesy of director Karl Pfeiffer) to explore the origins of a Crone-shaped relic that has ignited a bizarre series of events. The Unbinding will be exclusively available for rent or purchase on Prime Video on September 8th and on other streaming platforms shortly after.

The Unbinding is described, “When two hikers stumble across a strange statue deep inside in New York’s Catskill Mountains, they become the target of chilling paranormal phenomena. As the activity escalates into terrifying manifestations of a ghostly entity, occult researchers Dana and Greg Newkirk (Planet Weird’s Hellier, discovery+’s Kindred Spirits) are called to uncover the truth behind the haunted artifact. What follows is a harrowing journey into the very nature of belief, where the curse of the Catskills Crone dares to defy the stories we tell ourselves about the unexplained.”

In addition to the film’s tactile and sophisticated cinematography setting it apart from its peers, The Unbinding takes entirely fresh approaches to uncovering what could really be the cause of the “high strangeness” surrounding the object, as opposed to merely attaching paranormal buzzwords to the phenomenon. Taking place over the course of years, the Newkirks’ quest for answers, which includes assistance from frequent collaborators Tyler Strand and Jason Gowin, involves rituals, research, and interviews with experts to craft an entirely unique, eerie, and captivating excursion into this history of this totem that takes viewers down a chilling, gripping, and enlightening path.

ComicBook.com caught up with Greg and Dana Newkirk to talk the development of The Unbinding, the impact of the documentary, and the future of Hellier.

ComicBook.com: What do you think is the most common misconception that people have about your field and what it is you do? I’m sure you get lots of people at Q&As and screenings and at conventions that are just curious about the paranormal, but what do you feel is just the thing you wish you could give a disclaimer about to everyone you meet?

Dana Newkirk: It’s a boring answer, but it would probably be, I think that at least as far as Greg and I go, some of the topics that we touch on are obviously in the realms of high strangeness, and they are very weird, but we try as much as humanly possible to approach most of it from as much of a logical standpoint as we possibly can. 

I think it’s really easy to assume that we’re talking … Because we talk about things like, Bigfoot is a ghost. It’s as extreme as you possibly can get. I think, often, people see that and they’re dismissive, because they’re like, “That sounds crazy,” but there’s a lot of logic to it, I guess, at least from our perspective. So I think that’s probably my answer.

Greg Newkirk: That’s a good answer.

I love the fact that you got the “high strangeness” out of the way early, just because, to me, I feel like that’s what Hellier at least helped introduce me to, is giving a name to something that cannot be quantified as ghost versus supernatural versus paranormal. It’s just strangeness. It’s very hard to quantify.

Dana Newkirk: It really is. It’s so funny, because for the first season of Hellier, when we were doing a lot of press, people were like, “What does that mean? What’s high strangeness?”

Greg Newkirk: “How do you classify this?”

Dana Newkirk: And we were like, “How do you even create an elevator pitch for what that means?” It just encompasses so many things. But I think what’s funny about it is, once people get it, they’re like, “Oh, I totally understand exactly the vibe. It makes complete sense.” But in the beginning, people were like, “We don’t know what that means at all.”

I’m sure there are some people who say, “Well, I think aliens exist, but ghosts, no way,” or, “I think Bigfoot is total nonsense, but the Mothman is possible.” When it comes to cynics or cynicism about what the two of you experienced with Hellier, with The Unbinding, with any number of the other things, do you try to explain to them why they should believe you? Or is it just this binary of, if you’re not buying into this, I’m not going to try and sell it to you?

Greg Newkirk: I mean, honestly, we are not trying to convince anyone and I think that’s evident in our projects, because we don’t jump to conclusions with anything. I think that’s frustrating for people who are used to the way a lot of these shows are typically made. They give you an answer, they make it easy for you, and we’re not really interested in doing that, because it’s not easy for us. We can tell you what we think about what we experienced, but the hard truth about the paranormal is that it’s subjective. So to really have those experiences and feel the things that we’re feeling, you have to subject yourself to the experience.

