Poltergeist TV Series Taps Fear the Walking Dead and Supernatural Writers as Showrunners

They’re here. Amazon MGM Studios has tapped veteran television producers Kalinda Vazquez and Robbie Thompson to serve as writers, co-showrunners, and executive producers on the Poltergeist TV series based on the 1982 horror film. The project was first announced to be in the works last October with Steven Spielberg, who co-wrote the Tobe Hopper-directed original, producing via his Amblin TV with executive producers Darryl Frank (Netflix’s The Haunting) and Justin Falvey (The Haunting of Bly Manor). Variety first reported the news.

Vazquez started her career as a writer and story editor on Prison Break seasons 3 and 4 and executive story editor and writer for the DC Comics-based Fox action series Human Target. She’s written episodes of The CW action-thriller Nikita, ABC’s fantasy adventure series Once Upon a Time, and the Marvel-inspired Hulu series Runaways. Most recently, Vazquez penned two season 4 episodes of the AMC zombie drama Fear the Walking Dead, an episode of Star Trek Discovery, and the five-issue Marvel Comics series America Chavez: Made In the USA. 

Thompson, whose credits include episodes of Jericho, Human Target, and Cursed, created the 2009 sci-fi series Ark and served as executive story editor on The CW’s Supernatural. He penned over a dozen episodes of the horror-drama’s 8th-11th seasons between 2012 and 2016, including the show’s fan-favorite 200th episode, “Fan Fiction.” 

Thompson created the Supernatural spinoff The Winchesters, which was cancelled after one 13-episode season in 2023, and has written a number of Marvel comics, including Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme, Venom: Space Knight, Spidey, and Silk, the Spider-hero whose own television series was recently scrapped at Amazon MGM.

Following Amazon’s nearly $9 billion acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2022, it was reported that Amazon Studios was sifting through the MGM catalogue for potential movie-based series, including RoboCop, Legally Blonde, Stargate, Barbershop, Pink Panther, The Magnificent Seven, and Poltergeist, which spawned a film trilogy about the haunted Freeling family, a 2015 remake, and the spinoff series Poltergeist: The Legacy that ran for four seasons between 1996 and 1999.

Spielberg’s Amblin Productions has been mining its own library for television, spinning off the Jurassic World movies into the Netflix animated series Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory, rebooting Tiny Toons Adventures as Tiny Toons Looniversity, and reviving Gremlins with the animated series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.

Poltergeist marks the latest collaboration between Amblin and Amazon-owned MGM, which co-produced Frank and Falvey’s Laurel Canyon series for Epix and the MGM+ western series Billy the Kid.