From show creator Paul Zbyszewski and based on the Marvel comic, the Hulu series Helstrom follows siblings Daimon (Tom Austen) and Ana (Sydney Lemmon) and explores the complicated family dynamic that arises when your father is a mysterious and powerful serial killer and your mother is plagued by a literal demon. While Daimon is a professor of ethics who moonlights as an exorcist, Ana runs a successful auction house but secretly hunts down those who hurt others, at the same time that the estranged brother and sister both wonder just how deep the evil runs in their bloodline.

During the virtual junket for the show, Collider got the opportunity to chat 1-on-1 with showrunner Paul Zbyszewski about why he wanted to make Helstrom, the Easter eggs throughout the series, what he learned from his time on Lost, grounding the story in human emotion and morality, and telling a story that doesn’t end with everything wrapped up in a bow.

Collider: You’ve previously talked about how you were talking to Marvel about bringing a darker tone to things on the TV side and exploring some of these darker characters on the horror side. What was it about Helstrom</> specifically that made you want to tell that story?

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Image via Hulu

PAUL ZBYSZEWSKI: The emotion. There was a specific comic book panel that inspired me. That panel was Marvel Spotlight #13 from Gary Friedrich and Herb Trimpe. There’s a particular panel where Daimon, in his full cape with a pentagram on his chest, is reading his mother’s diary, which is telling him the story of his father, how his mother and father met, and who his father really is and how he’s the evil of it all. In that comic book panel, he’s crying. That told me everything that I needed to know about him, and that story and how it was placed. And then, he’s got a sister and his mother, in the comic book, is dying but going insane. There’s a real simple family dynamic story there, which is that this is the story of a really bad dad, and that’s relatable. That’s what we look for in these stories.

Aside from all of the cool fire, horror, magical stuff, and Marvel, you want and need a relatable, universal human emotion, a grounding that makes you understand why these people are the way they are. We all have brothers and sisters, and mothers and fathers, and we all have our own dysfunctional family dynamics, and have encountered and experienced those things. Once I saw that panel, I was like, “Oh, I have a way into this story that could be really interesting.” And then, because they’re already adults, we can unpack all of that stuff from the past, as opposed to the traditional, “They’re kids who are learning their powers.” We’re taking it from the more adult perspective of having some characters that have grown a little bit, and have the ability to look back and have a little bit of a wisdom to understand their experience and to unpack their childhoods and be confronted with their childhood as adults. Those are all super interesting concepts to me.

This show was originally part of that whole Adventure Into Fear initiative that Marvel was doing, and that seems to have fallen by the wayside when everything at Marvel TV changed. With Helstrom being the last show standing from all of that, do you feel any additional pressure as a result?

ZBYSZEWSKI: I don’t know if it’s pressure. The personal side of it is more impactful to me than the professional side. The folks at Marvel Television, I have grown to know and love over the past decade. I first came aboard during the pilot process of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and have known these executives and worked with them over the years. One of my favorite people on the planet, Megan Thomas Bradner, an executive at Marvel and co-executive producer on the show, who was my partner on this entire journey, from development to casting, to putting the writers’ room together, to production, to post, was my friend. The folks at Marvel Television were my friends. The corporate restructuring nature of it all makes me sad because all it says is that I won’t be getting to work with my friends, and that makes me sad.

This is a show featuring plenty of Easter eggs. How many Easter eggs can we expect throughout the season, and do you have a favorite one?

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Image via Hulu

ZBYSZEWSKI: I have a couple of real favorites. I will say, look for the chariots. There are a couple: One is super obvious. A little bit later in the season, it’s super obvious, glaringly so and in-your-face. The people who won’t understand will be like, “Why is that there?” And then, there are a couple that are a little more hidden and a little more subtle. There’s one really big one in the finale that is probably my favorite. The Marvel uninitiated will be like, “Why did they have to go there?” But Marvel fans will be like, “Ooh, they did it. That’s so cool!” I try to approach it from the perspective of a fan because I am a fan, and have been a fan my entire life.

Did you also work to plant seeds this season for things that you wanted to pick up later on?

ZBYSZEWSKI: Yeah. The season finale does not end with a complete, nice little wrapped-up bow. There are some things left unresolved in the finale. There is a closed story that takes place, so you do have some satisfaction in the finale but there are definitely threads that were put in the first season to explore down the road. You hope for success and you plan for success. You want those things to exist, so you can mine them later on, and you want those characters to feel rich and three-dimensional, and to have you go, “I want to go further into that backstory. I want to know how that moment happened. I want to know what the deal was when these two got together.” You can only tell so much story in the first 10 episodes. You want to have some stuff in reserves, should you be fortunate enough to go forward.

Audiences are in for quite a wild ride. Without spoilers, how would you say fans will react to where you leave the characters, at the end of the season?

ZBYSZEWSKI: I hope they love it. I feel like our jobs as storytellers and writers is threefold. We want to entertain, we want to move you a little bit, and we want to make you think a little bit. It’s about juggling those three elements. If you lean towards one of those things too much, it becomes not as satisfying. I’m hoping that, in the end, we stuck the landing on those things, and I hope that it’s moving, that it makes people think a little bit, and that it’s entertaining. I hope the finale is entertaining because it’s batshit crazy. It moves at a freight train’s pace. We want to stick the landing on an emotional and intellectual level, and get people to think for two seconds about the right and wrong of it, where we come from, why we think the way we do, where our moral compass is set, and what affected that, as we grew up and grew older. Those things are really relevant and important to what we’re going through today.