We’re not as concerned with telling people what to believe about high strangeness. We’re more concerned with giving them a way to think differently about the unexplained. For some people, that’s incredibly frustrating, because if you watch something like Hellier on a purely surface level, you’re going to walk away going, “Well, they found a tin can and some balloons, that doesn’t mean anything to me.” But it’s not supposed to mean anything to you, it’s meant something to us and we’re showing you our journey. The Unbinding is probably going to be seen the same way. It definitely has more of a typical, three-act structure. It has an ending at least that we’ve been able to–

Dana Newkirk: An ending so far.

Greg Newkirk: So far, yeah. It feels more like a conclusion to the story than something like Hellier does, but that’s a happy accident. There’s really no convincing anyone who isn’t going to go along for the ride. 

At one point in the film, you talk about how being scared is a necessary part of transformation or it’s a necessary part of change. Just speaking broadly and about scary experiences, scary stories, when the two of you look back on your careers, can you point to, “This is the thing that has scared me the most,”? Or is it a thing for the both of you where you’re like, “It’s always a mix of scared versus excitement versus adrenaline,”?

Dana Newkirk: There’s so many. The one that I can think of, and it was a scary experience, but over the years it’s metamorphosized into a different kind of scary experience, I guess. It was years and years ago, my friends and I had a TV show in Canada called the “Girly Ghost Hunters” and–

Greg Newkirk: You should look it up.

Dana Newkirk: Don’t look it up. Please don’t look it up. There’s a lot of very early 2000s bucket hats and fashion, there’s a lot of that going on. 

But we had a show, and so we traveled all across Ontario and parts of Canada and investigated haunted places. At this point, I had been investigating the paranormal for two or three years and had had weird experiences, but we investigated this, it was our final episode, we investigated this location called the Hermitage in Canada, and it’s the ruins of an abandoned mansion. It’s in the middle of the woods. It’s like the quintessential, spooky, abandoned house in the woods. There’s a lot of lore and legend around it. Not a whole lot of it is validated, but it’s interesting. It’s got its own folklore. We were investigating this place, it’s the middle of the night, and I started to see what looks like, it’s so hard to describe it, it was like a seven-foot, eight-foot tall, human-shaped thing made out of what looked like television static, but it was cased within what looked like a humanoid shape. And we were filming.

I stood there looking at this thing, walking out of the woods, and we were in the middle of nowhere. Then I watched two more of them come out on either side of them, and then myself and everyone around me focused on it. So six or seven people were watching this incredible thing. And I’m talking camera people, audio people, who really didn’t believe in the paranormal whatsoever. At the moment, it was incredibly terrifying. I was so scared. We’ve never really been able to figure out what it was and it’s something that I talk a lot about, but I think in the years since that experience, what actually is more terrifying to me is the existential dread that I get when I think about it, because it was a moment where it was a paradigm-shifting moment where I was like, “Monsters are real. We’re looking at this thing.” So it was two kinds of terrifying, it matured into a more existential inner, horror kind of fear.

Greg Newkirk: It’s a weird thing, because I think everybody who does something similar to what we’re doing, who truly believes it, there’s a lot of moments where you’re going, “Am I just LARPing? Is this for real? Am I just cosplaying ghosts or Bigfoot, or whatever?” But then you have a moment you have and you’re like, “Oh, sh-t, I can’t explain this. I can’t rationalize it away. I don’t know how to feel about this.” And it makes you go, “Oh yeah, monsters are real. I guess that’s the world I have to live in now.”

Dana Newkirk: Exactly. It was very much like that kind of a thing, where it was like, first I had to process the terrifying experience and then in the 20 years since, it’s just this thing that sits in my head every once in a while and goes like, “Hey, remember when that thing happened to me that one time in front of seven or eight people, half of which didn’t believe in any of this stuff at all?” So that’s probably the most terrifying experience that I’ve ever had, for sure.

