The ghost of Maggie and her best friend Roman (Elise Gatien and Avan Jogia
Residents of the remote Alaskan town of Port Moore believe they are being tortured with their own secrets by a plague of ghosts. The hauntings bring newfound popularity to the local cleric, Reverend Dan Carpenter (Vincent D’Onofrio), as many townspeople turn to religion for salvation. There is a pragmatic young physicist, Dr. Landis Barker (played by Kandyse McClure), who works for a company called Lambda. And Port Moore’s one (reluctant) psychic, Roman Mercer (Avan Jogia), whom no one in town likes, and who suddenly finds a use for his ability to speak to spirits.
Dr. Landis Barker
The main characters each take a different philosophical approach to the unusual phenomena plaguing the town. Mercer is a believer in the paranormal, Reverend Carpenter comes at things from a religious point of view of his own devising, and Dr. Barker attacks the problem scientifically. A fourth (somewhat ill-defined) perspective is provided by Doug Rennie (Meat Loaf), a handyman who takes great delight in bullying Roman Mercer.
Dr. Barker has recently relocated to Port Moore where she hopes to rebuild her tarnished reputation. (What tarnished it is not revealed right away.) She is unhappy in her job at Lambda, but it pays well.
Four of the thirteen episodes are directed by women (two each by Kristin Lehman and Leslie Hope), and three of the show’s writers are women: Karen Lam, Sonja Bennett, and Rachel Langer.
Carmel Amit as Daphne Holt in Episode 9 “Post-Apocalypse Now“
Lehman and Bennett also appear in the show. Bennett is local pub owner Karla Kowalski-Jones, and Lehman is the town doctor, Marilyn McGrath-Dufresne. You may remember Sonja Bennett as Callie Curie, the dry cleaner who almost dated Sheriff Carter for a couple of episodes of the SyFy series EUREKA in 2007.
Executive Producer and writer Dennis Heaton described GHOST WARS to Jenny McGrath of Digital Trends as an anthology show that’s also serialized. “Ghost stories are very personal, very intimate events,” Heaton explained. “Each episode has a very unique, individualized ghost story that gets traveled through and completed, and those events feed into that character’s attitude as they go forward.”
Heaton also stated that GHOST WARS specializes in ghosts. “Unlike other shows that have vampires, werewolves, and so on coexisting,” he said, “you won’t see other paranormals in Port Moore.”
Val McGrath-Dufresne (Luvia Petersen) and her wife Marilyn (Kristen Lehman)
Four actors who appeared in Simon Barry‘s previous series CONTINUUM are in the cast. Luvia Petersen plays the town’s mayor, Val McGrath-Dufresne. Zak Santiago is someone called Rodney Doyle, and Tammy Gillis is Jane from Lambda Security. She arrives late in the season. Ryan Robbins is Edward Clarke, a close associate of Dr. Barker, in the last four episodes.
In July of 2017, Simon Barry told Heather Wixson of The Daily Dead what inspired him to create the show: “I remember watching movies like An American Werewolf in London, where the movies were balanced in the humor and the horror, in way that you can have a scare and a laugh very close together.” Barry went on to explain that the show would approach the notion of ghosts differently. “Yeah, we’re doing one big thing, I think, that people haven’t seen before…we flip the table on what it means to be a ghost, and how our science and the ghost world overlap, where we see how the science and religion and paranormal are one big idea.”
** — Revised. Originally published on 23 September 2017