Building Worlds, Frame by Frame: Inside the Mind of Morgan Galen King
From dusty VHS shelves and battered paperbacks to seven years animating The Spine of Night nearly alone, Morgan Galen King has spent his life forging stories from the shadows. In this full interview, the Etch co-founder opens up about the mythic inspirations behind his work, the creative toll of chasing the impossible, and why horror’s future lies in the strange, the stylized, and the deeply personal.
This is a journey through process, passion, and the power of staying weird.
What first inspired you to pursue filmmaking and storytelling?
It’s hard to pin down a specific moment, but my mother was the head of the public library, so I was always reading as a kid. The library was also the only place to rent a VCR back then, so we’d get to bring it home for the weekend, and - for funding stipulation reasons - they were only allowed to purchase VHS tapes that were adaptations of books, so I ended up watching the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings over and over. It wasn’t too long after that when Dungeons & Dragons appeared in my life - a copy of the 1st Edition Monster Manual was donated to the library book sale, which I snagged - and that really opened up my mind to storytelling, and a love of film followed on from there. It was a great era to be into movies - VHS exploded over the decade, and in the years before the chains showed up and, we’d be digging through the shelves of tapes at the tanning salon for bad dubs of Italian gore films and the strangest independent monster movies we could get our hands on. I feel like we don’t talk about how weird the pre-Blockbuster hybrid tanning salon/video store era was, but it was formative, and imbued the films with a scrappy DIY energy, which made filmmaking seem like something anybody with a dream and camera could do. So, I suppose a slurry of all of that is how I ended up making these things!
How did working on The Spine of Night influence your approach to both horror and creative projects?
Perhaps due to such an insular and autodidactic film education, via the tanning salons, when I was on set filming the reference live action footage for The Spine of Night it was the first time I’d realized that I didn’t share hardly any of the common references that pretty much everybody else working in film had. It turns out that more people have seen Fellini and Polanski films than, say, the deep cuts in the Armando de Ossorio filmography that I knew so intimately. Just on a practical level, once I started the long process of animating The Spine of Night - 7 years! - I had a lot of time to throw on films while I was working, and very intentionally treated it as a ‘film school’ project, and so watched a classic film nearly every day for that entire production, and I feel like that experience was deeply transformative. The blend of influences on Spine is certainly why there’s visual references to both Polanski’s Knife in the Water and de Ossorio’s When the Screaming Stops (aka, The Loreley’s Grasp) in there.
What is your creative process when bringing a unique story to life?
I very much take a roleplaying-inspired ‘write to see what happens’ approach, which I think naturally falls into a different narrative rhythm than the highly plotted Hollywood formulas that people expect from film (and genre film, particularly). I feel like literary structures are more interesting to me, too, so that’s how Spine ends up as a connected era-spanning anthology like A Canticle for Leibowitz, or this other script I’ve been working on takes the shape of a picaresque. In general, I love filmmakers that aren’t drawn to commercial narrative structures, and I find the freeform quality of roleplaying narrative and unusual literary frameworks are a great way to escape the ingrained patterns of how a film is ‘supposed’ to operate. Also, and I get how this sounds, but I’ve found a lot of value in doing a tarot reading for fictional characters as a thought exercise to broaden your own understanding of what they desire and where they came from. Writers should give it a shot, sometime!
How do you approach blending elements of horror with visually striking moments in your work?
I don’t know if this is an outlandish take or not, but I’ve long felt that Horror almost always does Fantasy better than Fantasy does. So often Fantasy seems to come from a map-first approach, burdened with rich fictional histories, that it can feel very not-in-the-moment, because it’s looking backwards at all of that. Horror, however, is shrouded in the fog of unknowing, of ill-defined existential immediacy. Horror allows for all the same magic and monsters and medieval weaponry, but makes it feel actually otherworldly and unknowable. For me, and for Spine, I think that sensation connects naturally to psychedelic spectacle.
What’s a memorable challenge you’ve faced while working on a project, and how did you overcome it?
I don’t think I will ever again face a creative challenge as profound as working in relative isolation for 7 years animating a single project. At the time, I’d describe it as ‘my Everest,’ and I don’t know that I came out the other side of that fully intact, but I wanted to push myself to do something nearly impossible with such a small team, and I remain amazed that Phil and Will shared the commitment to see it through. It was definitely overcome through sheer relentless dedication and just brute force manhours. Probably not a healthy way to live, but I’m profoundly proud of the work we did with that.
Who are your biggest influences in the filmmaking world, especially within horror, animation, or other genres that inspire you?
