Interview PART 2 with Mark Lewis, Series Producer of Syfy’s PARANORMAL WITNESS
This is part two of my phone interview with Mark Lewis. If you missed part one click here. What I loved so much about this phone interview was Mark’s enthusiasm and genuine conviction in the show and his staff. His excitement for the show only fueled my own anticipation for the series second season premiere, which aired last Wednesday, August 8th.
This second half of the interview speaks about an upcoming episode based on true events entitled “The Dybbuk Box.” I’m very anxious to see what Mark and his team come up with in the episode.
Mark: What sort of films, what sort of Paranormal Witness stories are you looking forward to this season?
Judy: I’m personally looking forward to “The Dybbuk Box.”
Mark: Do you know about the actual Dybbuk box?
Judy: I don’t know a lot about it, but I’m looking forward to…
Mark: “The Dybbuk Box” is a fantastic story in our Canada films this season. “The Dybbuk Box” is the story of a cursed Jewish wine box that contains, so they say, a Dybbuk. A Dybbuk is a spirit or kind of demon in Jewish folklore and this Jewish wine cabinet, it’s believed, kind of houses this Dybbuk and anybody that opens the Dybbuk box releases this Dybbuk on themselves and on their families. It absolutely wreaks havoc in anyone’s life who opens the box.
Interestingly, the director/producer, Sam Raimi was so inspired by the story of the Dybbuk box, he’s made a kind of fictionalized version of this story in a movie called The Possession, which is coming out at the end of August.
We’re doing the real story, which is quite different from Sam Raimi’s tale and I suspect probably more frightening. It really is an incredible tale and very different, actually, from the stories that we’ve done before. This is the story of, essentially, a cursed item that absolutely wreaks havoc on anybody who owns I and what happens to the three sets of owners that we feature within out film (episode) is really shocking. It will have you jumping out of your seat.
Judy: Yeah, when I saw the trailer for The Possession, I found it very interesting but then when I read here in the press release that you guys were doing the actual case, that’s what really—I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be so amazing!”
Mark: Sam Raimi’s version is a fictionalized tale of a little girl who buys the box and then becomes possessed. The real story is very different from that. It starts with a guy called Kevin Mannis, who was an antiques dealer that bought a lot of antiques from an estate sale in Portland, OR (including the Dybbuk box). When he brought it back to his shop, everybody that came into contact with it, his store assistants, his own mother has a stroke when she opens the box. His store sales clerk is absolutely terrorized and she’s left down in the basement of the store with this box and the lights start to explode everywhere and furniture starts to shift. Then he sells the box on to other people and similarly, every time it gets sold on, all manner of awful things happens to everybody who owns it. It’s an absolutely extraordinary tale and extraordinary because, once again, it’s corroborated from one set of people to the next. Every time you start to wonder, “Gosh, could this really be true,” the story moves on to a new set of owners and one by one they all suffer the same misfortune. It’s a really staggering story and again, beautifully dramatized by Russell England, who’s another of our top directors. It looks absolutely astonishing; incredibly filmic.
Judy: I just can’t tell you enough how much this show has changed how I watch paranormal shows because this is the only one show that I cannot watch with the lights off. I have to keep the lights on.
Mark: Do you get the sense from your website, that it’s sort of becoming a culture, is that what your sense is?
Judy: Well, you know, I am huge into the paranormal culture and I have had a lot of people also comment and say that this is one of their favorite (paranormal) shows as well because of the reenactments are so spectacular. It just makes you feel like you are actually living the story as if it was your own experience. The reenactments are done so well, the actors are doing such a great job, and the cinematography, just the way everything is laid out…everything is to the detail—it’s just so spectacular.
Mark: The aim of the series, it’s funny you just said what you did because the aim of the series is really to be what I call ‘experiential.’ Because it’s just the paranormal witnesses themselves, it’s just the contributors telling their tales, what we dramatize is literally their words. If they say, “I walked down the corridor, walked up the stairs, turned the corner, and all of a sudden I was faced with the spirit of an evil bride” or whatever it may be, that is what we dramatize. We can only dramatize what our contributors tells us to, so it is really very blow-by-blow, moment-by-moment, and because it is so present tense, the people are describing it in exactly the moment-by-moment detail of what happened to them; the idea when you that coupled with the drama is that you feel it. You are there, side by side with them, experiencing what they experienced at exactly the same time, at exactly the same moment with exactly the same kind of emotion. That’s very much the aim of this show and the aspiration for it to be completely different from any other paranormal show on television.
Judy: Yeah and that was the main reason why I…because there are other shows that do reenactments but it’s the way you (the producers/directors) do the reenactments for this particular show, the way that it’s done that’s so realistic, it’s so adrenaline fueled; it makes other shows seem generic, and this one (Paranormal Witness) feels like it’s really happening, do you know what I mean…there’s a difference.
Mark: Absolutely. Of course, we spend a lot of time on the drama and the directors that we use really know how to realize things in a very compelling way but we would be nothing without our contributors. The reason it is so high octane, the reason it is so adrenaline fueled, as you called it, is because the adrenaline literally was pumping around the veins of these contributors. We spend so much time with these contributors and finally when we gain their trust and they are able to articulate, not just the events that happened but how they felt, what was going through their minds blow-by-blow, that’s what really gets us the adrenaline for the drama because you are seeing it and feeling it just as they did. So it becomes that much more exciting because you’re hearing the exact words and seeing the drama at exactly the same time.
Judy: Well, I’m very excited. Congratulations again on season two. I’m so looking forward to it and thank you so much for taking…
Mark: Let (publicist) know how you enjoy it. I hope you really do. “Man in the Attic,” I’m not joking, Judy, you mustn’t watch it alone; leave all the lights on; don’t watch it alone, it’ll scare you silly.
Judy: (laughing) Ok. Thank you for the warning.
We exchange final thank you’s and end the call.
***
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Judy Manning
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