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Image via Hulu

You worked as a producer on Lost and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which are both in the realm of this genre, just not quite as consistently dark. What did you learn from your time and experience on those shows that you were able to apply to running Helstrom?

ZBYSZEWSKI: It’s about the emotion. Really, it’s about the people. Working on Lost, Damon [Lindelof] is a storytelling genius. I bow down. There was stuff that he could come up with in a writers’ room that, if I locked myself in a room and banged my head for six months against the wall, I could never conceive. He’s just that brilliant, in that way. He was telling emotional stories that were very much stories about bad dads that had emotional resonance. Before Lost, I did a show called Daybreak with Jeff Bell. Jeff brought me onto Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and has grown to be one of my very best friends. He was the one who was like, “I like this premise but premise can be trickery and can be easy, if it’s just about the gimmicks, or if it’s just about plot, plot, plot, plot, plot. But why do we care?” That was something that he imprinted on me, very early on in Daybreak.

Sometimes you do come at writing from a premise-driven place because you want to do something that no one’s seen or done before but it’s all about the characters because characters are what drive plot. Character decisions tell you where the story’s going and you have to ground plot through character. Each scene needs both of those elements. If you’re just about the flash rather than the substance, or if you’re just about gimmicks and twists and turns for the sake of twists and turns without earning those moments, then you won’t care about the characters.

Sometimes on Lost, we got caught up in that a little bit. There were a lot of “Holy shit!” moments. I came aboard late, in the last two seasons, where it was a little bit of paying for sins of the cool. It was like, “Okay, there’s some great, wild, crazy shit here but what does it mean? We owe it to the fans to tell people what that meant.” At the end of the day, I think we stuck the landing on that one, much to people’s debate. Honestly, I stand by it. I think Damon took a lot of unnecessary shit for the Lost finale and I feel bad for him about that because I stand by it. I think we told an emotional story with an emotional ending, and it did what it was supposed to do. Damon’s brilliant, hands down.

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Image via Hulu

And people still talk about it, in a world of many forgotten shows.

ZBYSZEWSKI: And that’s the point, isn’t it? Just the fact that people still debate it and still talk about it and are still pissed about it means that it did its job. If you make everybody happy, you’re doing something wrong.

This show is about people trying to figure out who they are, in the face of pure evil. How hard is that to do when the evil of the real world is catching up in real time with the evil in fantasy and science fiction?

ZBYSZEWSKI: It’s a clarion call, is what it is. It defines things for you. The concept of morality is very central to this show. Daimon’s morality is different than Ana’s morality. It was affected by not just who his genetic parents were but how he was raised and who raised him to believe what he believes. His notion of right and wrong is different than Ana’s notion of right and wrong, and than Dr. Hastings’ notion of right and wrong. Everybody brings their own baggage to the table and has their own experiences and upbringings. It’s about finding that common ground and that line that says, “No, there’s a difference. We’re hurting people. If you’re hurting people, it’s wrong. I’m sorry.” We have to find that common ground. There’s no gray in causing other people suffering, and then taking pleasure in that suffering, or benefiting from that suffering. That is evil.

Those things are very important, thematically, to us as writers, in telling these stories and grounding it in human emotion and morality. You want to make people think a little bit. You hope that 325 million people look in the mirror and go, “Why do I think the way I do? Where’d that come from? Why do I think that’s right and that’s wrong? Why is it okay that we are treating these people differently than those people? Why is it that the African American community and Black people are treated so differently in our country? They have a right to be angry and they have a right to act on that anger, in a peaceful, protesting way, to bring a light to the injustice of what’s happening.” Hopefully, that stuff is buried in the show, thematically. We don’t attack it as literally as having a superhero who is attacking the KKK or people in the Klan but there is an element, thematically, of the other in our show. Hopefully, like good science fiction, it is a metaphorical thing. We’re telling stories that pertain to the real world and guising it in the form of Marvel, the supernatural, and science fiction. There are some very pointed scenes, especially in the later episodes, like in Episode 7 with Caretaker, where the language is very obvious and we are wearing our hearts on our sleeves.

It certainly seems like the veil of metaphor is much thinner now than ever.

ZBYSZEWSKI: Oh, my God, yeah. We’re in a wild time and we had to speak to it, in some way. The caveat is that we shot the show before George Floyd and before the pandemic broke out. Literally, the pandemic was breaking out during our last week of production, when the news was changing every day and every hour, and our schedule was changing every day and every hour. We had to cut our shoot short by a few days and we had to pivot and get whatever we could, whenever we could. Some of these things were in the ether, as we were shooting the show, but then our world shifted so dramatically when we were done that part of me was like, “Is this stuff still going to resonate?” Thankfully, I think it does.

Helstrom is available to stream at Hulu.

Christina Radish is a Senior Reporter of Film, TV, and Theme Parks for Collider. You can follow her on Twitter @ChristinaRadish.