Inspired by the graphic novel from prolific author R.L. Stine (Goosebumps, Fear Street), the Disney+ eight episode supernatural anthology series Just Beyond explores a world with witches, aliens, ghosts, parallel universes, brainwashing, and scary monsters. As each story follows a new cast of characters on their own journey of self-discovery, the stories are rooted in the anxieties and struggles of teenagers who really are just searching for their voice and their place in the world.
During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, show creator/executive producer Seth Grahame-Smith why he wanted to do a genre anthology series, building a new world for each episode, the importance of choosing the right song or creating the perfect creepy monster for a specific story, and his hope that they’ll be able to do more seasons. He also talked about the development of the Green Lantern TV series that he’s currently working on for HBO Max, and why that Beetlejuice sequel he was writing never got off the ground.
Collider: It’s rare to do an anthology series. There seems to be a bit of a resurgence of them again right now, but they’re still rare in comparison to everything else.
SETH GRAHAME-SMITH: Yeah, it’s very rare. Honestly, that’s how it came about. The opportunity to work on a genre anthology never comes along, and then to be able to include the R.L. Stine of it all and the Disney+ juggernaut of it all. It was just a really fun opportunity that dropped in my lap and I was really excited to start. It all happened really quickly. Somebody brought me the very first issue of the Just Beyond graphic novel, which I think there were only two at the time. And then, we just started talking about it, and a year later, we were done. It was really fast.
What are the advantages of doing an anthology and what are the biggest challenges of creating all these different worlds, for every episode?
GRAHAME-SMITH: The challenges are that obviously you can’t reuse any sets and you can’t reuse any talent, and that gets very expensive. Every couple of weeks, you’re in a completely different location or with completely different sets and a completely different cast. At the same time, the fun of it is that when you’re sitting there in a writers’ room and you’re talking about stories, you’re just talking about ideas. You’re not necessarily having to whiteboard a whole 20-season arc for these complex character relationships, which you do in almost every other television show. It’s really just like writing short stories. It’s really fun. And also, you get to play in a variety of different genres. We do parallel universes and ghosts and witches, and so on and son on. Eight felt like a lot when we were making them, but when we were talking about them, just as concepts, it’s not really a lot of episodes. You realize that there’s so many different ways you can go.
How were these episodes shot? Was it the usual amount of time for an episode of a show, or did you get extra time because you were telling a whole story in each one?
GRAHAME-SMITH: No, they were pretty much all around eight days to shoot. It was fast. It doesn’t sound tremendously fast, but at the same time, you have to realize that, while we were shooting Episode 1, we were building and prepping Episode 2, which was completely different. You don’t have the luxury of going back and redoing something. It gets very complicated. And we shot it during COVID and it stars mostly kids. Kids can only work a certain number of hours. They have to break for school, every so often. We basically threw every challenge you could add this show.
I especially loved the episode with Mckenna Grace (“Leave Them Kids Alone”) about the school for rebellious young women. What did you want to explore and say with that episode?
GRAHAME-SMITH: At the end of the day, from a kid’s point of view, it’s about expectations and conformity, and especially those placed on young women in society, in general. Although that’s changing, there’s still a lot of, “We want you to stand there and do what we tell you to do, and look good and conform to an image, and not say anything.” At the end of the day, it’s a genre episode about brainwashing and turning kids into little Village of the Damned automatons. That’s the fun of it and the entertaining part of it that we wanted to focus on. Underneath it, there is the message of conformity. Every one of them tries to have that, to some degree. In some cases, it’s a little louder than in other cases. I was very aware of like wanting to have that level of the show, but also not wanting it to overwhelm the genre fun of the episodes either.
I also very much appreciated that it takes music to restore individuality to a bunch of brainwashed girls.
GRAHAME-SMITH: Not just music, but Green Day.
I love that song (“She’s a Rebel”). I love that album (American Idiot). I think it’s not just some of their best work, but I think it’s one of the best rock albums of all time.
GRAHAME-SMITH: I agree.
How did you choose a song for that moment and how did it end up being that song? Did you think about other songs?
GRAHAME-SMITH: That was the song that was the most discussed, in the entire season, by a long shot. I don’t wanna dis other artists by saying who we ended up not going with, but we ended up using a lot of different choices and just taking a look at it. At he end of the day, the argument for Green Day was just that it’s a great song that gets right to the heart of the message. I was worried that it’s maybe a little on the nose with literally, “She’s a rebel,” but what am I, if not on the nose, as a writer, sometimes. So, we just went with it.
