Poker night at Demon’s house. He and four friends – Mummy, Werewolf. Vampire and a spooky ventriloquist dummy – are enjoying the camaraderie and the baseball. Dummy tells a story about being mistaken for a kid on a date. Werewolf asks Demon to pause the game so he can go outside. Demon refuses.

The friends give Demon such a hard time that he is forced to confess: his DIRECTV NOW can’t pause TV. It’s also missing a host of other products and services. The evil crew are stunned. Is this the most evil thing they’ve ever heard?? Who would make such a product? The Dummy offers to “take care of” the problem, “very professionally”. He never says exactly how, but it’s clear he won’t simply be sending a strongly worded e-mail.

If we were DIRECTV NOW we’d be worried. Spectrum has all the TV you need. DirecTV Bad. Spectrum Good.

The trick here was to take these tropey, 30’s and 40’s movie monsters and dimensionalize them for the modern world. So we gave them every day problems and tried to play the real believable emotions under the surface of the scenes for each of them. We tried to update the characters through modern takes on their make up and wardrobe, accenting each character with some touches that evoked the cliche but also kept a foot in the modern world.