Widow’s Bay Creator Katie Dippold Would Marry Freddy Krueger, F Jason, and Kill Hellraiser

“I think this is a great way to start a podcast,” says Widow’s Bay creator and showrunner Katie Dippold. “If you can bring up semen in any way. That’s the publicity rule: The quicker you can get to that, the sooner you hook them.”

Dippold has been telling me about sneaking into a movie theater when she was a kid and watching 10 minutes of The Silence of the Lambs. It was the scene when Hannibal Lecter first meets Clarice Starling; lucky for Dippold, she missed its ending, when Lecter’s cellmate flings bodily fluids at Starling as she walks away. “I remember seeing that part a couple of years later,” Dippold says. “[I was still] too young to understand it.” Eventually, Dippold saw the whole movie; she now counts the film as one of the greatest ever made, alongside Halloween and Jaws.

On paper, Dippold is a comedy writer. She worked on Mad TV, then Parks and Recreation, then started writing major studio comedies including The Heat, Snatched, and the all-women Ghostbusters remake (more on that later). But her love of horror has been a theme throughout her career, including a viral tweet of her dressed as the Babadook at a Halloween party filled with people in normal clothes. She marries her two loves in Apple TV’s word-of-mouth hit Widow’s Bay, a horror-comedy for which Dippold initially drafted the pilot in 2008.

The television business has evolved since Dippold first took the show’s pilot script to buyers. Initially, she says, Widow’s Bay “was more like a show you would see on network TV. I don’t think in that kind of show you would do a flashback from centuries ago.”

On this week’s Little Gold Men, Dippold reflects on the success of Widow’s Bay—which is currently up for 19 Emmy awards, including best comedy—the defining features of a comedy, her career thus far, and the internet’s love of all things Patricia.

Jeff Hiller, who plays an employee in the mayor's office, and Dippold on set.Robert Clark/Apple TV

Vanity Fair: Do you find comedy in horror films? For example, Ari Aster thinks that Midsommar is a dark comedy.

Katie Dippold: I completely get that. I saw Midsommar and I laughed so hard. The parts of the movie where the boyfriend is gaslighting her were so perfectly on the money. So I agree with him. I thought it was hilarious and terrifying. And then there are horror movies that are done by people I can tell just have a really good sense of humor. Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger are making horror movies, but they’re very playful and fun in moments. They are also brilliant comedy writers, even if they’re not making a comedy.

You know what’s funny about Jordan? I worked with him at Mad TV, and I remember he had a poster of The Descent in his dressing room. I remember he was telling me later about Get Out, and I just immediately assumed, “It’s like a horror-comedy?” And he said, “No, it’s a horror movie.” There are so many ways he could have done that movie where it was more of a comedy, but he loves horror.

It would’ve been so easy for him to get a comedy made. I remember I tried for years. I had a horror movie that I was trying to direct, and I just went down such a rabbit hole of it where every time it went somewhere, the place got shut down.

You have been working on this show in some form or another for 20 years. Can you talk a little about how it’s evolved?

I would say, first and foremost, TV has changed so much since I wrote the pilot. I just really hadn’t fleshed out the world or thought seriously about what this would be like as a full series. It was a little bit spoofier. It was just jokier. And it would’ve felt more like a parody.

Over the years, I kept thinking about Widow’s Bay as a real place. What would this island really be like? And what are the kind of scary things that I would want to see on the screen? I remember then TV started changing. I was watching shows like Atlanta and then Barry, and I just loved the stuff they were doing. It opened up the world to me of imagining all the different kinds of episodes you could do.

Then I sent it to Hiro Murai, who was my dream director for it because I loved Atlanta. He came on board—to my shock, because I was such a huge fan of his. Then we brought it to Apple and then Matt Cherniss [Apple TV’s head of programming] bought it in the room, as they say. He said, “Okay, great. Let’s do it.” And that is not something I had experienced before, and don’t know if I’ll ever experience again.

You shot this show on location in Massachusetts. Do you have a connection to Stephen King’s New England?

I grew up loving Stephen King. Growing up in New Jersey, I always romanticized New England. I like writing things where you just want to be there. Some people will write painful experiences, but I tend to write situations that I wish I were in. So when we scouted in January, you could still just feel all these buildings were real. It adds this authenticity that I think is so crucial. Because that’s the thing about the show, as ridiculous as it is: You have to buy everything that’s happening, or any false moment really takes you out of it.

