How Revival Took A Hatchet To The Traditional Zombie Story
Showrunner Aaron Koontz talks to Inverse about balancing gnarly creature effects with the intimacy of an indie film.
The dead coming back to life are a staple of the horror genre, but it’s rare to see a reanimated corpse that doesn’t sport the feral demeanor of a zombie. That’s just one of the things that makes Revival, a new SyFy series based on the Image Comics series of the same name, so special.
It all begins in a morgue, an appropriate place to open a show about the undead. It’s an average night in Wausau, Wisconsin — that is, until a cadaver suddenly bursts out of a crematory chamber, limbs engulfed in flame. Every Wausau resident who passed away within the fortnight quickly follows suit, tearing their way out of body bags, clawing through soil after their burial. It’s naturally horrifying to some residents, like Dana Cypress (Melanie Scrofano), a reluctant deputy sheriff who’s one of the first on the scene. For others, it’s nothing short of a miracle: who wouldn’t want to see their lost family members return to the land of the living?
Anyone familiar with writer Tim Seeley and artist Mike Norton’s comics series knows that not every “reviver” has good intentions. That uncertainty is exactly what elevates Syfy’s Revival beyond your garden-variety zombie story — and one of the many things that attracted co-showrunner Aaron Koontz to the project.
Koontz is no stranger to horror, but he credits his co-creator, Luke Boyce, with introducing him to this story. An adaptation of Revival had been Boyce’s “passion project” for years — and after collaborating with Koontz on a feature in 2020, he suggested the comic as their next feature.
“I read the first issue and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Koontz tells Inverse. “It was such a page-turner for me, but I saw it as a series. I was like, ‘This can’t just be a movie. This is the pilot, and then let’s see where we go from here.’”
The first issue of Revival became the groundwork for the first episode of the series: it follows the exact same beats, as Dana and other citizens of Wausau try to make sense of what’s happened. In the aftermath of “Revival Day,” the otherwise-insignificant town is now the subject of intense scrutiny, as journalists, scientists, and new believers converge in an attempt to explain the phenomenon. They all answer to the hard-boiled town sheriff (David James Elliott), who’s also Dana’s overbearing dad, but not even he can keep the chaos at bay.
As the CDC tries to collaborate with law enforcement, Dana works to balance her latest case — solving a murder case with a revived victim who has no memory of dying — with a reunion with her sister Em (Romy Weltman), who’s hiding much more than she lets on.
Koontz was adamant about using practical effects, even if it meant rewriting some parts of the series.
“We have a huge, huge, huge cast,” Koontz continues, “but it all centers around the Cypress family.” Each member of the clan has their own experience with revivers; even Dana’s young son Cooper (Hudson Wurster) gets his own misadventures. That focus gave the Revival writers a strong foundation to riff on: with the Cypress family as “our North Star,” most plot points and character dynamics sprung from them.
“Everyone that comes in, we need to [say], ‘Okay, Dana views the world this way. Now we need to create someone who views the world this way,” Koontz explains. “Or, ‘Em is going to be looking for this. Well, now she needs to have someone who's pushing against that.’”
Revival admittedly makes a few changes to the comic, tweaking plot points and switching the role of one character with another. But with the support to Seeley’s support and Image’s collaboration, Koontz and Boyce were careful to keep the soul of the series in tact. Its cast oscillate perfectly between off-beat comedy and the darker, more gruesome themes in the show. Scrofano in particular embodies Dana’s awkward, sardonic sense of humor as well as she does her heart; that reinforces Revival’s stakes and its emotional dynamics in equal measure.
Revival boasts “a huge cast,” but it always goes back to the Cypress family.
Revival prioritizes those emotional bonds between characters with the care and attention of an indie drama; Koontz refers to quiet moments between his cast as “Linklater scenes,” citing films like Before Sunrise as an unconventional source of inspiration. That said, when things do get bloody, Koontz doesn’t hesitate to flex his experience with horror. Again, not every reviver is able to ingratiate back into society: some do become the monsters we recognize from the most popular zombie thrillers.
“I’m a horror dude in every way, so it’s all practical effects,” Koontz says of the revived we’ll meet later in the series. He was encouraged to lean more on visual effects, to keep the strain off Revival’s budget. Koontz chose to compromise on other things instead: “It’s like, ‘Okay, well, I’ll cut a little in these areas... I’ll rewrite this scene to save money here to allow us to do these things the right way.’” Maintaining the look of the show with a more modest budget was part of the challenge, thus the emphasis on the story’s emotional core.
Koontz is “very proud” of the look of the show, but equally excited for the “rural noir” to unfold across the season. “It is about creating a world in between the panels, the things that weren’t even necessarily in the comic,” he adds. “It was really, really fun to kind of explore and see what was there, [and] I have even bigger explorations of that I would love to do in future seasons.”