And Greg, do you have a paradigm-shifting, existentially eye-opening experience like that?

Greg Newkirk: My friends and I, we started — we even talk about it in The Unbinding. Our career started as a joke. We were just scaring one of our friends in a cemetery at night in high school.

Dana Newkirk: Very Blair Witch-era.

Greg Newkirk: Exactly. It dates it perfectly. But when weird little things started to happen that no one would cop to, we started to go out to places every weekend, because maybe these things are real. 

The thing that really sold it for me, and we’d experienced a lot of strange things, but the thing that sold it to me was, there was an old building that my friends and I had always heard legends about but never had visited for some reason. We went there one night with this documentary filmmaker from Washington, and there were only four of us, and we didn’t think much of it, and we were laughing and joking, and then all of a sudden the director grabs his neck and drops his camera, and starts to wheeze. We had to drag this guy out of this building, because something was strangling him.

Dana Newkirk: I’ve seen the footage, it’s terrifying.

Greg Newkirk: He had handprints on his neck and the whole time we were like, “There’s no way this can be real. He’s doing this for his documentary. He did this for his documentary.” But we still were so scared. We didn’t ghost hunt for six months. 

One night we were at our favorite all-night diner in the middle of the night, and we bring it up, because everybody was too weirded out to talk about it. We bring it up and somebody’s like, “You think Robbie was making that up? You think he just needed a good end for the doc?” And we’re all like, “Yeah, yeah, totally.” And we’re like, “Let’s go.” And it’s midnight, one in the morning at this point. “Let’s go back to that building. Let’s go back.”

So we went back, cautiously walk inside, we’re all on pins and needles. But as we started to warm up to the place, all of a sudden a book — and we were the only people in there, it’s just a one-room building, there’s not much going on there — a book goes whizzing past our heads right between me and my friend from nothing. There was nothing there. We were so scared, we went bolting out of that place as fast as we could. A couple of my friends couldn’t see picnic tables in the dark and did full summersaults over them when they hit them. That was the moment where we’re like, “There’s something about this that is, for us, very real and we can’t understand the mechanisms behind how it works.” And it was over from that point, my guidance counselor’s lost that day. 

When it came to developing Hellier, it was almost by accident that so much was uncovered from that initial thing. When it came to The Unbinding, where you have years’ worth of experience and you are chronicling it from relatively early on, and then you were revisiting it, what was it specifically about “The Crone,” about this idol that you found that you were like, “This needs to be investigated a bit more thoroughly than some of the other artifacts that you have,”?

Greg Newkirk: I say it in the documentary, but 99% of the stuff people send us never acts up, it’s never strange. I really do think that the way that we haunt things, whether it’s people, places, things, is by attaching strong emotions to them. Then I think, for a lot of people, it causes a reaction, whether or not that’s something that’s manifesting from the item itself or themselves, I don’t think it really matters to them. All they know is “this is spooky.” There’s something happening here. So when they send it to us, we won’t experience it, because we don’t have those strong emotions attached unless there’s a really scary story attached to it that sits in the back of your head and you start to think about.

So most cases, I think, we typically are the ones who are haunting these things with story. This item responded so strongly to that, whether it’s that story, whether it’s whatever it is that we found at the end was influencing it, I don’t know. But it seemed to be … It wanted attention, whatever it was. It wanted attention. It wanted us to pay attention to what it was doing. And just following that thread just kept ramping up to more and more things. 

The way that we always talk about it is, when somebody has a haunting, they come to us and they say, “Well, what am I supposed to do about it?” And our first question is, “Have you addressed it? Have you acknowledged it? Have you tried, as silly as it sounds, just talking to the ghost?” Most people say no, because they just want to ignore it. Well, what do you do when you’re trying to get someone’s attention and they’re ignoring you? You raise your voice. I think that’s what we were experiencing, and this one had such a loud voice, we didn’t really have an option but to listen. 