Let’s talk about Kate O’Flynn, who plays Patricia. She’s become a favorite on the internet. What did she do in the audition that made you think that she could be Patricia?

Her audition was not what I expected. If you read the scripts, you wouldn’t imagine this person, if I’m being honest. I almost had to shake off what I thought Patricia was going to be and embrace what Kate did because it was so special. Patricia was a little bit based on my mom. There are some things about my mom that are in there. This sort of passive aggressiveness. I think Kate O’Flynn just made that her own.

Patricia is the conduit for a lot of jokes about gender on the show, which I thought really worked. Do you think that’s part of why the internet has just fallen so in love with her? I feel like there’s this underdog aspect to her that people relate to.

There is. I feel like she wants to be seen and heard, and she tries to do the right thing, but she’s also not self-righteous. There’s something authentic and real about her. There’s something about her that’s very inviting.

This is a weird thing to say. It’s a theory I have that I have not said out loud: People bring up that Babadook tweet of me and then relate it to the show. I feel like the connection is that there’s something inviting about these characters. Patricia puts herself out there in the way that the Babadook photo does.

This is a weird story—but I remember when I was in fourth grade, I was allowed to have a Halloween party. My parents said you have to invite everyone in your class. But there was this one kid who was the outcast, and I was like, “I can’t invite him. Then no one will come.” Which is terrible. But my parents made me invite him. I went around to every student and gave them their invitation. I remember this moment; it’s burned in my brain for the rest of my life. When I gave him his invitation, he welled up and was in shock and said, “Really, I’m invited too?”

That just stuck with me forever. Part of me loves Halloween because it is something everyone can do. Anyways, it’s a long, weird, emotional way to say there’s something about Patricia that would invite you in, and would never want you to feel bad.

Matthew Rhys in "Widow’s Bay" and Rhea Seehorn in "Pluribus."Apple TV

When you wrote the Ghostbusters remake, were you shocked by the sheer amount of discourse about having an all-female cast?

When Paul Feig [the director of Ghostbusters] said he wanted to do a reboot with all women, even as a Ghostbusters fan, I was looking forward to a sequel with the original cast passing down the baton. I had friends working on versions of that movie, and I knew it wasn’t going to happen. So when Paul brought it up, I had a mixed reaction. I knew people aren’t going to like the reboot part of it. To be honest, I knew we were asking for it.

The reaction was more hateful than I would’ve anticipated. But it’s also Twitter. Sometimes a hundred people on Twitter feels like the entire world. It became this thing where if you said you didn’t like the movie, you were sexist. And that’s not true. You can not like the movie. But then there were also people who were very sexist. So both things were true.

We’re going to play a fun game: Fuck, Marry, Kill, horror-movie edition. First, final girls: Sidney Prescott from the Scream series, Laurie Strode from Halloween, Maxine from the X series.

This is painful to me because I don’t want to kill anyone, and I love all these people. But you have to marry Laurie. She’s the icon. It’s Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween. That’s everything. I guess I would spend time with Sidney. I was 16 when Scream came out, so that was a real touchstone for me. I don’t want to kill Maxine. I love the X movies. I love Ti West. But that wasn’t a formative year for me when I saw those movies. So if I had to get rid of one, I would sadly have to. Sorry, Ti West.

Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Hellraiser.

I don’t want to marry any of these guys. But if we’re talking about who meant the most to me, then I would marry Freddy Krueger. Just the poster alone terrorized my childhood before I ever saw the movie. He seems like he would be a lot to deal with, but I would marry him. I would have sex with Jason because it’s like a summer-fling kind of movie. And I would kill Hellraiser. Even though there’s something fundamentally about Hellraiser that scares me the most, I would have to kill him.

Finally, quirky witches: Minnie Castevet played by Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby, Anjelica Huston in The Witches, and Fairuza Balk in The Craft.

Oh, that’s very hard. I have to marry Ruth Gordon. Yeah. I love that performance so much. She’s so incredible. Gosh, the other two? I can’t. I’m having sex with them both. I’m cheating. I can’t. I can’t kill all of them. I refuse.