I also really loved the episode “My Monster.” When you create a creepy character like that, that’s supposed to creep people out and scare people, how hard is it to find a balance of that, and have it be scary, and have it not talk or really have any facial expressions? How does that work?
GRAHAME-SMITH: A lot of trial and error. We had a great designer that came up with some concepts for what the mask would look like and what the suit would look like. I wanted it to be from an Edward Gorey type of tradition. That episode, particularly, I think is our most horror movie, tropey episode. There are let’s call them obvious homages to specific horror movies instead of just direct rip-offs. There are homages to several very specific horror movie moments in that episode, which ended up working really well. I love that episode too. I think that Megan [Stott] did a great job, and the kid who played her friend Graham (Elisha Henig) was just really, really funny. That one came together pretty well.
I couldn’t get passed how creepy and scary the monster was.
GRAHAME-SMITH: So creepy and scary. It always helps when you get a super tall performer to put the mask on too. I think the guy was 6'8", or something.
It’s been haunting me since I watched it.
GRAHAME-SMITH: That’s great. I’m glad to hear that. The balance that you’re talking about is exactly the challenge of a show like this. You wanna create something that’s scary, but not traumatizing. You’re in the R.L. Stine universe, you’re on Disney+, and you can’t go full rated R, so you’re not gonna take anybody’s head off or cover the walls with blood, or anything like that. You have to find ways to be scary, but also, at the end of the day, you’ve gotta be comfortable with families watching this together. It’s really just trial and error.
It was announced that you’d be the showrunner on the HBO Max Green Lantern series, and that you’d be writing it with Marc Guggenheim. How is that going? It seems like an enormous undertaking.
GRAHAME-SMITH: Yeah, that show is gigantic. It has taken quite a bit of time to get to this point and it’s just a big, big undertaking. It’s going really well. All I can say is that it’s going really well and there are gonna be Green Lanterns in it, and it’s gonna be on HBO Max.
As a kid, were you a fan of that character, or was it something you became familiar with later on?
GRAHAME-SMITH: I’ll admit, I wasn’t like a huge comic book kid. I was a huge movie kid. And so, my introduction to DC Comics came through the ‘89 Batman movie. When that movie came out, I was like, "Oh, my God, Batman is the coolest," and I started reading Batman comic books. But Green Lantern is something that, to be honest with you, just came to me later, by way of just talking about doing the show. The possibility of doing the show led me down a deep dive of Green Lantern lore. We’ll see. It’s gonna be awhile before the world gets to see that, but we are very, very busy at work, as we speak.
Awhile back, you had been working on a Beetlejuice sequel, and you had even met with Tim Burton and Michael Keaton about it. Why do you think that’s a project that just hasn’t gotten off the ground, when it’s clearly something that so many people love?
GRAHAME-SMITH: It’s funny, when I had met with Tim about it last, and we’re talking about five years ago at this point, the reason that it’s so hard to get going is because so many people love it and because there are 10 million ways to get that sequel wrong and four ways to get it right. It’s such a very fine needle to thread that I certainly like didn’t get it there, on the script side. I didn’t thread the needle. There are things that were cool and some interesting ideas. I’ve certainly emotionally moved on from it and just said, "If it happens someday, it happens."
It’s such a curious thing because it’s something that people are so passionate about, for whatever reason, just doesn’t come together.
GRAHAME-SMITH: Yeah. Michael Keaton is just as relevant as ever and, and Tim Burton is just as relevant as ever, but you have to have both of those people excited about something to do it. I couldn’t get it there personally, as a writer, but maybe somebody else can.
Do you hope that there will be more of Just Beyond? Is that something that you would like to do?
GRAHAME-SMITH: Yeah, it’d be a lot of fun to play with more stories. This is such a great opportunity to try a different idea with every episode and really experiment, in some ways. There are so many stories and so many genre conventions, and so many anxieties and fears to explore in the world of young people, that it’d be fun to continue in The Twilight Zone tradition and see how we could expand these concepts, going forward. But it’s not in my hands, so well have to see. It’ll be easier if people like it and a lot of people watch it . . . The fun of it is that there are episodes that are truly scarier than others, and ones that tug at your heartstrings, and ones that are more broadly comedic. That kept it exciting for me, in making the eight of them. We were always doing something different.
Just Beyond is available to stream at Disney+.