I think it’s in the opening narration of the movie, you talk about all these different objects and sometimes there are just objects or artifacts that change the way you approach all of this stuff. From the start of the project to now, this film being released, how do you feel this investigation and your experiences with this object, how do you feel like they have changed you?

Dana Newkirk: I say it in the documentary and it is genuinely, it’s so true. But this case specifically really changed me as a person and really changed a lot of the ways that I view the paranormal and paranormal experiences, just in general. And that, for me, I left truly a very changed person. I think that is a really powerful thing and I hope that that comes across throughout the course of the investigation. 

It’s really interesting even just looking at …. One of the things Greg’s been saying quite a bit has been watching the first half of the documentaries is hard for us now, at this point, because it’s so removed from our viewpoints now, and it’s so removed from even our process in terms of how we investigate the paranormal and how we communicate with other people who are having paranormal experiences, that it’s been a strange thing. Just watching the progression of how we’ve evolved as paranormal researchers, even that alone has been a fascinating thing. I think that the influence of The Crone on us, I think has been to make us really better at what we do. Hopefully make us better at what we do.

Greg Newkirk: I don’t think ghosts are dead people anymore. I mean, that’s really the simplest way I can sum it up.

Dana Newkirk: It’s so much more nuanced. I think that we are so used to paranormal TV being very black and white. It’s not even just paranormal; paranormal media, in general, there’s a lack of nuance to quite a bit of it and it’s disruptive. It’s not really beneficial and helpful in most cases to paint things that way. I think that going through this process and this investigation, it only helped to further solidify our beliefs about the utilization of nuance when it comes to all of these types of things. I think I can speak for both of us. It really changed, truly, the way that we approach a lot of this kind of stuff, for sure. 

When you say you don’t really feel that ghosts are dead people anymore, I know that some of the elements of The Unbinding, we get some teases, some glimpses, some theories of what you could mean by that, and I don’t want to spoil it for folks who haven’t seen it, but are you able to talk a little bit more about that? Do you feel that ghosts fall into that unquantifiable high strangeness? It’s not Mr. John Brown who used to live in this place, and it’s not the Green Man? Do you feel like all that stuff exists on a spectrum?

Greg Newkirk: I think you nailed it by saying the idea that it’s part of the broader spectrum of the unexplained. I think that as human beings, we want to put things in boxes, and that’s how we tell stories a lot of the time. We know what a good story feels like. It’s got a beginning, middle, and an end, and it makes us comfortable, it gives us an answer. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the paranormal works that way, otherwise it wouldn’t be the paranormal. 

We’ve done a really great job of telling ourselves dead people can get hung up here on this plane of existence, because they’ve got unfinished business. I think the truth is, we are the ones with unfinished business. I think we are the ones who are keeping the ghosts here. That’s not to say that I don’t think that your Aunt Edna can’t come back to tell you that she loves you to give you closure when you need it. I think that’s an evolutionary trait, frankly. I think that’s meant to happen. But I think that the things that go bump in the night are so much more complex, that if we try to look at them outside of that box and see what they’re trying to get us to do, say, think or build, or the stories that they’re trying to get us to tell, I think they’re a very human thing that we have given over to bad storytellers. And I don’t think it’s been a very good thing for people’s… How do I want to put this? People’s…

Dana Newkirk: Psyche?

Greg Newkirk: Yeah, because we’re getting stories that aren’t giving us anything of meaning. They’re just saying, “Be scared of everything you don’t understand.” And I truly have come to believe — we’ve been doing this 25 years, 30 years at this point. I remember when I was excited by the orb chart that showed what color orb meant the ghost was happy, sad, or whatever. I’ve run the gamut. 

Where I’m at right now, and hopefully it’ll change in five years, I’ll have more information. Where I’m at right now, I truly do think that the strange things that manifest to us and around us are things that are trying to get us to move outside of a way of thinking or a way of existing. And if we really do listen to them intentionally, it will lead us to places that are very healthy for us. And I think that’s what we’re trying to capture in The Unbinding, is a story that’s trying very hard to manifest in this place and time. 

