The Originals boss on the 'monster under the bed' and whether this new evil has a face

The Originals fans have been introduced to something new this season: a faceless, nameless evil that no one seems to know how to stop. Just last week, fans watched as Klaus sat next to his daughter, utterly clueless on how he might help her. After all, how can you help someone when you have no idea that they’re being targeted by some unidentified evil magic? That’s the problem that the Mikaelsons now face.

“We talked a lot about what scares us and ghosts and the monster under the bed,” executive producer Michael Narducci says of the writers’ plan for season 4. “If you’re a thousand-year-old vampire, what is the thing that YOU are afraid of? And we talked a lot about what is the most important commodity of a community, and naturally the conversation arrived at children. It made sense because now we had Hope as a child and kids are the most vulnerable, the most susceptible. Wouldn’t it be great to explore how our family would react to a big monster underneath the bed coming out and trying to do harm to the children of our community?”

And the first step of that reaction seems to be trying to figure out exactly what this “monster under the bed” is and what it can do. For instance, episode 3 ended with Will Kinney kidnapping an ambulance full of children, but why? Has this new evil possessed him? “I don’t know if possessed is the right word,” Narducci says. “Whatever this thing is, it really just makes you an offer and demands that if you want what it is offering then you’re going to have to pay a price. With Will Kinney, we know he’s a human; we know that he has been basically abused by the supernatural creatures in his city; we know what Lucien did to Will Kinney last season; and we know that, at the request of Cami, Klaus tried to help him. But he was someone who was always a bit fractured and devastated to realize that he was a human being in a city filled with supernatural creatures and he would never really be as powerful as they are. So something has reached out to him and we’re going to explore further what’s going on with Will in our fourth episode. I think calling it a possession kind of lets Will off the hook. It’s a little bit scarier than that.”

As for identifying this new monster, Narducci says we will know what to call it after this week’s fourth hour. And before long, it might have a face. “We definitely set out to write something that is scary, and the moment you show the monster’s face, all the sudden the creature’s real and you’re not as scared of it anymore,” he says. “We set out to create something that would be really frightening and I’ll promise you this: You’re going to get answers.”

But aside from the central monster mystery, there’s another smaller mystery that the show is going to dig into this week: The relationship between Marcel and Hayley. The two of them will find themselves working together, and considering that Marcel spent the beginning of the season telling his vampires that Hayley was off-limits, there are a few questions surrounding their relationship. “That’s one of the things I so want to reveal in Friday’s episode,” Narducci says of the Marcel-Hayley dynamic. “Basically he spared Hayley. He spared Hope. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to Klaus’ daughter. I think if push came to shove, Marcel would’ve killed anybody who tried to hurt Hope, because as we know, Marcel has a rule: I’m not going to allow children to be hurt. So there is a code of honor and a nobility to Marcel and I think that’s very important.”

The Originals airs Fridays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.