Interview (Part 3): Sean Harrigan

My interview with 2023 Black List writer for his script First You Hear Them.

Sean Harrigan wrote the screenplay First You Hear Them which was named to the 2023 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Sean about his creative background, writing his Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day this week, Sean shares his thoughts about some of his script’s key characters and I offer a Jungian analysis of his story.

Scott: That’s your inciting incident, or as Joseph Campbell would say, the “Call to Adventure” when she pops that pill. That friend of hers, Poppy, they’re roommates and longtime friends. Poppy’s very helpful in that scene, first of all, inspiring Shae to go to the birthday party. Shae wasn’t even that interested in doing that.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about Poppy and how that character emerged and what their function is in the story.

Sean: It was one became a little clearer in every draft. Actually, I learned a lot from this script about finding specific ways to make every character have their own story along the way.

What emerged as I went through different drafts was Shae and Poppy having this symbiotic relationship that is really good for each of them, but also is destructive for each of them. Poppy is the cheerleader for Shae, and at the same time, we see along the way that she’s also really reliant on Shae.

Even as she seems like she’s the one that’s in the lead and in control and guiding Shae into this experience and into letting loose, we see over time that she’s following Shae. As Shae becomes more proactive, like you mentioned, Poppy ends up following Shae along this journey, and that becomes more and more destructive to both of them.

Shae in a way is also Poppy’s addiction in that Poppy is living vicariously through Shae. She’s too connected to Shae and needs to find her own path out of all of this.

Scott: At some point, she makes a decision to go off on her own. I remember that Carson even says, “I’m surprised she did that because she’s always following you.”

Sean: Yeah.

Scott: Your comments there, again, speak to the fact that you’ve got addiction here, not just literally the physical addiction to drugs, but it works in several different layers. You could have a psychological addiction to another person, an addiction to your own self-image, an addiction to your own bad behavior.

There’s four major characters. Let’s get to the third one, Javier, a neighbor. What was the inspiration for that character?

Sean: You want to have a variation in their tempo, in their personalities. He’s a little bit more of go with the flow is how he wants to see himself. He’s a little bit looser. It seems like he has the most experience with drugs out of all of them.

But there’s also an element of him that is repressed. He sees himself as a lot more relaxed and chill than he actually is. Under the surface, there’s a lot of fear and angst from him that only comes out in these more extreme circumstances. So, that was a different viewpoint on what Poppy and Shae are experiencing and a different tenor to the script.

Scott: Yeah. When you introduce him, you even say in scene description, “He lives at a lower BPM.”

[laughter]

Scott: So, there’s a birthday party, and they go to a club, dancing and all that sort of thing. This is where they meet this guy, Derek. They take these weird pills. Right off the bat when you’re reading these things, it’s like, “OK. Wait a minute here.”

It’s described as six brown pills. They seem to be molding, flaky, some fungal growth caking it. So that’s not just your pristine little Molly or whatever. This is an odd thing. It feels like a mushroom territory.

Let’s talk about the drug. I’m sure that has a back story in terms of your development. How did that come about?

Sean: I think there was always something fungal about it that felt interesting. That mixed with a party drug. Having elements of both. Like ecstasy combined with a mushroom-like experience, with a hallucinogenic element which we see gets carried out a lot farther into the hauntings.

And then a lot of the concepts around the horror resulted from that. The hauntings themselves have this fungal element too, with this growth that’s apart of them.

That fungal growth ends up carrying over to Shae too. We see it when she cuts her hand later in the story. That culminates when we learn that this growth is actually coming out of people. Each step of that over time organically came from the idea of the drug. It all felt like part of the same theme, part of the same world.

Scott: I don’t know if you’re a fan of Carl Jung. It strikes me that this story, even just that part, is very Jungian in nature. There is this stuff that’s already inside of us. He says, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you are.” He’s a big fan of like, “What’s going on with the unconscious?”

The idea that this stuff is growing and emerging physically, as opposed to just being made as a chemical in a lab. No. It’s actually tied to a human character and emerging from inside out.

Anyhow, I don’t know if you’re a fan of Carl Jung. I’ll throw that out there for you that when you’re being interviewed at Cannes, you can drop a little Carl Jung on the film critics.

[laughter]

Sean: That’s perfect. I’ll mention that. I’ll say I had a Jungian approach for this all along.

Scott: Exactly. Of course, the script is called “First You Hear Them”. There’s a euphoria with the drug. At first, it’s great. Shae has this incredible high. Then even at their job interview, she takes a bump on it and goes back in, and she nails the job interview. There’s that.

Then once the drug starts to wear off, these hauntings happen. The first manifestation of it is sound, “First you hear them…” Could you maybe walk me through your process of this growth? It starts with sound, but then becomes something more. How did that emerge in your story‑crafting process?

Sean: Those were those fun ones where you find them on the page. With horror, you want to have that natural build where you don’t want to reveal too many things too quickly. You want to let it unfold.

So I came up with it during an early version of when Shae arrives at Derek’s house. I liked this idea that Shae didn’t see the horror. It’s always out of her view, off to the side or only heard. Starting off really small and just playing with sound.

It also felt very much in line from my own previous drug experiences when I was younger. First, there is that auditory hallucination and then it shifts to be more visual.

Then the rule of first you hear them resulted organically from that. First you hear them, then you see them, which eventually gave this third element where the hauntings don’t actually see you at the beginning. That felt creepy to me. That the hauntings can be there, right next to you, but haven’t yet moved into action.

That rule ended up giving me the structure of the build. A build that keeps cycling through. It resets every time you take the drug.

That timeline gets condensed every time they take it. At the same time, you can have that circular nature propel the horror again and again. It felt like it gave the horror enough runway and the opportunity to milk each version of the scares that could come from it.

Scott: I could see it’s very advantageous because, as you’re talking about, you can raise the stakes and the tension that way. Then, they have to reset and do that in interesting ways every time, was an interesting challenge for you.

I have to say, I thought it was ironic and fun. I know the guys who wrote A Quiet Place. There, they had that idea: Make a noise. You die. Here, your story inverts it.

Sean: Right. [laughs]

Tomorrow in Part 4, Sean shares how the influence of the drug’s timetable benefited the structure of the story’s plot

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Sean is repped by Empirical Evidence.

Twitter / X: @swharrigan

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.