Horror-comedy is a bizarre genre.  Most of the laughs are on camera, but most of the horrors occur behind-the-scenes.  As writer / producer / director of the cult series Grave Mood Rings, I've endured horrors beyond comprehension, all rooted in terrifying reality.

"Real horror is a fragile, glass-boned thing" (Carlos Clarens).  Forget so-called friends cancelling you for being honest about your discomforts, or the excruciations of struggling against a system that automatically suppresses original voices.  Forget crucial cheerleaders dropping away, or the irony of being unable to either sell or give away your labors of love.  Profounder horrors leave a creator as fragile as a glass skeleton.

"The real horror is that unless we stop it, it's just a prologue" (Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1).  Whereas a film or miniseries has a conclusion, an open-ended series can stop only if its creators decide to terminate it.  In the absence of a finish line, the show takes on its own momentum, turning the crew into minions.  It's not so much like riding an endless roller coaster but rather like building the diabolical track into infinity.  With no network to threaten cancellation, no viewership numbers of consequence, no budget to run out of, and no reliance on outside talent, an indie production can die only by its own hand, and that is a real horror.  Such a show is kept alive by intravenous feedings, by the very machine it has morphed into.  With no promotion or backing, the show is essentially incapacitated, impotent, in its own sort of pain and unfit to communicate.  Is it the show's life that's being prolonged, or is it the show's death?  What a horrible thing to contemplate.

"The real horror is what drove you onto that alien shore in the first place" (Jay Amberg).  Fellow creators may be able to relate — we might find ourselves in the midst of a project whose precise origin is hazy.  Even if we can pinpoint its genesis, we're all-too-aware that we couldn't foresee exactly where it was all leading, how complicated it would turn out to be, how big it would strive to become, or how it would morph along the way.  Though technically at the helm of our own undertakings, we are in fact strangers in a strange land.  The feeling is its own form of horror.

"The real horror is not in the shadows, but in that twisted little world inside our own skulls" (Jovanka Vuckovic).  "There is no force, no power from without which threatens me. ... The real horror is that which lies in myself" (Henrik Ibsen).  When we stop blaming the system, selfish "friends," and fickle audiences, we might confront the very personal tribulations that come with producing a long-running minus-zero-budget tv series.  Undistracted by outside voices, one must face and finesse one's inner demons.  Here are some tips I've developed along the way, in no special order:

1. As an Inhuman Resources Manager, remember to fill every vacancy within yourself with self-motivated inner demons possessing leadership abilities.  Realistically, we are living in a less-than-perfect world with less-than-perfect inner demons, but if we simply take steps toward improvement, we will move in the direction of world domination.  

2. This might be a good time to invoke the serenity prayer: "Lord of Storms, give me the grace to accept with serenity the atrocities I must commit, the courage to pass the spawn of my enemies through fire, and the wisdom to distinguish gargoyles from cheap garden ornaments."  

"The real horror is still to come" (Famous Monsters of Filmland #162).  The beat goes on.  Grave Mood Rings continues to laugh its way through the horrors.  Check it out at MysteryArts.com, Roku, and wherever you watch videos online.

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MAD MIKE'S INTERVIEW WITH GRAVE MOOD RINGS

Professor Oddfellow (aka Craig Conley) is the author of dozens of books which can be found at his WEBSITE (https://www.oneletterwords.com/craigconley/), and co-creator of the new sketch comedy/horror show GRAVE MOOD RINGS (https://www.mysteryarts.com/grave-mood-rings/). Today we sit down to discuss his career as an author of the obscure, and go behind the scenes of the hit show!

MAD: Professor! Thanks so much for taking some time with us at Horror to Culture and the Scary Salad Network! Can you please give viewers a little insight into what they might expect from Grave Mood Rings, and how did the concept come about?

PROF: A recent viewer of our show commented, "Stop putting acid in my tea!" Grave Mood Rings is typically seen as trippy and Dada in the sense of absurdist humor. We lovingly poke fun at vintage tv horror, with rapid-fire jokes and ridiculous situations within a 1970s vampiric manor house. One main inspiration has been the classic slow-moving Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, but nothing's slow in our treatment. We make up for a zero budget by pouring hours of intricate post-production into literally ever second. The series actually started as a one-off interruption of my show Prof. Oddfellow's Penetralia, as if another broadcast surreally started tuning into the wrong frequency and the two shows suddenly overlapped. But we loved the characters enough to keep bringing them back (and, ahem, it felt good to get more mileage out of the costumes).

