School Spirits makes its series debut on Syfy this Wednesday with executive producers Seth and Julie Jarrett of Celebrity Ghost Stories at the production helm with Mark Burnett.
When School Spirits makes its series debut on Syfy, the series recounts first-person experiences at a University of Michigan sorority house. Although the house is creepy and in disrepair, the sisters are excited to begin the new school year in a place all to their own. After moving in, dark forces seem to have awakened something evil and disturbs a frightful presence that prompts the girls to uncover a long forgotten tragedy.
Told in an edgy documentary style format, School Spirits treats each episodes like am mini-movie. With a sleek production, the series puts viewers in the middle of the terror as the true accounts play out and everyone experiences the events at the same time.
The Deadbolt recently caught up with School Spirits executive producers, Seth Jarrett and Julie Isogna Jarrett to learn more creating the series, the unique style of storytelling, and how they brought mega-producer mark Burnett on board to join the new Syfy spookfest.
THE DEADBOLT: Can you talk about the approach to storytelling in relation to the production value in order to get the most of the stories themselves?
SETH JARRETT: All of the stories are based on firsthand accounts. They’re all students or faculty or alumni. The story is built around their first person storytelling.
JULIE INSOGNA JARRETT: And the recreations are meant to illustrate and dramatize their experiences. So we took a very cinematic approach to the recreations that we did on the show. So, while these are firsthand stories, we wanted them to feel like movies. So it’s factually true, but cinematically, filmically visual.
SETH: Right. I mean we really wanted the audience to be able to go along for the ride. And these are amazing, compelling stories made more compelling by the fact that they’re true.
THE DEADBOLT: Seth, can you talk about reaching out to Mark Burnett and the potential that he saw in the project?
SETH: Sure. We had known the guys over at Mark Burnett for a while and had been speaking to them about some different projects. He was actually a big fan of a show that we also do called Celebrity Ghost Stories, and had always told us that he wanted to get into the paranormal space, wanted to get into the recreation space. We had done that before.
And when we came up with this idea for School Spirits, it just made sense to go to him. We had wanted to partner with him on a great project. This is something that he had expressed interest with. So we brought the idea to him. He instantly fell in love with it and we went to Syfy together.
THE DEADBOLT: What can fans expect from the tone?
JULIE: What you’ll see is that it feels more like higher production quality. It has that bigness that you would expect from a show from Mark Burnett. It’s obviously not reality competition in any way, but it just feels bigger. The production value is very high and feels like a movie.
THE DEADBOLT: Did you find any similarities between the different schools; death, suicides, tragedies?
SETH: I would say, yes to all of the above. It does appear that many of the hauntings seem to be connected to some type of tragedy that took place, to people who passed on earlier than they should or in a certain unexpected or violent way; that does seem to be a commonality.
What’s always amazing for us, from story to story to story, the way people describe their experiences; that feeling that they felt, the coldness in the air, the way that they feel fingers on their shoulder because they feel like they’re being touched by a spirit.
School Spirits airs Wednesday nights at 10/9c on Syfy.