DON’T HUGE ME I’M SCARED is a 6-part indie musical/comedy/horror web series released from 2011 to 2016 by British filmmakers Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. Rolling out like a horror version of SESAME STREET on crack, it’s honestly one of the most deeply provocative, entertaining, and strangest things I’ve ever seen on the internet.

Each episode starts off as a typical show for kids, complete with a stylized, colorful set and three characters, Yellow Guy (a boy like Bert or Ernie), Red Guy (a creature like Grover or Oscar the Grouch), and Duck (a talking duck). They find themselves in a situation, and an object on the set comes to life to sing a song to teach them something about a topic such as Creativity, Time, Technology, Love, Healthy Eating, and Dreams. The lessons start off educationally until sliding headlong and in a surreal way into a darker, nastier, very adult interpretation of the topic, resulting in the characters being brutalized. This could have come across as a shtick, but it’s done so well, and you sympathize with the characters so much, it’s super dark and compelling.

Part of the wonder of the show is the amazing detail in set design and techniques used to tell the story. Easter eggs abound, many visible only on repeated or even frame by frame viewings, all of them hinting at a deeper story. The storytelling techniques combine live action, puppets, cartoons, and computer animation. The songs are catchy ear worms. The surreal horror aspect is creepy as hell. And the end of episode 4 and the last episode bring in what appears to be a meta commentary on corruption in content creation in children’s programming, a larger story that ties the whole thing together but is very open to interpretation as to exactly what that story is.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend it. All the episodes are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ux2ZxSXePs&t=1221s.

I liked Joe Hill’s LOCKE AND KEY comic series quite a bit and was excited to hear it would be coming to Netflix. Unfortunately, despite some nice threads and plenty of promise, the adaptation, which deviates quite a bit from the comics’ darker material, feels like standard TV fare, and by the end had me banging my head against the wall at characters making constant terrible decisions without any consequences.

The story follows the Locke family, which is moving into the father’s ancestral home, Key House, after he is murdered by a student at the high school where he worked. Everyone is grieving or dealing with guilt. The three kids in the family try to make their way at their new school. Then the youngest begins to find mysterious keys around the house, each of which grants a magical power. Unfortunately, an evil entity also needs the keys, which it intends to use to unleash hell. This begins a cat and mouse game where the kids use the keys to gain powers while fending off the evil entity, which often has the upper hand.

The result was not bad for me so much as simply lackluster and overly familiar. The keys were fantastic, a really fun element in the story that kept me interested. The characters, unfortunately, weren’t exactly likeable, and the villain was dastardly and conniving to the point of being eye-rolling. Some of this was in the acting, while much of it was simply an adaptation of very dark and powerful material to render it safely packaged for a wide TV audience. By the end, the characters were making one terrible decision after another, generally without consequences.

So overall, LOCKE AND KEY was okay for me, a fairly decent watch but lacking the strength of its source material and paling in comparison with other amazing shows.

The Shudder series CREEPSHOW pulls together an anthology of horror tales. I’m caught up to the first four episodes (eight stories), and while overall it’s not as strong as I was hoping, it has some real gems, and I was happy to see the series creators pull stories from some of today’s greatest horror fiction authors.

For me, the challenge of this type of series is whether to follow the dark gotcha formula of the original comics, or use the dark justice themes and medium to create something fresh. The majority of the stories go the former route, creating spot-on CREEPSHOW stories that would have been brilliant in the original comics but in some cases felt a bit shallow and fell flat for me as a viewer of today.

For me, two of the stories really stand out. The first is THE MAN IN THE SUITCASE, in which a college student with low ambition winds up taking a suitcase home from the airport with a brutally contorted man stuffed inside. The thing is, if the man feels pain, he spits out golden coins, creating a moral choice: help the man, or milk him to get rich? The simple moral choice in the story skims both horror and dark humor, with a classic horror justice-style ending.

The absolute best story in the anthology so far for me, however, has to be Josh Malerman’s THE HOUSE OF THE HEAD. While the ending didn’t quite pay off for me, the story itself and how it’s told is extremely tense, weird, and creepy. In this story, a girl with an amazing dollhouse discovers a strange little severed head in the living room. The family of dolls in the house appear to react to the strangeness with dread and steadily mounting horror. The girl buys more dolls to try to help the doll family, but things just get worse. I found this story to be extremely titillating and clever while showing a fresh horror sensibility. I’d love to see more like it!

Looking forward to Thursday, when the next episode airs, with stories by Joe Hill and John Esposito. And especially looking forward to John Skipp’s story in the final episode.

MARIANNE, a French horror web TV series now airing on Netflix, is one of the best horror stories I’ve ever seen on a screen, pushing every element of visual storytelling and every advantage of the medium to the max to deliver a superb horror experience that never feels cheap or unearned.

The story introduces us to Emma, a brusque and selfish literary star promoting the final book in her Lizzi Larck series about a girl entangled with an ancient witch. A childhood friend visits her and tells her that her mother is possessed by the very witch she’s been writing about. This leads Emma to return to Elden, her hometown, and a duel with a very real Marianne. Did her writing produce Marianne, or did Marianne influence Emma to write about her?

Along the way, we meet her long-suffering assistant, childhood friends, and estranged parents, along with a quirky police inspector and an irascible priest. Through Emma’s interactions with these people, we learn the source of her past trauma and pain that led to her becoming who and what she is. She gains support from them in her fight with the witch, though they’re weakly matched for what they’re up against, as is she for the most part.

While some lighter moments and mild touches of humor are seeded into the fast-paced narrative, the horror rarely flags, and it’s almost always effective. Not a single punch is pulled. Very clever camera work, effects, and spooky situations provide genuine scares without cheap jump scares and other tricks. The acting, particularly among those influenced by Marianne, is terrific. An enormous care and not a little artistry went into every scene to create just the right effect here, the right transition there, the right pacing, atmosphere, and level of tension.

Overall, I liked it far better than most American horror shows. While the ending suggests a second season is in the offing, I don’t think the show needs it. It’s excellent just as it is, and I ended the first season completely satisfied with the story.