MAD: Not only is Grave Mood Rings watched religiously by billions of people across the globe, and surely aliens in outer space, but you also have a novelization! Please tell us a little bit about the book adaptation.

PROF: Thank you for acknowledging our massive audience on this and other worlds, and (easy mistake to make) let's not leave out viewers from higher dimensions and from parallel realities. The dearly departed should also be included, for, if it weren't for ghosts, who knows where we'd be. Yes, I wrote a novelization of Grave Mood Rings because that idea started as a total joke in the show's closing credits: "Demand a novelization." A few people actually did demand it, and rather than rehash existing scripts into narrative form, I thought it would be more fun to come up with all new material in the overblown style of the first Gothic horror novels. The legendary horror host Dr. Sarcofiguy, a.k.a. John Dimes, voiced the entire novelization for its audio book incarnation.

MAD: Speaking of books, you have written, or contributed to, dozens of them. Yet, before any of the lavish fame and fortune, you were teaching college courses in creative writing and literature. How did you make the jump from academics, to focus on becoming an author?

PROF: I think it's at least 100 books by now. Who was it who said, "Go overboard or stay within reasonable limits"? Academia isn't about free thought or intellectual innovation, so I fled it to spend full time on completing a dictionary of one-letter words (which got published by HarperCollins).

MAD: You have an impressive back catalog of publications. What might you suggest for new readers of your work? Do you have any personal favorite title releases?

PROF: Personal favorites are Books of the Dead, A Field Guide to Identifying Unicorns by Sound, and How to Be Your Own Cat. I'm also especially fond of Webster's Dictionary of Improbable Words, which I wrote to be a word gamer's ultimate secret weapon.

MAD: Who are some of your favorite authors and inspirations?

PROF: Oh my, where to begin? I agree with Carl Jung that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most remarkable artifact of humanity. Philip K. Dick's entire body of work. Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. Samuel Butler's two astonishing Erewhon fables and the novel The Way of All Flesh. Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Most anything by William Faulkner. Eudora Welty's entire body of work. John Cowper Powys' Porius. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. James Stephens' The Crock of Gold. D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Tim Powers' entire body of work. Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings. Elias Canetti's entire body of work. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Frank Herbert's Dune novels.

MAD: You guys not only handle all the writing, production, and editing for Grave Mood Rings, but also provide most of the music and jingles. Please tell us about your musical background, and how the songs for the show come about?

PROF: My partner and I began recording and releasing electronic dance music in the mid-1990s and ran our own record label for years. We invented the haunted clockwork / Tesla spirit radio genre and still record such as Neons Gone Mad. For Grave Mood Rings, we first seek to collaborate with old and new friend, preferring to add our own lyrics to pre-existing or custom instrumentation. I also like to homage favorite tracks through whimsical cover versions. Most of the Grave Mood Rings songs — surely over 60 this point — tend more toward jingles because we like to keep the proceedings snappy. Due to the 1970s setting, it's supposed to all be Disco, but we end up doing whatever feels right at the moment. We probably spend as much time on sound design as on the visual editing.

MAD: You have a lot of variety going on, with several different skits and scenes. How long do you typically work on a single episode, and how does the process work?

PROF: We have a troupe of writers and a backlog of unproduced scripts, so the arrival of a new horror host bumper clip tends to motivate us to pair it with a script or to write a new accompanying story. I'm extraordinarily inspired by collaborations and by viewer comments and suggestions. We basically "do requests." Because we have only one actor to play all the roles except for my Prof. Oddfellow character, we must film each element separately with an eye toward the compositing process. The assembly and post-production requires about 3 hours per completed minute of footage.

MAD: Realistically, if you could have any guest star make an appearance on your program, still living, who would you choose?

PROF: Elvira would be amazing. Someone please ask her for us. It's difficult to think of the living, actually.

MAD: Favorite horror film of all time?

PROF: There are so very many favorite horror films, but The Lost Boys easily tops the list.

MAD: Once again, we appreciate you taking some time with us, and hope for future collaborations! Is there anything you would like to close with today?

PROF: It's scary out here in the wastelands of indie culture. We need promotion! It's not paranoia to say that the powers that be suppress original voices. This is a bizarre, post-WTF world, and Grave Mood Rings has to date offered over 200 post-post-WTF episodes to help us all retain our sense of humor. Let's do this together.