Lockwood and Co., Joe Cornish’s series about ghost hunters, is out today on Netflix globally. The show, the UK’s latest young-adult series, stars Ruby Stokes (Bridgerton), Cameron Chapman and Ali Hadji-Heshmati as a trio of teenagers who run a ghost-hunting agency.

“We have these really brilliant books to draw from,” Cornish said in an interview with Deadline following the series’ debut. “The challenge is to bring them to the screen with the scale, energy and detail we want, with the time and money to do it, and to polish them and thus honor the books in the saga”.

Lockwood & Co. is the first complete series written by Cornish and the first to see him as showrunner, even if he doesn’t like the term. “I’ve resisted using that term because ‘show’ sounds like a West End musical and ‘runner’ sounds like sport, and those aren’t fields I want to work in,” she joked. “I was more of a producer and executive producer. It was a team effort between me, Nira, [Complete Fiction co-founder and head of Film and TV] Rachael Prior and [head of development] Bradley Down.”

Cornish directed episodes one and eight and supervised the rest of the scripts and filming. His attention was focused on building an image of the world based on four elements created by Stroud for the books: ghosts kill by touching people, young people are able to perceive them before adults, agencies were created by adults to hire young people who deal with ghosts and salt and metal in different forms can repel the apparitions.

We Really Tried to Avoid Gratuitous Explanations

“We really tried to avoid gratuitous explanations,” he said. “I tried to approach it as a procedural, with detectives going about their business, and to understand their methodology. In general, we’re just trying to create an interesting atmosphere. We want to immerse the audience in the story and let them make their own way. just. You have to respect the audience and their intelligence and assume they’re looking with both eyes, not just one while the other is looking at their cell phone. It’s worked so far.”

Cornish was keen to point out that while Lockwood and Co. theoretically fits into the Young Adult category, the ambition of his stories is far greater.

“The books and the building of this world are really clever, and the rules that Jonathan created and the fight against ghosts are unusually sophisticated for this kind of material,” he said. “We’ve tried to make the stakes real, so that it’s not big-mouthed, quirky, or meta. It’s not a reboot or a franchise; it’s an original work of serious, scary, funny storytelling with three lovable characters at its core.”

Meanwhile, Cornish said he’s still working on Attack the Block 2 with John Boyega. After co-writing Ant-Man with Edgar Wright, Cornish directed his latest film in 2019. Read our review of The Boy Who Would Be King.

This article is originally published on serial.everyeye.it