A Conversation In 'The House Between'

"Sanctuary," "Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance," "Star Trek: New Voyages," and the list continues to grow. But one Web series that may have been overlooked is John Kenneth Muir’s "The House Between," a series about five strangers that awaken in an empty Victorian house "at the end of the universe." Trapped, they have no idea how they got there. They must learn to trust each other and try to find a way out.

It doesn’t have the budget of some of the more popular Web series, but it does have heart. It also has on board Muir, best known as an award-winning author of more than 20 reference books covering film and television including "An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith," "The Encyclopedia of Superhero on Film and Television," "Horror Films of the 1970s," and "Terror Television."

Last year, however, Muir decided to take the plunge and try his own hand at creating a TV series by avoiding the middleman and airing it on the Internet.

"Well, I had in mind to mount a new independent, super-low-budget production, and I understood that -- unlike the last time I had attempted this (during the independent film movement of the mid-1990s) -- I wouldn't necessarily have to be concerned with a distributor, given the surging development of video on the web," Muir told SyFy Portal's Marx Pyle. "Once I realized that it was do-able to get a low-budget video series out to consumers at virtually no cost, it became a matter of what kind of story I wanted to dramatize and what kind of story I could actually afford to dramatize."

Muir knew right away that he wanted to do something in the horror and science fiction genres.

"And I also knew I wanted to cover some of the same dramatic/philosophical territory as the Jean-Paul Sartre existentialist play 'No Exit,' about people trapped in Hell. But realistically, I knew I couldn't afford CGI, name actors, or a huge orchestra," he said.

Muir wanted "to emulate the ambience" of black-and-white classics like "One Step Beyond," "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits." He combined that with a heavy influence of 1970s British science-fiction television of "Sapphire & Steel," "Space: 1999" and "The Prisoner."

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