There’s no getting around the major influence of Ralph Bakshi and the stable of weirdos that made up the magazine Métal Hurlant, and the revelatory-as-a-pre-teen Heavy Metal film based on their work. Sam Raimi’s mash-up of Horror and Fantasy in his Evil Dead films speaks to something deep within me. As far as influences as an adult, I adore the work of Guy Maddin, Bertrand Mandico, the duo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, Tarsem Singh’s grim Fantasy films, Shinya Tsukamoto, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s run of Greek tragedies. I love the really trippy Shaw Bros. martial arts films, and, certainly, the films of the aforementioned Armando de Ossorio!
How do you approach world-building in a horror story like The Spine of Night, and why is it so important?
I touched a bit on this in discussing the intersection of Horror and Fantasy, but I think world building is most interesting when you create just enough that the audience’s imagination can wonder about what they aren’t shown or told. When I was young and Star Wars was still largely untapped, I loved imaging the vastness of the unknown worlds that all the Mos Eisley cantina patrons must have come from, or how cool and mysterious this Boba Fett character was, before all those stories were told in all the countless extended universe spin-offs over the decades since. So I guess I’m saying that I like my world-building to feel big without actually detailing it more than you have to, or letting any of the characters know more than myths half-lost to time. I like the world as an unknowable entity that the characters can only understand, or misunderstand, in part. Certainly A Canticle for Leibowitz plays into that, but also writers like Gene Wolf and his Book of the New Sun, or the ambient revelation of the world in something like the Dark Souls games.
What’s one of your favorite moments from your career so far, and what made it stand out to you?
Certainly the reference film shoot for Spine was an amazing experience - felt like the summer camp experience I never had as a kid. It was relentlessly fun. But, if I’m really digging deep, my favorite moments are just getting lost in the work. That kind of intense creative output where you don’t realize the sun’s already come up - it’s the kind of transcendent experience of what I think Camus’s argument for the absurdity of Sisyphus forever rolling his boulder is that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. I just really enjoy the flow state of the work, and the moment-to-moment expression of being a part of a creative engine. Most of the actual industry things are a dispiriting slog, to me, if I’m being honest, though I did have a terrific time at the Telluride Horror Show with Phil and Will (and Etch friends Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones).
Rumor has it, you're a fan of Moby Dick - which is known for its depth and symbolism. How has this classic influenced your own creative process or storytelling?
This certainly gets back to my love of unorthodox literary structures! I think this is a uniquely fascinating work, since it’s one of those things that everybody thinks they know, but every adaptation of it ever made is nearly antithetical to what the book’s actually about. The idea that it’s about an obsessed sea captain who dooms his screw because he won’t listen to reason is just so backwards. Ahab is an occult crusader hunting down the embodiment of a cruel God - the Biblical Leviathan - because he cannot punch through the boundaries of reality itself. He does this on a ship covered in bones with a crew who sail because they are alienated and suicidal from the ‘civility’ of the nightmare of the world. For something hailed as the ‘great American novel’ and presented on screen as a cautionary tale, it’s a potently occult, queer, condemnation of America's conflation of Capitalism and Christianity that is loaded with dick jokes. It’s a brilliant work that is maddeningly misunderstood (especially by the film industry).
What’s next for you creatively, and how do you see the future of horror filmmaking evolving?
Since The Spine of Night came out we’ve been hard at work on getting a host of projects off the ground. There’s a follow-up film to that, The Prism of Death, that we’re trying to get financed, and a few other Spine-related things in kicking around. I’m also working on a different project with Etch, an experimental adaptation of a modern cult genre novel that I’ve co-written with the novel’s author. I guess I’d say we’re in pre-pre-production on that - I’m spending a lot of time researching rear projection! - but it’s very exciting, and I can’t wait until we can go deeper into the details.
As for the future of horror filmmaking? I think the traditional film industry has largely destroyed itself for anything but gambling on mega-blockbusters, and that genre films will have to find a way to exist outside of that model. I hope that means an embrace of stylization and different modes of storytelling and novel ways to capture all the human weirdness that makes art so fascinating. I think we’re already seeing a few Horror films emerge from the YouTube swamp, and I think we’re all going to have to embrace experimentation, and cultivate a willingness to watch it, if we’re to create imaginative films in the ultra-low-budget future.
Whether he's channeling forgotten gods, conjuring new nightmares, or letting the tarot guide the way, Morgan Galen King continues to build art that defies easy categorization — strange, unflinching, and utterly his own.
This interview is a glimpse into that creative cosmos, a place where fantasy burns hot, horror runs deep, and the stories never stay in the lines.
More soon from the world of Etch. Stay tuned.
If any of you folks have any other additional questions I'd be happy to answer them down here, too.