Interview: Joe Hill on ‘Abraham’s Boys’
Long before Abraham’s Boys became a slow-burn gothic thriller from filmmaker Natasha Kermani, it was just a short story Joe Hill was writing to get into an anthology.
“In 2003 or 2004, I was a failed novelist,” Hill says with a laugh. “I’d written four novels I couldn’t sell. But I was getting good at short stories.”
When he spotted a call for submissions for a Van Helsing-themed collection back in 2004, tied to the release of the Hugh Jackman film, he jumped at the chance. “I thought, I’m getting in that fucking collection. They’re putting me in,” he says.
The resulting story, a brooding, psychological tale of two boys raised in isolation by a paranoid father, is now one of the most haunting entries in Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts, a collection of short stories that also features The Black Phone, which was also adapted into a successful film in 2021 with a sequel due later this year. It’s also the basis for Kermani’s new film adaptation, which casts Titus Welliver as a version of Van Helsing we’ve never quite seen before.
“He’s an iconic character,” Hill says. “Even outside of Dracula, there’s been solo Van Helsing films. But here, we see something else — something darker, more restrained. And Titus gives one of the most astonishing performances I’ve seen in the last year or two.”
Hill had nothing but praise for Kermani’s vision. “She did a fantastic job,” he says. “The film has very little money behind it, and that kind of limitation can either lead to disaster or triumph. What she did was go more and more Hitchcockian. The result is something hand-on-the-throat suspenseful — and occasionally grisly, in the best way.”
The film’s restraint is key. There are few jump scares and even fewer overtly supernatural sequences. Instead, it’s a film about fathers and sons, generational trauma and the slow erosion of trust. How belief becomes doctrine and how that doctrine can take hold of a family until it’s all they’ve ever known.
“That part was easy for me to write,” admits Hill. “I grew up with an extraordinary father [Hill’s father is the iconic writer Stephen King]. And because of that, I’ve spent a lot of my life wondering what it would be like to be the child of an unusual, famous, extraordinary man. So I thought: what if Abraham Van Helsing was your dad? Probably not great. A man who’s dedicated his life to killing infected supernatural creatures — someone who believes you can’t talk to them, can’t negotiate with them, that the only answer is to cut off their head? That’s chilling. That’s heroic, but it’s also maybe two steps away from being Ted Bundy.”
The emotional resonance of the film came into focus for Hill when he saw what the actors brought to the screen. “Whenever you’ve got someone like Brady [Hepner] or Titus stepping into a part, their focus and emotional clarity adds so much,” he says. “There’s a moment toward the end — about 30 seconds with Titus — that just floored me. It’s shocking and satisfying in the best way.”
Hepner, who plays Max Van Helsing, also has a strange connection to Hill’s work. He had a small but crucial role in The Black Phone, another Hill adaptation that coincidentally was also in 20th Century Ghosts. “I was delighted when I found out,” says Hill. “He was so great [in The Black Phone]. Tiny part, but he just jumps off the screen. It’s like McConaughey in Dazed and Confused — barely in it, but unforgettable.”
Here, Hepner gets to stretch further, taking on a role that sits somewhere between horror protagonist and Western hero. “His performance made me think of Gregory Peck, honestly,” says Hill. “There’s something very classic about it. The whole film has that feeling — like a throwback to John Ford or early Hitchcock. You’ve got the 1910s setting, the farmhouse on the hill, the endless sky. It’s almost a Western.”
That sense of atmosphere (wide-open spaces slowly closing in, a tension that slowly ramps up on you until it starts to feel suffocating) runs through the DNA of the story, but it’s Kermani’s eye that makes it sing on screen. “She doesn’t over-swing at the pitch,” Hill says. “She’s interior. She’s quiet. She’s patient. And I sort of love that.”
Hill may have written Abraham’s Boys to land a spot in an anthology but the story has outlived its original purpose, evolving into something more layered, more unsettling and more enduring than he ever anticipated. What began as a quick exercise in myth-flipping has become a meditation on legacy, fear and the people we become when we grow up under someone else’s belief system. Watching it come to life onscreen, Hill seems both surprised and deeply proud. “I think she did a lovely job,” he says. “It was precise, emotionally intelligent, genuinely scary. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.”
ABRAHAM’S BOYS is now playing in theaters.