Hell's Bells!

Former YouTuber turns homegrown pilot into adult animated series Hazbin Hotel

- TARA BENNETT

IN THE WORLD OF YOUTUBE creators, Vivienne Medrano is a gold standard example of a self-made success story. An illustrator and animator who worked under the moniker "VivziePop", Medrano joined the platform in 2012 to share her self-made comic ZooPhobia, along with a progression of colourful, highly stylised animated shorts centred on an array of Hell-based characters.

By 2016, Medrano's following was so large that it enabled her to start a Patreon to fund her own animation studio, Spindle Horse Toons, in order to create a pilot episode for her passion project Hazbin Hotel. Four years and 92 million YouTube views later, that pilot has evolved into a brand-new, A24-produced series of the same name for Prime Video.

Hazbin Hotel's premise and genre-defying tone has remained the same, with Medrano serving as the showrunner, director and a writer, working with animation studio Bento Box Entertainment to bring the ambitious show to life. Hazbin mingles familiar Biblical characters from Heaven and Hell with new characters like series protagonist Charlie Morningstar (Erika Henningsen), and unfolds like a goth Broadway musical with a foul-mouthed sensibility.

"There aren't that many horror musicals that are a raunchy R-rated comedy centring around queer and female characters," Medrano says with a laugh to Red Alert. "But it's definitely a combination of so many things I love: mythology, musicals and villains.