October Faction: Get a first look at Netflix's adaptation of the monstrous IDW comic

SYFY WIRE Exclusives

October Faction: Get a first look at Netflix's adaptation of the monstrous IDW comic

By Josh Weiss

Monsters of the world, beware! Netflix's adaptation of The October Faction premieres this week, and once it does, your supernatural misdeeds will be a thing of the past.

Based on the IDW comic book series of the same name by Steve Niles and Damien Worm, the show is about the Allan family. Upon moving to a small town in upstate New York, Geoff and Viv (Gabriel Darku and Aurora Burghart) discover that their mild-mannered parents — Fred and Deloris (J.C. MacKenzie and Tamara Taylor) — aren't boring insurance brokers, but members of an ancient, monster-hunting society known as the October Faction.

"We were hoping to create something that felt a little bit like Ozark meets Stephen King," creator/showrunner Damian Kindler tells SYFY WIRE. "I think with this show, we had to focus mainly on character mythology and the drama that comes from within, as opposed to massive-style spectacle. That created a sense of honesty, that we had to make all these stories feel real and this town feel like a real town and its history feel like a real place. So I think the show favors substance over style in an interesting way."

Darku echoes those sentiments, saying the show feels like "Supernatural meets something like The Addams Family. You know, this weird, quirky, dark [show] and this odd, out-of-place family dealing with a lot of supernatural stuff."

SYFY WIRE was able to do some hunting of its own and procured two exclusive images from the upcoming series, which you can see below ...

So, how do Geoff and Viv react to the knowledge that their parents hunt monsters for a living?

"Geoff has this thing about lying. He’s a very open and honest person, having been raised to accept himself and to always be honest and tell the truth. His parents and his family are sort of his rock in that sense," Darku explains. "As soon as he no longer feels like he can trust his parents, he starts to act out and try to find a place to fit in elsewhere. It’s really interesting to watch him go through that."

"The cool thing about [the show] is [that it's] just an amped-up, crazier version of the fact that sometime in our mid-to-late teens or early 20s, we begin to learn the truth that our parents are just flawed humans like we are," continues Kindler, a vet of genre shows like Stargate Atlantis and Sleepy Hollow. "They kind of get yanked off the pedestal we put them on as young children, and then we begin to see them as people with flaws, who have an entire history and story that we don’t really know or appreciate until we’re a bit older."

As for what beasties you can expect to see in the first season, both Kindler and Darku promise entities like vampires, warlocks, werewolves, and ghosts.

"They will be presented in a way you haven’t seen before, and they’ll be presented in a context you haven’t seen before, which is important ... When you have a show about the supernatural, it’s really important what you’re trying say and not just to be scary," reveals Kindler. "The supernatural serves a very, very important purpose in the show, in the narrative, and I hope that we offer something surprising and fresh in terms of the way we designed [the monsters] and the way they’re used in the story."

Season 1 of October Faction will begin to hunt the things that go bump in the night this Thursday, Jan. 23. Per Kindler, the debut season is "one big origin story about the October Faction."

"I think that if we did our job right, people will go, ‘Okay, now we’ve set the table, what happens [next]?’ I think this show is just about to actually leap outta the gate, so I’m absolutely convinced people will have a great time if they invest in the whole show," finishes the showrunner.