Nick Peterson is a director and producer, working on everything from short films to commercials to music videos. The horror genre has long interested him, and he’s written his first graphic novel, The Harvest, which was initially inspired by his art. Peterson spoke to Cemetery Dance about his work, being in horror film festivals, and what makes The Harvest bold and different.
(Interview conducted by Danica Davidson)
CEMETERY DANCE: Can you tell us a little about your work in general?
NICK PETERSON: I’m a filmmaker. I went to CalArts. My first short film went to Sundance; it was a stop motion short film called MuM. That was like twenty years ago. I worked for years in visual effects. Now I’m a director for the past twenty years. I’ve directed maybe sixty music videos, a hundred commercials, a feature film. I’ve got some really exciting feature film projects coming up this year. And in the meantime I wrote a book called The Harvest.
How has horror influenced your work?
Horror has been a great influence on my work ever since I was a kid. When I was growing up, I went to the video store every weekend. You look at all the video tapes, all the options, and think, What do I want to watch? Typically it was a horror film or a scifi film. They had the best covers and they always had the best movies. Horror is one of those things where it’s just exciting to watch. You never know what you’re going to get. Even if you’ve seen all the horror films, you’re hopefully surprised by something new. I think it’s the one genre where when it’s super different and super bold, that’s when it’s exciting. That’s what people want. People want horror that’s different and bold and changes their lives in certain ways and reveals new information about how people react to different things. The storytelling possibilities are huge in horror, even though sometimes it does get a little homogenized, which is a bummer. But that’s okay. Sometimes even the homogenized stuff is still kind of fun in parts.
You’ve gotten some honors at horror film festivals. Can you tell us about that?
Yes. Screamfest has premiered my shorts a bunch of times. FilmQuest has given me many awards there. These genre festivals are amazing and Fantasia premiered the book Haunted Reels, a horror anthology I was lucky to be a part of.
What’s great about genre film festivals is, unlike the large festivals where you have to “find your people,” everyone at genre festivals loves the same things. So it’s easy to make friends, it’s easy to build that community of horror-loving professionals and even nonprofessionals alike. It doesn’t matter. Everyone is in on it.
What can you tell us about The Harvest?
The Harvest started out like many things with just a drawing. As a kid I drew a bunch, and that’s what drew me — ha — that’s what drew me to go to CalArts for animation. Even though I do live-action now, I started in animation in school. I had a meeting at Shudder a long, long time ago. This was before Shudder was even launched yet. They were looking to do original content before they started licensing things. I went in there and met with them. I had my sketchbook and I threw it on the table. I said, “Look through the sketchbook. If you see a drawing you like, let me know!”
They were flipping through, and they stopped on the drawing of the baby being breastfed with the mask on his face. They said, “What’s this?” I pitched them the story.
They said, “Wow, that’s amazing.”
I went off and I wrote the whole story that’s in the book now. They wanted ten chapters to do ten ten-minute shorts that would all equal one large film. So I wrote the whole thing, built the entire world, went back excitedly, and they passed on it.
Then you’re like, Crap, what do I do now? You’ve got all this energy, all this work, this story that you love. So I thought, Well, maybe I’ll make it into this or that. I had a couple different ideas. But in the end, I thought, You know, why don’t I just make it into something that’s a little bit different where it’s a story of a hiker in Hungary who finds this book and it tells this story of this diary of this girl who is trapped by these creatures? I thought, I really like the drawing I did, so maybe I just keep drawing as if these are the girl’s drawings in the book. It grew from there until I had the whole thing worked out. Now it has its own graphic novel, which is kind of a play on words, because it’s a pretty graphic story. My wife is really smart, and she did all the grammar polishing on it. It shocked her on how grotesque it is. But she really respected the story. You’ve got to have terrible things happen to people in order for them to have a struggle to move on and live and learn from those experiences.
Do you want to tell a bit about the story?
The Harvest is about a mountain village that is taken over by a cadre of lost creatures. These creatures imprison the village, and close it off from the rest of the world for over sixty years. They forced the villagers to do everything for them, to grow their food, to bring them their water, and to even birth their own dangerous creature babies. Because these creatures were all males each year on harvest day, the women of the village are gathered in order to be presented to the creatures within the cave to be impregnated. By the time we find the village, this has been happening for decades. And at this point in their imprisonment these young woman are like in our society where young men going off to war, knowing that not all of them will come back alive, or will be damaged protecting the village. There’s a moral code for these young women to perform their duties, just as their mothers did and their mothers before them. And while many of the men want to end this cycle of abuse, it’s their mothers who are the ones really pushing them to do their duty to keep the village safe.
That’s where the story starts. It’s the beginning of the change, where the village finally learns that they can fight back. And through a series of chaotic events, they finally go to war with the creatures.
This is a story for people who want to see something vastly different from what’s out there and who are brave enough to take this road. I hope they realize it’s a grotesque story that’s bold, but it’s also emotional, in the sense that people learn to fight back against bad things happening. If you don’t stand up for what’s right, when will you? That’s the theme of the book. If you’re in a bad situation, a terrible situation, and everyone around you says, “This is okay” you can still say, “No.” And that’s what these people did. They said no and they fought against their monsters. In this situation, these are literal creatures, but in real life you get to ask yourself, “Who are the monsters where everyone is telling you it’s okay what they’re doing?” At what point do you say, “It’s not okay”? And it’s painful, but if you fight back. You find common friends to help you. In the situation of The Harvest, they find common enemies to group together against a larger enemy. So tradition working with progressive thinking becomes their way to salvation.
Where can people find this?
Right now you can find it on my TikTok page and you can also find it on Shopify on my website. Soon, I think next year, it will be released officially through a publisher.