I think by the film’s conclusion, there are ways in which you’ve been able to literally and symbolically put this artifact, this story, this experience to rest. But I know that humans putting things to rest isn’t the same as strangeness, allowing those things to rest. In regards to The Crone and what you’ve found, what you’ve discovered, do you feel that other things have happened since finishing the movie that are related to it? Honestly, even just more people seeing the movie, now that it’s had premieres, have any bizarre phenomenon happened surrounding what you feel to be The Crone?

Greg Newkirk: Oh yeah, for sure.

Dana Newkirk: I also think a lot of positive things. There are people who have felt compelled to honor the experience themselves. It’s an interesting thing. There’s been positive things, but for sure, there’s all sorts of weirdness.

Greg Newkirk: There’s strangeness and even there’s a meta moment at the end of the documentary where we thought we were done. We filmed the final recreation scene, we’re still in the clothes that we wore in the recreation scene, and we’re trying as hard as we can to pull on this one last thread that’s been bothering us. When pulling on that, all of this other stuff comes out of there. Around the time that we were doing all of that, we were experiencing strange things. Like, for example, when we were doing recreations in the film, there was indoor rain.

Dana Newkirk: Yeah, multiple times, like, randomly.

Greg Newkirk: Little drops of water dropping down the backs of our necks.

Dana Newkirk: Just absolutely random.

Greg Newkirk: While we’re shooting this thing, little reminders.

Dana Newkirk: I think Karl actually had it happen to him while he was editing at one point. It dropped onto his hand or it was something like that. But I experienced sleep paralysis, and I’ve only ever experienced it twice in my life. This time was after the final recreation, that night I had a sleep paralysis experience, which sucked and was not fun at all, and I hated every second of it. But yeah, there was a lot of little weird things that sort of have happened.

Greg Newkirk: I think the same way that people who engage with Hellier start to have strange things happen to them, I don’t think that this project is any different. There were people who showed up to previous screenings of the movie, and then came to later screenings and were different people, and I think that will happen.

Just thinking about your house and your traveling museum, and all the different artifacts, I picture it like being the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, that the ark just ends up being put in a crate. Literally every one of these crates, you could dive into the journey and the history of that. Do the two of you know what you would like to uncover next or what you would like to explore next? Or was it really like, The Crone and the experiences surrounding that were like, “Oh, she is telling us we need to dive more into this,”?

Greg Newkirk: Oh, this was an accident. This project was an accident, and you can tell by the amount of iPhone footage in it, because it drives our cinematographer crazy. We never intended on this being anything. In fact, the original idea was what ended up becoming the Haunted Objects podcast. We were going to do little half-hour vignettes on the most fascinating stories attached to the objects in the museum, and these were just going to live on YouTube. But after we sat down and gave a couple four-hour interviews to our director, Karl, he was like, “This deserves to be told in a bigger way. You can’t just put this out, you have to really tell this in a big way.” So we set out to make this movie in a way that was maybe more accessible than Hellier is, because Hellier, it’s 15 hours at this point, so it’s not the easiest thing to get into if you’re new to us.

We wanted to make something that was close to an hour-and-a-half horror movie as we could out of this. It took us four years, but by the time we were done, that scene at the end, the weird meta moment at the end of the documentary, wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t taken that long. I try not to be one of those “everything happens for a reason” people, but sometimes it’s hard to deny and this is one of those cases. So I think that The Crone wanted her story told and that’s what ended up happening. 

Looking to the future for the both of you, I feel like so many people in your field, their dream goal is, “I just want a Travel Channel series” or whatever. From this movie that you’ve self-developed and self-financed, and then Hellier, and the podcast, and the traveling museum, are there still things on the horizon that you are both looking to accomplish, or maybe there’s another collaborator out there, I know like Amy Bruni or John L. Tenney, you have so many people that you’d really love to work with for something larger?

Greg Newkirk: We have so many stories that we want to tell.

Dana Newkirk: Oh, my God, yeah.

Greg Newkirk: And I think we try to look at Planet Weird, which is our production company, we try to look at that as a project in and of itself. There is an overarching goal with everything that we do that I think will make more sense once we’ve put a bow on our body of work. When we’re done telling all the stories that we want to tell in all of the different avenues we want to tell them, all the different outlets, it’ll make a lot of sense to people, it’ll be very cohesive. So there are still things in projects that we want to do in different mediums, it’s just a matter of waiting for them to tell us it’s time to tell those stories.

Dana Newkirk: I think, as weird as it sounds, it’s almost like, as long as we’re still curious about things, I think we’ll always want to be telling those stories. We’ll always want to be investigating them. We’ll always want to be involving ourselves in them. At this point, we still have so many things that we’re curious about. There’s so many things that we want to experience and explore that I think we’ll probably be very old people still doing a lot of this stuff, because I just can’t see the bottom of my bucket of interesting things that I want to investigate. So we have lots. 

I think that’s so evident in what you guys are doing, is that it’s not about the end goal, it’s about the process. It’s about you both trying to enlighten yourselves, and if that helps other people find enlightenment, or uncover truths, or uncover new realities, or strangeness, whatever the hell it is, that’s the joy, that’s the reward, is just that process. That’s what I viewed the two seasons, 15 hours of Hellier as. I don’t see it as a linear thing that is going to have an answer. To more definitively be able to put it out there, I feel like I know the answer and that I just talked about it, but for all the fans who might be Googling, “Will there be a Hellier Season 3?” do you see a Hellier Season 3?

Greg Newkirk: What if I told you we’ve already been shooting it?

Dana Newkirk: We’re filming it. We’re in it.

Greg Newkirk: We’re in the sh-t right now.

Dana Newkirk: We’re in it. And it’s so frustrating, because we keep joking that we’re like, people are literally not going to believe it. It’s just every time, this season has been insane. It’s insane. I just cannot wrap my head around the experience. We were like, “We’re just getting started.” I’m already excited for people to see. I can’t even deal with it. It’s nuts.

Greg Newkirk: We’ve dipped our toes into the water. I think we’re ankle-deep now. It’s a matter of when, not if. And, who knows, we let these stories tell themselves, we just show up. We are always joking about the “writers.” We just look to the sky and talk about, “I don’t know what the writers have in store for us,” and we just wait to see what happens. But, f-ck man, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. So yes, there will be.

I can’t tell you the mixture of excitement and just curiosity that I have that there’s going to be another season of Hellier. Because I felt pretty good in putting a cap on the concept of “celebrate activity,” if you will, and embracing that spirit of learning more, being more curious, uncovering answers for yourself, and now there’s a goddamn Season 3 on the way that I’m going to have to deal with.

Dana Newkirk: It’s so weird. You know what it is? Actually, it feels like, there’s been four years since the last season came out and even longer since we filmed the last part of the second season. And this season, again, we’re only ankle-deep in it, but this season is like, we’re really utilizing a lot of the knowledge that we’ve learned collectively as a group over the past however many years it’s been, and it feels scary, but in an exciting way.

Greg Newkirk: The implications are scary, is what it is.

Dana Newkirk: Yeah. We’re collectively just sort of hanging on for dear life.

Greg Newkirk: We’re on the ride now.

Dana Newkirk: We are on the ride. There’s no looking back at this point.

Greg Newkirk: Got to ride it through.

Dana Newkirk: Yeah, we have to go through it.

Greg Newkirk: The only way out is through.

Dana Newkirk: Exactly. 

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The Unbinding will be exclusively available for rent or purchase on Prime Video on September 8th and on other streaming platforms shortly after. You can learn more about The Unbinding, Hellier, Haunted Objects, and more at the Planet Weird website.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter.